June 2026
What is Somatic Psychotherapy

or therapy which utilises Somatic Empathy (as per R Geist’s papers on Permeable Boundaries)?

Somatic Psychotherapy “is grounded in the belief that not only are thought, emotion and bodily experience inextricably linked (creating a bodymind), but also that change can be brought about in one domain of experience by mindfully accessing another.” (from http://www.pacfa.org.au/somatic-psychotherapy/ on 21/11/2017).
This means that accessing our somatic sensations – our internal subjective sense of our physical self – is useful, and at times, essential for the therapeutic process of understanding and change. The body is often a missed dimension in making the connections between our emotions, our health and our relationship to the people and places around us.

‘Somatic‘ is our internal sensing, our bodies inner sensations. When you place your hand on your own arm, you can feel your arm with your hand – that’s proprioceptive sensation. You can also feel on your arm the warmth or pressure of your hand. That’s also proprioceptive sensing. You may also feel inside a recoil, an urge to remove the hand? Or perhaps instead you notice an inner comforting sense of buzzing, or gooeyness? 

Is it easy, or difficult to touch your own arm or give yourself a hug? Does it bring up sadness, or comfort? You may feel a soothing sensation, or a gentle buzzing in response to your hands’ touch. That inner sensing, your inner responsiveness is your somatic awareness of the touch. It holds so much information and is unique to you, always.

Words, actions, external events, even internal thoughts also have a somatic effect without any physical touch required. A word felt and judged as ‘harsh’ provides us with an inner sensation that tells us it is felt as something unpleasant, and our cognition translates the sensation as ‘harsh’. But how do we come to know that? What actually was the sensation? Our mind has said ‘that’s harsh”, but what has our body actually felt inside? And yes, we did feel something somatically first whether we were aware of it in our mind or not. 

All our reactions (based on primary affects – see work by Silvan Tomkins, or Allan Schore, Ron Lee & others), are primarily physiological, animated, and make up the core of our experience of being in the world, whether we are cognitively aware of it or not. That is why, for me, psychotherapy has to be practiced with an awareness of the somatic experience of the people in the room, and with an understanding of how we function as animated, dynamic feeling systems of cells.

Verbalising your awareness of how you are on the inside depends upon developing your capacity to sense inside yourself.  So in session, working somatically, we may include an exploration of what was and is actually sensed in the body somatically. It is not essential and there is no ‘fail’ possible at this, as it is not possible in many cases – it can be very difficult to do. When I first ask about an inner sense of something, people will have a reaction – often a puzzled, blank, or even frustrated one.  We have differing abilities, or capacity, to do this. 

It may feel impossible to do – and that’s ok! It’s not something we are taught, and our past experiences may have led us far far away from feeling what’s going on in our insides. For many different reasons. 

Somatic awareness can be learnt. The therapists’ role is to guide and encourage, and to work with each person, from where they are at, for as long as is needed, or desired. 

But first they (the therapist) has to be able to discern all of this in a sensitive and safe way, so …

Working somatically means the therapist is required to: 

• Make full use of their own somatic awareness; and
• Have a thorough understanding of human development, of affect theory, of the processes of cognition, of attachment and relating and it’s development and myriad of variations.

It is through becoming increasingly aware of my own internal sensations and states that I can be more fully present in therapy and be further enabled to practice psychotherapy in a somatic way. Being aware of what I am sensing in session, from my insides (Somatic awareness/ interoception), to the outside (proprioception), and being aware of what I may be attuning to in a client’s inner state, &/or my inner reactions, is how I work in session in the practice of Somatic Psychotherapy. 

Somatic psychotherapy may not be as ‘active’, nor even as ‘verbal’ as you first think. It’s not about movement, or exercises, or being asked to ‘do’. It is about our inner world, a pre-thought, or body mind world. Each part of our body has it’s own ‘mind’ & wisdom. Our Soma records and communicates all of our experiences, and our reactions.  A world made up of tissues, fascia, fluids, bones, nerves and many many cells. It is also about the shared somatic sense of the moments in therapy – an active awareness by the therapist of the intersubjective space and it’s qualities. It can feel mysterious and unfathomable, but over time, that can change and as your sense of being in your body in a real tangible way will enable you to experience a more fully embodied sense of you, which provides a comfort and satisfaction beyond words!