Why Talking About Trauma Isn’t Always Enough
You can know why you feel anxious. You can trace every wound back to its origin. You can explain your patterns perfectly — and yet still wake up with your body clenched, heart racing and a deep ache that words can’t touch.
For many people, talking about trauma brings insight and understanding. But at a certain point, words alone can’t reach the places where trauma lives. That’s because healing doesn’t just happen in the mind — it happens through the body.
Insight Isn’t Always Integration
Traditional talk therapy engages the thinking brain — the part of us that seeks meaning, connection, and understanding. It helps us make sense of what happened, to name and contextualise experiences that were once confusing or overwhelming.
But trauma doesn’t live in the logical brain. It’s stored in the body, in the nervous system, and in the protective parts of us that learned to survive. You can tell the story of your pain without ever feeling it safely in the body — and so the pattern quietly continues.
It’s a bit like reading about swimming versus getting into the water. You can study every stroke, memorise every safety tip — but until your body meets the water, it can’t truly learn how to float.
Insight opens the door; the body has to walk through.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
When we experience something overwhelming, our bodies respond instinctively: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. If that response can’t complete — for example, a child can’t run or cry out — the energy of the moment stays locked inside the body.
Over time, that stored activation becomes symptoms:
A tightening in the chest when conflict arises.
A numbness or dissociation when someone gets too close.
An exhaustion that no amount of rest seems to cure.
These are not failures or flaws. They are the body’s intelligent attempts to protect us. Trauma lives in the nervous system — not as a memory of what happened, but as a pattern of survival still running beneath our awareness.
Healing, then, isn’t about retelling the story more clearly. It’s about giving the body new experiences of safety, completion, and connection — experiences that update the nervous system’s belief that “it’s over” and “I’m safe now.”
Bringing the Body Back Into the Conversation: Somatic Psychotherapy
This is where Somatic Psychotherapy comes in — an approach that weaves together psychological, emotional, and body-based healing.
In this work, we bring together several therapeutic lenses:
Inner Child Work — meeting younger parts of the self with compassion.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) — helping protective and wounded parts find harmony.
Relational Transactional Analysis — exploring patterns that shape how we connect.
Shadow Work — reclaiming exiled aspects of our humanity.
Somatic Therapy — using awareness, breath, and gentle movement to restore regulation.
This integration allows the mind and body to work together. It doesn’t replace talking — it deepens it.
Through Somatic Psychotherapy, we explore emotions not just as thoughts or stories, but as physical sensations, impulses, and movements that carry meaning. We listen to the body’s wisdom, allowing what’s been frozen or suppressed to complete its natural cycle.
When this happens within a safe therapeutic relationship, the body learns a new pattern — one of safety, regulation, and connection.
Healing Happens When the Body Feels What the Mind Knows
Imagine you understand that you’re not in danger anymore — but your body still reacts as if you are. You might freeze during conflict, go blank when someone gets close, or find it hard to relax even when life is calm.
This is the gap between knowing and feeling safe.
Somatic Psychotherapy helps bridge that gap by working directly with the nervous system. Through mindfulness, breath, grounding, and relational attunement, you learn to notice your body’s signals and respond differently. Over time, your system begins to trust that it no longer needs to stay on high alert.
Here’s a small practice you can try:
Pause for a moment and bring to mind a mildly stressful situation. Notice what happens in your body — do you tighten, hold your breath, withdraw? See if you can soften just 5% around that tension. Maybe take a breath or let your shoulders drop. Notice what happens when you do.
That’s the beginning of integration — when the body starts to participate in the healing process.
When You’re Ready to Go Deeper
If talking hasn’t been enough, nothing is wrong with you. It simply means the next layer of healing is calling — one that includes your body, your emotions, and the parts of you that learned to survive.
Somatic Psychotherapy invites all of you into the room — the mind that understands, the body that remembers, and the heart that longs to reconnect. It’s a space to restore balance to your nervous system, release what’s been held for too long, and return to a felt sense of wholeness.
Talking helps us make sense of the past; the body helps us finally feel safe in the present.
If you’re curious about this approach, you can explore more about Somatic Psychotherapy here or book a session here.
