You've probably heard someone say that trauma is "stored in the body." The body keeps the score. The body remembers. Trauma lives in the body. You need to work with the body, not just the mind. But what does any of that actually mean?
Because somatic therapy isn't just lying on the floor and breathing. It isn't endlessly being asked where you feel an emotion in your body, and it definitely isn't a collection of nervous system exercises designed to make you calmer, softer and better at functioning. Working with the body can go much deeper than that.
Sometimes the body is still carrying a response it once needed but never had the safety, support or opportunity to complete. The urge to run when you couldn't leave. The impulse to push someone away when saying no wasn't safe. The anger you had to swallow. The tears you couldn't cry. The way you learned to brace, shrink, freeze, please or stay incredibly still. And that is one of the pieces of somatic therapy I think often gets missed.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy is a body-based approach to therapy that pays attention not only to what you think and feel, but also to what is happening physically as you experience those thoughts and emotions. That might include noticing a tight chest, clenched jaw, sinking stomach, shallow breath, urge to move away or feeling of heaviness in the body. Those sensations can give us information about what your nervous system is doing.
But somatic therapy isn't just endlessly asking, "Where do you feel that in your body?" until everyone involved wants to lie down dramatically. Noticing sensation is a doorway. It isn't necessarily the whole house.
A deeper question might be: What did your body need to do that it couldn't do at the time? Maybe your body wanted to run, but leaving wasn't possible. Maybe you wanted to fight back, but fighting would have made the situation less safe. Maybe you wanted to say no but learned that saying no had consequences. Maybe you needed comfort and there was nobody available to give it. Maybe you wanted to cry, shake, hide, scream, curl up, push away or simply stop, but you had to keep functioning instead.
Those interrupted responses can become part of the patterns your nervous system continues to use long after the original situation has ended. If you're new to this way of understanding trauma, you might also want to read Signs of Trauma in the Body (Even When Nothing "Bad" Happened), where I talk more about why trauma isn't only defined by the event itself, but by what happened inside your body when there wasn't enough safety, support, choice or completion.
What Does It Mean When Trauma Is "Stored in the Body"?
When people say trauma is stored or stuck in the body, it can sound like there is literally a tiny trauma file sitting somewhere in your hamstring. Some hamstrings do act suspicious, but thankfully that isn't quite what we mean. We're usually talking about patterns.
Your nervous system learns through experience. If your body discovers that bracing, freezing, pleasing, hiding or staying hyper-alert helps you get through something difficult, it can become very good at using that strategy again. This is part of why I find it more useful to think of the nervous system as a protection system, rather than simply a system we need to calm down or control. I explain this more in Your Nervous System Is a Protection System — Here's What That Actually Means.
So the body might continue holding tension in the jaw. Your shoulders may constantly sit slightly raised. Your breathing might stay shallow. Your stomach may tighten around uncertainty. You might automatically scan people's faces for signs that something is wrong, or stay ready to run even when there is nowhere you actually need to go.
Over time, those responses can start to feel less like something your body does and more like something you are. "I'm just an anxious person." "I'm terrible at boundaries." "I don't know how to relax." "I'm too sensitive." "I'm lazy." "I just have no self-control around food."
But what if at least some of those things are better understood as shapes of protection? A clenched jaw may once have helped you keep words inside. Rounded shoulders may have helped you feel smaller or less exposed. Holding your stomach in may have become connected to safety, visibility or how acceptable you felt in your body. Shutdown may have been the best option available when fighting or leaving wasn't possible.
The body isn't necessarily malfunctioning when it keeps repeating these things. It may simply be working from old information.
Somatic Therapy Isn't Just About Calming Your Nervous System
This is one of the biggest misunderstandings I see online. Nervous system regulation has become almost synonymous with calming down: deep breaths, soft music, gentle movement, long exhales, relaxing your shoulders and unclenching your jaw. Those things can absolutely be useful, but regulation does not mean being calm all the time.
A regulated nervous system still experiences anger, fear, grief, excitement, hunger, desire and intensity. The difference is that your system has enough flexibility to respond, move through those states and eventually return. Another way of thinking about this is through your window of tolerance: the amount of emotional and physiological intensity you can stay present with before your system moves toward overwhelm, hyperarousal or shutdown. I talk much more about this in Window of Tolerance: Why Food Feels Harder When You're Overwhelmed.
Sometimes somatic work therefore involves soothing, and sometimes it involves accessing more energy rather than less. Anger. Movement. Sound. Strength. A boundary. The urge to push. The ability to say no. The experience of taking up space.
If your body once had to suppress its fight response to stay safe, constantly telling it to calm down may not be what it needs. It might need to discover that anger can exist without destroying everything. If you once had to stay completely still, your body may need the experience of being able to move. If you learned that saying no was dangerous, the new experience may be expressing a boundary and discovering that you are still okay afterward.
Somatic therapy isn't about forcing those experiences. It's about creating enough safety and choice that something different becomes possible.
Why Forcing Your Body to Relax Can Backfire
There is a lot of language in wellness spaces about opening the body. Open your chest. Open your heart. Open your hips. Let go. Release. Soften. Beautiful in theory, but if your body closed for a reason, forcing it open can feel like another demand.
If rounded shoulders helped you protect yourself, pulling them aggressively backward might feel exposed rather than empowering. If tightening your jaw helped you hold back words that once weren't safe to express, repeatedly telling yourself to "just relax your jaw" doesn't necessarily address why the tension exists. If holding your belly became connected to body shame or being watched, suddenly breathing deeply into it can feel far more vulnerable than somebody on Instagram made it sound.
The goal isn't to bully the body out of its protective responses. It's to become curious about why they are there. Instead of asking, How do I get rid of this tension?, somatic work might begin with, What might this tension be doing for me? Is it holding something together? Protecting something? Preparing for something? Stopping something from happening too quickly?
That shift from correction to curiosity matters, because the body does not necessarily need another person, including you, telling it that its response is wrong. It needs enough new information to realise it has options now.
How Somatic Therapy Can Help Complete a Survival Response
This part of the work can look almost ridiculously simple from the outside. Maybe you notice the impulse to push away and gently press your hands into a wall. Maybe your feet want to push into the floor. Maybe your head wants to turn away and, instead of overriding that movement, you let it turn. Maybe your legs feel full of nervous energy and you stand up, walk, stomp or shake them gently.
Maybe there is a sound sitting in your throat and you experiment with letting yourself exhale audibly. Maybe your body wants to curl inward and, rather than immediately correcting your posture, you allow yourself to feel what that position is doing for you.
A logical brain can look at all of this and think, Sorry, is this therapy or have we just spent twelve minutes discussing my left elbow? But simple doesn't always mean shallow.
A tiny movement accompanied by choice can be profoundly different from an old experience in which there was no choice. The point isn't the wall push itself. The important information may be: I can push now. I can stop. I can leave. I can say no. I can take up space. I can feel this sensation without disappearing into it. I have options.
And importantly, none of this needs to involve dramatic catharsis. You do not need to scream into the void and heal everything by Thursday. In trauma-informed somatic work, pacing matters. Going slowly matters. Choice matters. Sometimes the most useful thing that happens is almost imperceptible: a breath lands differently, a shoulder softens when it is ready, or the body notices that it can stop an exercise whenever it wants to.
What Does This Have to Do With Food and Body Image?
Quite a lot. Food and body behaviours don't exist separately from the nervous system. A binge might sometimes function as discharge, comfort or escape. Restriction can create a feeling of certainty or control. Body checking can become an attempt to reduce uncertainty: Has my body changed? Am I still okay? Over-exercising may provide somewhere for activation to go, while emotional eating can become one of the quickest available ways to soothe. Holding your stomach in, controlling your posture or trying to make yourself smaller can become connected to visibility and safety.
And if you've ever noticed that the exact same craving or urge around food can feel completely manageable one day and overwhelmingly urgent the next, your nervous system state may be part of the picture. I talk much more about that relationship in Polyvagal Theory and Emotional Eating: Why Your Relationship With Food Keeps Changing.
That doesn't mean every difficult food or body-image experience comes from trauma, and it doesn't mean we need to analyse every snack like it contains the secrets of your childhood. But it does mean these behaviours deserve curiosity before shame.
When we only ask, "How do I stop bingeing?" or "How do I stop checking my body?" we can miss another useful question: What is this behaviour helping my body do right now? Is it creating relief? Safety? Containment? Certainty? Disconnection? Giving activation somewhere to go?
Once you understand what the pattern is trying to accomplish, you have much more information about what might actually help. That is a big part of the work inside The Regulated Eater: moving away from fighting food behaviours and toward understanding the nervous-system, emotional and body-based patterns underneath them.
A Simple Somatic Practice to Try
You don't need to go looking for your deepest trauma in your left hip. Please do not begin emotional archaeology on a random Tuesday because a blog post told you to.
Start with something that is already happening. The next time you notice tension somewhere in your body, pause before immediately trying to make it disappear and ask: What might this tension be doing for me?
Maybe it is bracing, protecting, holding, containing or preparing. Maybe it is keeping you upright, keeping you quiet or slowing something down. Then, if it feels okay, ask another question: If this part of my body had an impulse, what might it want to do?
Maybe it wants to push, pull, turn away, run, curl inward, reach, make a sound, rest or take up more space. You don't have to dramatically act anything out. Maybe your hands press gently together. Maybe your feet push into the floor. Maybe you turn your head a few centimetres. Maybe you stand up or let out a heavier exhale. Maybe nothing happens at all.
There is no perfect somatic response you are trying to perform. The point is simply to begin listening for what I sometimes think of as the body's unfinished sentence.
The Goal Isn't to Monitor Your Body Forever
Somatic work isn't about becoming hyper-aware of every twitch, sensation and breath until you're monitoring yourself like a tiny nervous system police officer. The goal is relationship.
Can you notice tension without immediately treating it as a problem? Can you recognise shutdown and wonder what became too much? Can you experience anger without assuming it has to be suppressed or acted out? Can you notice an urge around food and become curious about what changed before it arrived? Can your body's signals begin to make a little more sense?
This is also why "listen to your body" can become surprisingly unhelpful advice when listening turns into constantly analysing yourself. Healing your relationship with food requires more than perfect body awareness. It involves learning that you can stay in relationship with yourself even when your hunger, fullness, emotion or body signals aren't completely clear. I explore that more in Why Healing Your Relationship With Food Requires More Than Listening To Your Body.
Ultimately, somatic therapy isn't about becoming endlessly calm, perfectly embodied or impossible to trigger. That person sounds exhausting anyway.
It's about developing enough relationship with your body that when an old protective response appears, you can recognise it for what it is: Oh. This makes sense. My body learned this. It was trying to protect me. And maybe we have more options now.
Your body isn't the enemy. It has been trying to protect you. And sometimes healing begins when the body finally gets enough safety, support and choice to finish something it once had to hold.
If this is the kind of work you want to explore more deeply, you can learn more about 1:1 therapy or explore The Regulated Eater, my 12-week programme for understanding the nervous system and emotional patterns underneath food and body struggles.
You can also watch the full What Is Somatic Therapy? episode on the Becoming Wilder Co YouTube channel, where we talk about food, body image, nervous system regulation and how to stop fighting your body so you can begin understanding what it has been trying to protect.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is a body-based approach to therapy that works with physical sensations, impulses, movement and nervous system responses alongside thoughts and emotions. Rather than focusing only on understanding an experience intellectually, somatic approaches can explore how the body adapted to that experience and what it may still be doing to protect you.
What does it mean when people say trauma is stored in the body?
It doesn't mean trauma is literally stored inside a particular muscle. The phrase generally refers to learned nervous system and protective patterns that can continue after a difficult experience has ended. These might include bracing, muscle tension, shallow breathing, freezing, hypervigilance, shutdown or strong impulses to fight or flee.
Can somatic therapy release trauma from the body?
Somatic therapy is less about forcing a dramatic "release" and more about helping someone safely notice and work with protective responses, sensations and impulses. Sometimes that includes allowing an interrupted movement or boundary response to complete, but this should happen with choice and appropriate pacing rather than trying to force a cathartic experience.
Is somatic therapy just nervous system regulation?
No. Nervous system regulation is part of many somatic approaches, but regulation does not simply mean calming down. Somatic work can also involve safely accessing anger, movement, boundaries, strength, grief and other experiences that may previously have been suppressed.
Why does my body feel unsafe when I know I'm safe?
Your conscious mind and nervous system don't always update at the same speed. Something in the present, such as a tone of voice, uncertainty, conflict, being watched or another familiar cue, may resemble an earlier experience closely enough that your body activates an old protective response, even when you intellectually know the current situation is different.
If this resonated, you might like working together more deeply.