Somatic Therapy

Levine wasn't the first to notice that the body holds what the mind can't. In Vienna and Berlin around 1930, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich saw his patients holding their feelings in their muscles. He called it muscular armor and pressed on jaws, necks and chests to loosen it. His later claims about a life energy he called orgone led to a court ban, and then prison. Much of his work was dismissed.

In the 1940s, lawyer Alexander Lowen studied with Reich in New York, and he later trained as a physician. He kept the idea of body armor and left orgone behind. With psychiatrist John Pierrakos, he developed bioenergetic analysis, which used breathing, posture and movement to ease tension. Lowen also developed the idea of grounding, feeling supported by your feet and the ground beneath you. Many therapists use the word today without knowing where it came from.

In the early 1970s, yoga and dance teacher Pat Ogden was working at a psychiatric hospital. She noticed many patients seemed far away from their bodies, and their posture seemed to carry their pain. She trained with psychotherapist Ron Kurtz, and in 1981 they co-founded the Hakomi Institute. It taught Hakomi, which uses mindful attention to the body to explore deeply held beliefs. Ogden later focused on trauma and developed Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, which pays close attention to posture and movement.

A new language for the nervous system came from a psychologist who studied heart rhythms, including in newborn babies. In 1994, Stephen Porges introduced polyvagal theory, which describes how the nervous system shifts between safety, danger and shutdown. Many therapists began using it to make sense of what their clients' bodies were doing.

In 1997, Levine published Waking the Tiger. He had spent years studying how animals in the wild freeze in danger, then shake and recover. He came to believe people can get stuck where animals move through. His method became known as Somatic Experiencing, which helps the body complete survival responses that were cut short.

In 2014, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score. Decades earlier, he had worked with Vietnam veterans at a clinic in Boston. Many still lived as if the war hadn't ended. He went on to found the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, where his team studied body-based treatments like yoga and neurofeedback. His book brought these ideas to millions of readers and stayed on bestseller lists for years.

But some things were pushed too fast and some were left behind.

Release often became the goal above all else. Pushing someone to shake, cry or let go before they're ready can overwhelm rather than heal.

Many of these ideas were much older. Yoga, qigong, dance, drumming and Indigenous ceremony had worked with the body for generations, and therapy often borrowed from them without credit. These practices usually happened in community, tied to land, spirit and belonging. When they became techniques for one person in an office, much of that was left behind. In Canada, many Indigenous ceremonies were banned for decades, and communities are still reclaiming them.

Nervous system language spread quickly online, and some of it got simplified. Polyvagal theory helps many people make sense of their bodies, and researchers still debate parts of it.

Some body-based work uses touch. Without clear consent and safety, touch can repeat harm.

Trauma-sensitive somatic therapy works inside those gaps. It lets your body lead instead of pushing release. It makes room for your own culture, community and the practices that already help you heal. It holds ideas about the nervous system as maps, not rules. And it asks before any touch, every time.

Trauma-sensitive therapy starts with what your body already knows.