Safety Series: Somatic-Based Psychotherapy - Healing the Mind by Listening to the Body
Most of us have been taught that healing happens in the mind — that if we can think differently, we can feel differently. There’s truth in that, but it’s not the whole picture. Because while the mind tells stories, it’s the body that remembers. The body remembers in the way your shoulders rise without you noticing when someone criticises you. It remembers in the restless tapping of your foot when you’re trapped in a meeting that feels too long. It remembers in the way your stomach knots at the thought of a conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Even long after the events that shaped us, the body continues to keep the record — not as a neat, chronological memory, but as patterns of tension, shallow breaths, postures that curl in to protect, and sudden jolts of adrenaline when there’s no actual danger. This is not weakness or personal failing. It is biology. It is your nervous system doing its job — the job of keeping you alive — but doing it so well that it can’t tell the past from the present.
When something overwhelming happens, the nervous system acts instantly. Polyvagal theory maps this out as three primary states. In fight, we mobilise to defend ourselves — muscles tighten, heart rate rises, vision narrows. In flight, we mobilise to escape — our bodies flooded with the chemistry of running and avoidance. And if neither fighting nor fleeing is possible, we go into freeze — a shutdown, a collapse, a numbing that helps us endure what feels unbearable. These states are adaptive in the moment. But if the nervous system doesn’t receive the message that the danger is over, they can become our baseline. We keep living as though the threat is still here.
This is why purely cognitive approaches can sometimes feel like they only get you so far. You can tell yourself you’re safe, you can understand the logic of the situation, you can even reframe the story in your mind — but if your nervous system is still braced for impact, no amount of reasoning will change the way your body reacts. Safety isn’t an idea; safety is a felt experience. It has to be lived in the body before the mind will believe it.
Somatic-based psychotherapy is the bridge between the mind’s narrative and the body’s reality. Instead of keeping the work in the realm of conversation alone, it invites the body into the process. We pay attention to sensations, breath, posture, movement, and micro-reactions that happen in real time. We explore how the body responds to certain memories, situations, or emotions, not to fix it instantly, but to understand what it’s been holding — and why.
In my own practice, this means weaving together two approaches that might seem very different on the surface but are deeply complementary: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry. CBT gives us the structure — a way of understanding the links between thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, and practical tools to experiment with new patterns. It helps us see the loops we get caught in and gives us ways to gently interrupt them. Compassionate Inquiry, on the other hand, is not about “changing” the thought so much as following it inward, with curiosity and compassion, to discover its origin. It is a presence-based, somatic approach that asks not just, “What are you thinking?” but “Where do you feel that in your body?” and “What is your body telling you in this moment?”
The work often begins with noticing. You might be talking about something from your past and suddenly realise your throat has tightened. We pause there. We let the body lead, staying with that sensation, exploring its texture, its temperature, its impulse. Often, the body carries a memory the mind has long pushed aside — not always a visual flashback, but an emotional imprint, a feeling that belonged to a younger you who never had the chance to express it.
Sometimes the body holds back tears because, at the time, crying would have made things worse. Sometimes it holds a clenched jaw because speaking up would have been dangerous. Sometimes it holds numbness because feeling at all would have been overwhelming. These are not “symptoms” to be eliminated — they are survival strategies. Somatic psychotherapy respects that. The aim is not to bulldoze through defences but to work with them, slowly and safely, until the nervous system begins to trust that it can soften.
Bessel van der Kolk’s phrase, the body keeps the score, is the simplest expression of this truth. Trauma and chronic stress leave their fingerprints all over the nervous system. You might see it in the way your shoulders rise before your voice does, or in the constant readiness to bolt, or in the inability to relax even when nothing is wrong. The work is about helping your body rewrite that score — not erasing the past, but updating it so that the present can feel like the present, not a replay of what came before.
From a polyvagal perspective, this means moving out of the automatic defensive states of fight, flight, or freeze and into what’s called ventral vagal activation — the state where you feel grounded, connected, and capable of responding rather than reacting. It’s here that your body and mind can work together instead of pulling in different directions. It’s here that you can feel safe enough to rest, to play, to connect with others, and to see the world with more openness and less threat.
The shift doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment; it happens through repeated experiences of safety. In our sessions, that might mean feeling a wave of anxiety rise in your chest and staying with it long enough for it to move through, rather than pushing it away. It might mean noticing that your body wants to take a deeper breath, or that your shoulders drop when you finally speak the words you’ve been holding in. Over time, your nervous system learns that it can be with discomfort without being overwhelmed by it, that it can express and release rather than brace and store.
This is why somatic psychotherapy can be so life-changing. It’s not just that your symptoms reduce — though they often do — but that you begin to inhabit yourself differently. You feel more in your body and more at ease in your own skin. You have more choice in how you respond. You can be in the same situations that used to send you into spirals, and this time, your body doesn’t automatically go to war.
You don’t have to keep living in survival mode. Whether we work together in person here in Western Australia or virtually from wherever you are in the world, I offer somatic-based psychotherapy that meets you exactly where you are and moves at the pace your nervous system can trust. This isn’t about forcing change; it’s about creating the conditions where change becomes possible — where your body can finally exhale and know it is safe.
If you’ve been trying to think your way out of anxiety, stress, or the lingering effects of trauma, but still feel the same in your body, it might be time to take a different approach. Your body already holds the map. Let’s follow it together.
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