When Talk Isn’t Enough: What Somatic Work Adds to the Therapeutic Experience
The Limits of Language
Talk therapy can be incredibly powerful. Naming our emotions, telling our stories, making sense of our pain: these are essential steps in healing. But for many people, especially those with trauma, there comes a moment when words just aren’t enough.
You might know the story backward and forward. You’ve explained the timeline to your therapist. You’ve cried the tears, journaled the insights, and still… something feels stuck. The same emotional loops. The same shutdown. The same urge to stay small, safe, or hidden. This is how the body often holds what the mind cannot say.
The Body Holds the Rest of the Story
Somatic work picks up where talk therapy leaves off. It helps us notice and gently tend to the places in the body where emotions got frozen in time. That tightening in the throat that happens every time you speak up, the heaviness in your chest when someone asks how you’re doing, the tension in your back that flares up when you feel misunderstood. These aren’t random; they’re unspoken stories.
Sometimes what presents as sadness is really fear. Sometimes fear is actually anger that has no safe place to go. Sometimes anxiety is your body trying to protect you the only way it knows how: through freeze, fawn, or flight.
Somatic work honors this embodied intelligence: the survival strategies your nervous system learned to keep you safe.
Common Patterns: When the Body Speaks Louder Than Words
You might notice:
Tears that come “out of nowhere” in sessions
Chronic tension in the jaw, shoulders, stomach
Collapsing or spacing out when talking about certain topics
People-pleasing or fawning behaviors that override your true needs
A felt sense of “something’s wrong with me” even when your rational mind knows better
These are not just thoughts to challenge; they’re protective patterns. Often formed in childhood. Often automatic. And often misunderstood by therapists who’ve only been taught to work with thoughts and behaviors.
Why Somatic Awareness Should Be Required in Therapy Training
The absence of somatic awareness in most foundational therapy programs is a significant oversight, a missing piece in our profession’s ability to truly meet the whole person.
Research shows trauma is held in the body. So how can we expect clients to heal without also including the body in the room?
The answer isn’t to abandon talk therapy. It’s to expand it. To integrate somatic approaches like:
Somatic Experiencing (SE): Working with nervous system activation and discharge
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Tracking body memory, posture, and sensation in real-time
EMDR and Attachment-Focused EMDR: Including body cues in target mapping and resourcing
Polyvagal-informed practices: Understanding when a client is in a state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
These aren’t “extras.” They’re essential tools for trauma, attachment wounding, chronic stress, and early developmental trauma.
A Different Kind of Knowing
In somatic work, we don’t force the body to change. Instead, we listen, create safety, and offer curiosity instead of judgment. We support someone in noticing their body with kindness, perhaps for the first time in their life.
For example, we don’t analyze a clenched fist. We invite someone to get curious about it. What does it want to do? What does it remember? What happens when you notice it… and breathe?
This work can be slower. Gentler. Sometimes more confronting than expected. But it’s also where the most profound shifts tend to happen.
Integrative Therapy: You Don’t Have to Choose
The most effective therapy doesn’t rely on one modality. It draws from a palette. It’s integrative.
Think of it like this:
Talk therapy helps you name the pain
Somatic therapy helps you feel and release it
EMDR helps you reprocess it
Attachment work helps you experience safety in relationship
Each one has a place in a holistic pursuit of mental wellness. Together, they offer a truly integrative path forward.
You’re Not “Too Much”—You’re Just Carrying A Lot
If you’re a client feeling frustrated that therapy isn’t going deep enough, it might not be you. It might be that your body is telling the rest of the story.
If you’re a therapist reading this and sensing something is missing in your work, rest assured that it’s never too late to expand your toolkit.
Just like you wouldn’t expect a dentist to fix a broken bone, don’t expect talk therapy to resolve the body’s experience of trauma.
Sometimes healing begins with a sigh. A sensation. A place in the body you didn’t even know was asking to be heard. And sometimes, noticing that is the first step toward profound transformation.
Want to go deeper?
I offer somatic EMDR intensives, professional consultation for therapists wanting to integrate body-based work, and self-guided resources for clients. Let’s explore what your body might be trying to tell you.
Learn more about the importance of somatic approaches like EMDR
Core Ideas
Talk therapy is essential but can’t always access trauma stored in the body.
Somatic work addresses frozen emotions, nervous system responses, and protective patterns.
Somatic approaches are research-backed and integrative, combining talk, EMDR, polyvagal-informed practices, and body-based techniques to produce the most holistic and profound healing experience.
