Somatic therapy: the rise of psychotherapy for the body

27-year-old Ellie* has been suffering with her mental health for around six years. A store manager from Bracknell, she tells Dazed she fell into a bout of depression after a “traumatising flatmate experience” but she struggled to find effective coping mechanisms for her symptoms. “I tried CBT [Cognitive Behavioural Therapy] on the NHS, but it didn’t help entirely.”

This year, five years after she first attempted to get help, she tried somatic therapy. “I came across somatic therapy on TikTok and started with just the somatic exercises – doing them on my own at home,” she explains. “It made a big difference almost straight away, so then I decided to find an actual somatic therapist as well.”

Interest in somatic therapy has blown up recently, with The New York Times reporting a huge influx in requests to therapists offering the service. And as 2023 drew to a close, this was mirrored here in the UK. According to search traffic analysing tool Semrush, ‘somatic therapy’ was searched 90 per cent more in 2023 compared with the previous year in Britain. On TikTok, ‘somatic therapy’ has 160 million views, with comment sections full of hopeful people in need of a new avenue for their mental health treatment. 

For the unfamiliar, somatic therapy is a type of therapy that focuses on the connection between the mind and body. Though a lot of us don’t know it, our mind and bodies work together, and, in a way, break together. When we’re mentally well, our body works as it should (ailments and illnesses aside). When we’re struggling psychologically, this can translate into problems with the body. In the best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains it like this: “Traumatised people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies.”

Somatic therapy is about reprogramming the mind through those bodily responses, rather than targeting the brain by talking, or through medication. Eldin Hasa, a neuroscientist and human behaviour expert tells Dazed that “during somatic therapy, individuals identify bodily sensations and emotions that have been stored as a result of past trauma”. This could be pain in your joints or strains in your neck and shoulders. It’s the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow. Those types of responses are identified essentially by triggering them through talk therapy, then supporting the patient to retrain their mind through physical approaches (massage, meditation, movement, you name it).

It’s easy to see the appeal of somatic therapy. The UK is in the midst of an ongoing mental health crisis: one in four people in the UK experience mental health problems each year, yet the average waiting time for mental health assistance on the National Health Service is 178 days and leaves people in a “postcode lottery”, meaning their access to adequate, prompt services will depend on where they live. 

Body and self-acceptance coach Kitty Underhill works with somatic therapy approaches. She believes the intense interest around it is down to the way society has separated our minds and bodies. “There’s societal encouragement for us to be disconnected from our bodies. If we look at diet culture, hustle culture, all these things tell us that we should be focusing on everything else outside of ourselves,” she explains. For her, doing somatic work is like “coming home to the body” and is an act of real self-love and anti-capitalism. “Instead of focusing on the capitalist rat race or diet culture… we’re listening to our bodies and its cues like we’re supposed to.”

This is something 35-year-old payroll manager Alix*, from Shropshire, can relate to. After suffering trauma for five years, she tried CBT but found it “only really scratched the surface”, so she saved up for somatic sessions. She says they make her feel like she’s “getting somewhere with recovery for the first time”.

@jamarrogers A somatic exercise for generational trauma. Thank you @Sah D’Simone for the affirmation 🙏🏽 #somatichealing #emotionalintelligence #generationaltrauma #blacktiktok #tiktokpartner ♬ Melanin - Michaël Brun & Kah-lo

“I knew there was something happening to my body because of the trauma. I was constantly aching, my bones even hurting, and I was always unwell. It was like my body was screaming because I was ignoring my brain,” Alix says. Having her body and mind working together again has been important for trauma recovery. “I don’t think we’re generally encouraged to check in with our bodies the way [somatic therapy gets you to] and it’s a real shame. I have to wonder how much earlier I could have started recovering if I’d known about all of this.”

It’s a great thing that we’re becoming more knowledgeable about the body’s role in mental health as Hasa says our thoughts, emotions and experiences have a profound impact on our body’s functioning. “When our mental health is compromised, it can manifest in various physical symptoms and enduring trauma can leave imprints on our body, potentially leading to long-term health consequences.” In fact, a whopping 37 per cent of people with severe symptoms of mental health problems also have long-term physical conditions as a result.

While Hasa acknowledges social media’s role in the “unprecedented surge in interest” in somatic therapy (which he’s seen at his own practice), he thinks the appeal goes much deeper than that. Hasa believes somatic therapy appeals particularly to young women because of its holistic nature, the onus the practice puts on encouraging self-regulation and compassion, and that women are more likely to experience trauma. Despite stereotypes attached to PTSD, women are actually two to three times more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

@isabella.mainwaring A tight jaw = stress hormones running the show due to unprocessed emotions & trauma #traumarelease #jawtension #traumareleaseexercise #traumareleaseexercises #somatichealing #somatictherapy ♬ Clouds - Tollan Kim

Since starting somatic therapy, Ellie’s mental health is beginning to improve. “I’ve realised that I have so much tension physically sitting in my body and making me have all these reactions because I got used to walking on eggshells living with my old flatmate,” she explains. “With the exercises, meditation and talk therapy we’re doing, I feel hopeful that I’m headed towards recovery.”

 But Underhill worries that the social media obsession around somatic therapy could also cause harm. “Unfortunately somatic therapy is already being co-opted by diet culture which goes against the [core principles] of it. Influencers are sharing ways to lose weight with somatic therapy exercises and that’s not what it’s for.” She adds that there are also untrained professionals sharing advice and encouraging somatic work from home. This can be a problem, Hasa explains, because somatic therapy has a huge physical involvement and involves bringing up traumatic memories and feelings in one go, so it is something you’d want a professional involved in.

Alix says she has started to match the physical symptoms she’s been experiencing to underlying emotions and it’s been raw. “It’s so interesting, horrifying, relieving and overwhelming all at once, just the act of realising physical feelings you’ve been storing are actually some experience from years ago you didn’t work through,” she says. 

Somatic therapy could be the saviour a lot of young people need as we navigate trauma in a self-improvement-obsessed world. It’s just important to keep in mind that any kind of therapy trending online doesn’t automatically mean it’s right for you, nor does it mean the content you’re watching is correct or trustworthy. Unfortunately, the majority of wellness routes will inevitably be repurposed in unhelpful ways. The first step of self-care is cutting through the noise and making sure we’re finding health support in the right places.