Somatic Therapy

Sara Anderson, LPC is a somatic therapist and Licensed Professional Counselor in Georgia specializing in somatic depth psychotherapy for women in midlife. She provides somatic therapy via telehealth to women throughout Georgia including Atlanta, Alpharetta, Johns Creek, Roswell, Sandy Springs, and St. Simons Island.

Why Talking About It Isn't Always Enough.

You may have tried therapy before and talked through the anxiety, the patterns, the history. You may have an understanding of where it comes from, and you might be able to trace back your anxiety, the patterns, the struggles while explaining it and contextualizing it.

And yet… it's still there.

This does not mean that therapy failed; it simply points to the limits of talk therapy—the limits of what talking can reach—and it's one of the most important things neuroscience has taught us about how lasting change actually happens.

What talk therapy can and can't do.

Talk therapy works at the level of the cortex — the thinking, reasoning, narrative-making part of the brain. Understanding our patterns, making meaning of our experiences, developing insight into why we do what we do is valuable and it matters.

But anxiety, trauma, and the kind of deep exhaustion that comes from years of holding everything together don't primarily live in the cortex. They live in the body, in the nervous system, in the limbic system — the part of the brain that processes threat, memory, and emotion — and in the brainstem, which regulates our most fundamental physiological responses.

These parts of the brain don't respond to explanation. You can understand perfectly well why you're anxious and still feel the anxiety. You can know intellectually that you're safe and still feel the threat response in your body. You can have years of insight and still find yourself repeating the same patterns.

The parts of the brain where trauma and chronic stress live are not primarily verbal — and they don't change primarily through words.

Lasting change requires working at the level where the pattern actually lives. That means working with the body, the nervous system, and the deeper structures of the psyche — not just the story we tell about them.

That's what somatic therapy does.

What somatic therapy is.

Somatic therapy is any therapeutic approach that works with the body as a primary source of information and a primary pathway for change. Rather than treating the body as a container for the mind, somatic approaches recognize that the body and mind are one integrated system — and that the body often knows things the mind hasn't yet articulated.

In somatic work, we pay attention to sensation, posture, gesture, breath, and physical impulse. We notice where tension lives, where energy gets stuck, where the body braces or collapses or holds. We follow those signals — not just talk about them — and use them as doorways into the deeper work.

This allows for something that talk therapy alone often can't create: a felt shift. This isn’t about understanding something differently, but actually feeling different in your body, which is the kind of change that holds.

The approaches that make up this work.

No single modality does everything. Each of the following approaches contributes something distinct — and together they form a more complete toolkit than any one of them alone, and as a somatic and depth therapist, I use each of these and more in my work with clients.

EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

EMDR is one of the most extensively researched trauma treatments available. It uses bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements, tapping, or auditory tones — to help the brain reprocess distressing memories and experiences that have become stuck.

When something traumatic or overwhelmingly stressful happens, the brain sometimes can't fully process the experience — it gets stored in a fragmented, unintegrated way that keeps activating as if the event is still happening. EMDR helps the brain complete that processing, so the memory loses its charge. You still remember what happened — but it no longer feels like it's happening now.

EMDR is effective not just for acute trauma but for the chronic, accumulated stress of a life that has asked too much for too long. Many of the women I work with find that EMDR reaches things that years of talk therapy circled without landing.

Havening Techniques®

Havening is a psychosensory therapy — meaning it uses touch to create neurological change. Specifically, it uses gentle self-administered touch on the arms, face, and hands to generate delta waves in the brain, which have been shown to depotentiate — essentially deactivate — traumatically encoded memories and stress responses.

What this means in practice: Havening can rapidly reduce the emotional charge of distressing experiences, calm an activated nervous system, and create a state of receptivity that makes deeper therapeutic work possible. It is gentle, non-invasive, and remarkably effective for anxiety, phobias, traumatic stress, and chronic overwhelm.

I use Havening both as a standalone intervention and as a way of preparing the nervous system for deeper somatic and depth psychology work. Women often describe the experience as profoundly calming — like something that has been braced for years finally releases.

Polyvagal-Informed Approaches

Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, describes how our autonomic nervous system responds to perceived threat and safety — and how those responses shape our emotional experience, our relationships, and our capacity for connection and presence.

Most of us who have spent years managing chronic stress, holding everything together, and performing fine have nervous systems that are stuck in patterns of hyperactivation — always scanning, always braced, never fully at rest. Or in patterns of shutdown — flat, disconnected, going through the motions.

Polyvagal-informed work helps us understand these patterns not as personal failings but as intelligent adaptations — and then helps us gently, systematically expand our window of tolerance, so that we can be present in our lives without the nervous system treating ordinary moments as emergencies.

Tapping — Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

Tapping uses gentle rhythmic pressure on specific acupressure points on the face, upper body, and hands while focusing on a distressing thought, feeling, or memory. Like Havening, it works through the body to calm the nervous system's stress response — reducing the emotional intensity of difficult experiences so they can be processed more fully.

Tapping is particularly useful for anxiety, specific fears, and the kind of intrusive thoughts that feel impossible to quiet through reasoning alone. It is something I often teach clients to use between sessions — as a tool they can reach for when the nervous system activates and they need to come back to regulation on their own.

Breathwork

The breath is the one autonomic function we can consciously control — which makes it one of the most accessible and powerful tools for nervous system regulation available to us.

Specific breathing patterns directly influence the autonomic nervous system. Slow, extended exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system — the rest and digest state — and can move us out of a stress response within minutes. Conscious connected breathing can access emotional material that the analytical mind has learned to bypass. Breathwork practices range from simple daily regulation tools to deeper experiential processes that open access to the body's stored wisdom.

I integrate breathwork throughout the work — as a regulation tool, as a way of arriving in the body at the start of a session, and as a bridge into deeper somatic and expressive work.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, is one of the most extensively researched mind-body interventions available. It uses formal meditation practice, body awareness, and mindful movement to develop the capacity to observe our experience — thoughts, sensations, emotions — without being swept away by it.

For women managing chronic anxiety and overwhelm, MBSR builds a foundational skill: the ability to be with what is, rather than fighting it, fixing it, or bracing against it. That capacity — to observe the anxiety without becoming the anxiety — is not a small thing. It changes the entire relationship to the nervous system's signals.

Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC)

Mindful Self-Compassion, developed by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, applies the principles of mindfulness to our relationship with ourselves — particularly in moments of difficulty, failure, and suffering.

Most of the women I work with are significantly more compassionate toward others than they are toward themselves. The inner critic is relentless. The standard is impossible. The response to struggling is more pressure, not more care.

Mindful Self-Compassion is not about positive thinking or letting yourself off the hook. It is about responding to your own suffering the way you would respond to a dear friend's — with warmth, with presence, with the recognition that struggling is part of being human. That shift — from self-criticism to self-compassion — changes the physiology of distress. It activates the care system rather than the threat system. And it creates the internal conditions that make deeper change possible.

Applied Somatic Jungian Psychology

Jungian psychology is a depth psychological tradition concerned with the unconscious — the parts of ourselves that operate below the level of awareness and that profoundly shape our experience, our choices, and our relationships. It works with dreams, symbols, archetypes, and the imagination as pathways into what the conscious mind cannot directly access.

Applied Somatic Jungian Psychology brings the body into this depth work — recognizing that the unconscious speaks through the soma as much as through the psyche. The recurring sensation in the chest. The way the body braces when a certain subject comes up. The image or symbol that keeps surfacing in a session. These are not random — they are the psyche and the soma communicating in their native language.

This is the most distinctly depth-oriented aspect of my work, and it is what allows us to engage not just with symptoms but with meaning — with the deeper questions of identity, purpose, and what it means to live as the woman you actually are.

Why these approaches together.

Each of these modalities addresses a different level of human experience. EMDR and Havening Techniques® work at the level of traumatic memory and nervous system encoding. Polyvagal-informed work addresses the autonomic patterns that shape how we move through the world. Breathwork and mindfulness build the capacity for presence and regulation. Mindful self-compassion changes the internal climate that either supports or undermines change. Somatic Jungian work reaches the deeper layers of identity, meaning, and the unconscious.

Talk therapy reaches some of these levels. None of the talking approaches reach all of them.

This is why I don't practice one modality. This is why I have spent 25 years building a toolbox rather than a technique. Because the women I work with are complex, whole human beings — and they deserve an approach that is complex and whole enough to meet them.

What this allows for.

Working somatically — with the body and the nervous system as primary — allows for something that purely cognitive approaches often can't create: gentler processing of distress.

Rather than pushing through, analyzing, or forcing insight, somatic approaches work with the body's own wisdom and timing. Difficult material can be approached gradually, with the nervous system regulated and resourced enough to tolerate what emerges. This means the work doesn't have to be retraumatizing — it can be genuinely healing.

Women who have found talk therapy helpful but insufficient often describe somatic work as the missing piece. Not because the previous work didn't matter — it did. But because something underneath the insight finally got addressed.

Want to understand how this work might help you specifically?