Somatic Therapy
Your body has been carrying the abuse and trauma since before you had words for it.
The way you flinch at certain sounds. The tightness in your chest before you can name why. The way you leave yourself mid-conversation, or go completely blank when things feel too close. You probably don’t even realise these things are happening unless someone says something to you – or you wonder why you don’t recall conversations.
I know you’ve tried to think your way through it, who wouldn’t? But it’s so confusing and exhausting that thinking hasn’t been enough. You feel as though your body is betraying you every day.
That’s because trauma doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your body and your body has been doing the only thing it knew how to do — keep you alive. It hasn’t been betraying you. It’s been protecting you the only way it could — and that’s exactly where we work.
Book an Appointment
Healing that works with your body, not around it
Somatic therapy is a body-based approach to trauma recovery. Rather than focusing only on what happened, we pay attention to what your body is doing right now — how it holds tension, braces itself, shuts down, and what that feels like for you, even if it’s just for seconds at a time. We work with those responses gently and deliberately.
This is not talk therapy with breathing added on. It’s a different way of working entirely, one that recognises your nervous system and how it learned to protect you. That superpower needs more than words to learn that it’s safe to soften.
You will be supported to:
- Build a relationship with yourself that isn’t driven by fear
- Notice what happens in your body without being overwhelmed by it
- Understand your physical responses as survival — not weakness or dysfunction
- Gently expand your window of tolerance for sensation and emotion
- Reconnect with your body at a pace that feels safe
Key Benefits
- Understanding what your body has been doing for you and why it makes complete sense
- Beginning to appreciate your body as a protector, not the enemy
- Learning to work with your body rather than pushing through it or shutting it down
- Developing a new relationship with yourself — one built on curiosity instead of shame
- Reducing the physical symptoms of trauma — tension, shutdown, hypervigilance
- Feeling more present in your body and in your relationships
- Learning to notice early warning signs before you’re overwhelmed
- Developing a genuine sense of safety — not just telling yourself you’re safe
- Practical skills you can use between sessions and in daily life
- Coming home to yourself, maybe for the first time
What somatic therapy is
A body-based approach — not a touch-based one
Somatic therapy in our practice does not involve any physical touch. Ever. This is important — and we say it clearly because we know many of our clients carry histories where their body wasn’t theirs to control.
Your body belongs to you and that doesn’t change in this room. Here, everything is your choice.
Work that happens in session and between sessions
Sessions involve gentle body-awareness exercises — things like noticing where you feel tension, what coffee tastes like first thing in the morning, how you feel in all types of conversations, tracking what happens in your chest or throat when a memory surfaces, or slowing down a response that usually happens automatically.
Your clinician will demonstrate these exercises and you’ll explore them together — at your pace, with full choice about what you engage with and what you don’t.
Between sessions, you’ll be given simple practices to try in your own time. These aren’t homework in the pressured sense — they’re invitations to keep building the relationship with your body that we start in the room. Practices may include breathwork, gentle movement, grounding exercises, or —when it feels right —using sound or voice as a way of releasing what words can’t reach.
A space where going slow is the point
There’s no pushing through here. Somatic therapy works precisely because we don’t rush. We work at the edge of what feels manageable — not beyond it, even if it starts with just noticing your toe with more pressure on the ground.
What if part of me doesn’t want to?
That part of you has an important voice in our rooms the resistance you feel isn’t something we push past —it’s something we get curious about and see if we can notice how it’s protecting you. Often it’s the most protected part of you, and it deserves the same gentleness as everything else.
Methods
Our somatic therapy work is informed by polyvagal theory, the window of tolerance, and nervous system science —understanding how your body moves between states of activation, shutdown, and safety, and how to gently expand on what feels tolerable.
This work sits alongside EMDR and parts work (IFS) in our practice, creating a whole-person approach that addresses what held in the body, the memory, and the mind.
Who this is for
Somatic therapy is for anyone who:
- Looks fine on the outside but feels lost, flat, or unreachable on the inside
- Feels disconnected from their body — numb, absent, or like it belongs to someone else
- Notices their body reacting before their mind catches up
- Experiences anxiety, shutdown, or dissociation that feels beyond their control
- Carries childhood or sexual trauma in their body — chronic tension, numbness, hypervigilance
- Has tried talk therapy and felt like something was still missing
- Has done therapy before but still feels stuck in their body
- Wants to feel at home in their body again — or perhaps for the first time
- Is ready to go deeper than just understanding what happened
- Wants practical tools, not just insight
Not sure if this is the right fit? Reach out and we’ll help you figure it out.
Somatic therapy for survivors of childhood and sexual trauma
For survivors of childhood sexual abuse and complex trauma, the body can feel like the enemy. It reacted in ways that felt wrong and often carries shame that doesn’t belong to it. It braces, shuts down, or disappears, even when you’re safe and with the person you want to be with.
Somatic therapy is one of the most effective approaches for this kind of trauma, not because it’s confronting, but because it’s careful. We work with the nervous system’s own pace, its own signals, its own wisdom. Remember, shutting down is the way your body learnt to protect you.
You don’t need to relive anything. You don’t need to explain everything. You just need to show up and we’ll work with whatever your body brings.
This work can bring things to the surface. There may be sessions that feel hard, moments where your body responds in ways that surprise you, or times when things feel more difficult before they shift. That’s not a sign something has gone wrong — it’s often a sign something is moving.
What we can promise is that you won’t be left alone in it. We move at your pace, we check in, we adjust, and we stay with you through all of it — the difficult moments and the breakthroughs.
Book an appointment
Somatic therapy is available in-person in Midland & Ellenbrook and online across Australia.
Your body has been waiting patiently for long enough, it wants to be heard — let’s talk
