Somatic Therapy: How do Ontario Psychotherapists Use It?

Most people's understanding of therapy involves talking. You sit across from a therapist, you describe what's happening, you explore your thoughts and feelings through conversation, and over time things shift. That model is real and valuable. But it isn't the whole picture — and for some people and some experiences, it isn't enough on its own.\

Somatic therapy starts from a different premise: that the body isn't just a vehicle for the mind, and that what we've been through doesn't only live in memory and thought. It lives in muscle tension, in breath patterns, in the way the nervous system has learned to respond to threat. Healing that works only at the level of narrative and cognition can miss what's held in the body entirely.

Understanding what somatic therapy actually is, how Ontario psychotherapists use it, and who it tends to help most is worth doing before you decide whether it's something to explore.

What Somatic Therapy Is

The word somatic comes from the Greek word for body. Somatic therapy is an umbrella term for therapeutic approaches that work with the body's role in psychological experience — paying attention to physical sensation, posture, breath, movement, and nervous system responses as part of the therapeutic process rather than treating them as incidental background to the real work.

The theoretical foundation draws on several decades of research into how trauma and chronic stress are stored in the body and nervous system. The work of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Pat Ogden, among others, has established a compelling body of evidence that traumatic experiences are encoded not just in explicit memory but in the body's implicit, procedural memory — the kind that doesn't require conscious recall to influence present-moment experience.

This explains something that many people who have lived with trauma or chronic anxiety recognize intuitively: why understanding something cognitively doesn't automatically change how it feels. A person can know, intellectually, that a situation is safe — and their body can continue responding as though it isn't. That gap between what the mind knows and what the body does is one of the primary places somatic therapy works.

How Trauma Lives in the Body

When something overwhelming happens, the nervous system responds with a survival response — fight, flight, or freeze. Under ordinary circumstances, this response completes itself: the threat is addressed or escaped, the body discharges the activation, and the nervous system returns to a regulated baseline.

When the threat is too overwhelming, too prolonged, or when escape isn't possible, that cycle can get interrupted. The activation doesn't complete. The energy mobilized for survival doesn't fully discharge. And the nervous system remains in a state of partial readiness — braced for a threat that, at the level of conscious experience, may be long past.

This is what produces many of the most recognizable symptoms of trauma: hypervigilance, the startle response, chronic muscle tension, numbness, dissociation, and the way certain sensory experiences — a smell, a sound, a tone of voice — can trigger a response that seems entirely disproportionate to the present moment. These aren't irrational reactions. They're the body doing what it learned to do, in response to experiences that encoded a particular understanding of what the world is like and how much threat it contains.

Talk therapy works with the narrative and cognitive dimensions of this. Somatic therapy works with the physiological dimension — the place where much of the experience actually lives.

How Ontario Psychotherapists Use Somatic Approaches

In Ontario, registered psychotherapists who incorporate somatic approaches do so within the scope of their training and the regulatory framework of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. Somatic therapy isn't a single technique — it's an orientation that can be integrated into a broader therapeutic approach in different ways depending on the therapist's training and the client's needs.

In practice, somatic work in a therapy session might look like a number of different things.

A therapist might invite a client to slow down and notice what's happening in their body as they talk about something difficult — where they feel it, what the sensation is like, whether it has a quality or an intensity or a location. This kind of body awareness, called interoception, is something many people have very limited access to, particularly if years of stress or trauma have led them to cope by disconnecting from physical experience. Developing it gradually, in a safe context, is often the beginning of significant work.

A therapist might pay attention to how a client is sitting, where they're holding tension, how they're breathing — and gently bring these observations into the conversation. Not as assessment or correction, but as curiosity: what might this be about? What does the body know that the words haven't said yet?

A therapist might work with movement — small, deliberate gestures or shifts in posture that help complete interrupted survival responses or access emotional experience that isn't available through language alone. This doesn't mean dramatic physical exercises. It can be as subtle as noticing the impulse to push something away, or the sensation of the feet on the floor, or the slow release of a held breath.

And a therapist might use breath as a primary intervention — helping a client shift their nervous system state through specific breathing practices that activate the parasympathetic system and reduce the physiological arousal that underlies anxiety, hypervigilance, and emotional flooding.

All of this happens within the context of a therapeutic relationship. The quality of that relationship — the degree to which the client feels genuinely safe in the room — is the prerequisite for somatic work to be possible at all. A nervous system that is in threat-mode cannot do the work of settling. Safety has to come first.

Who Benefits Most from Somatic Therapy

Somatic approaches tend to be particularly valuable for people for whom language-based processing has limitations.

Trauma, especially early or complex trauma, is one of the clearest indications. When traumatic experiences are pre-verbal, or when they were overwhelming enough that the ordinary processes of narrative memory weren't fully engaged, there may be relatively little accessible to work with through talk alone. The experience lives in the body rather than in story, and reaching it requires working at that level.

People who feel disconnected from their emotions often find somatic work helpful because it provides a different doorway into emotional experience — through sensation rather than through cognitive identification of feeling states. For people who have spent years coping by intellectualizing or dissociating, the body can become a more reliable guide to what's actually happening than the mind.

Chronic anxiety, with its pervasive physiological component — the constant low-level activation, the muscle tension, the shallow breathing, the hypervigilance — often responds well to somatic approaches that work directly with the nervous system rather than only with the thoughts driving the anxiety.

People with chronic illness or chronic pain can also benefit significantly. The relationship between psychological state and physical experience is bidirectional and well-documented, and somatic approaches that help people develop a more compassionate and less adversarial relationship with their body can produce meaningful change in the quality of that experience.

Somatic Therapy and EMDR

EMDR, which is one of the most well-researched trauma treatments available, has a significant somatic dimension that's worth understanding. The bilateral stimulation that characterizes EMDR — the side-to-side eye movements or tapping — appears to work partly through its effect on the nervous system's processing of stored traumatic material. It engages the body as part of the mechanism of change, not just the narrative or cognitive dimensions of memory.

Tamari Thompson-Kraft, Registered Psychotherapist and EMDR specialist at Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy, describes EMDR's appeal in terms that point directly to its somatic nature: "If you're struggling with any kind of trauma it can translate into other disorders. They are all symptoms of greater issues. EMDR can really help because it's such a mind-body connected therapy."

That mind-body connection is precisely what distinguishes EMDR from purely cognitive approaches, and it's one of the reasons EMDR tends to reach things that talk therapy alone sometimes can't. The trauma is processed at the level where it's actually stored — not just reframed narratively, but metabolized in a way that reduces the physiological charge it carries.

For many people, EMDR and somatic therapy are complementary — the EMDR working to process specific traumatic memories, and the somatic work building the body-based resources and nervous system regulation that make that processing possible and sustainable.

What a Somatic Therapy Session Feels Like

People sometimes expect somatic therapy to be physically intense or dramatically different from ordinary therapy. In practice it often isn't. The external presentation of a somatic session can look very similar to other forms of therapy — two people in conversation. What's different is the quality of attention being brought to the body as part of that conversation, and the willingness to slow down and work with what's happening somatically rather than moving past it toward the next cognitive insight.

A good somatic therapist moves at the client's pace. They don't push toward physical experience before the client is ready for it, and they don't interpret physical responses for the client — they invite curiosity about them. The client remains in the driver's seat throughout, which is especially important for trauma survivors for whom experiences of powerlessness are part of what's being healed.

What many people notice over time is a gradually increasing capacity to be present in their body without fear or disconnection — a more settled relationship with physical experience, and a growing sense that the body is something to be inhabited rather than managed or escaped.

Somatic Therapy and Trauma Counselling in Barrie

At Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy, Tamari Thompson-Kraft and members of our team offer trauma and PTSD counselling that incorporates somatic approaches alongside EMDR, IFS, CPT, and CBT. We work with people navigating trauma, complex PTSD, chronic anxiety, chronic illness, and the quieter ways difficult histories show up in the body and in daily life.

In person at our Barrie location and virtually across Ontario. No referral needed.

Book a session with our Barrie trauma therapy team →



Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy is located at Unit 201-151 Essa Road, Barrie, ON. We offer trauma therapy, PTSD counselling, somatic therapy, and a full range of mental health services, in person and virtually across Ontario.