What is Somatic Therapy

Somatic Experiencing (SE)

Think of it like this: your body is always giving you signals. You feel hungry, you shiver when you’re cold, you get that tight feeling in your chest when something feels off. Most of the time, we act on these signals without even thinking.

But sometimes, especially after stress or trauma, we stop listening to those signals. Or the signals get stuck—like a system that’s still trying to process something long after it happened.

Somatic Experiencing helps us tune back in. It’s a way of slowing down, listening to what your body is saying, and gently helping it complete whatever got interrupted or overwhelmed along the way.

It’s not about reliving the past. It’s about supporting your body to safely release stored survival energy—the kind connected to fight, flight, or freeze responses—and return to a state of regulation and wholeness.

Sessions are quiet, respectful, and attuned to your pace. You don’t have to talk about everything. You don’t have to "go deep" before you feel ready. It’s about creating enough safety for your system to do what it already knows how to do: move toward balance.

If you’ve tried talking, thinking, or meditating your way through stuckness—and it still feels like something's missing—Somatic Experiencing might offer another path.

“The body is telling us the story, even if our minds aren’t aware of it.”

- Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing

Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP)

ISP is a body-based approach to working with emotions. It helps you feel what’s happening—in both your body and your emotions—without getting overwhelmed by it. Instead of only talking about what you feel, ISP invites you to notice how those feelings live in your body.

The idea is simple but powerful: when emotions feel too intense, bringing awareness into how they are experienced in your body can eventually make them easier to stay with. This helps your system process what’s there, rather than shutting it down or getting swept away by it.

As you build the capacity to stay present with emotion in this way, your body starts to regulate itself more naturally. What once felt overwhelming begins to soften. Clarity returns, and your thoughts often become steadier and more spacious.

ISP also supports the integration of emotions that may have been avoided or disconnected from for a long time. By bringing both the body and the mind into the process, it helps create lasting change—so that emotional insight isn’t just something you understand intellectually, but something you feel and embody.

How It’s Different from SE

While Somatic Experiencing tends to approach emotions slowly and indirectly, ISP is a bit more direct. It helps you face emotional pain in a way that’s still safe, but doesn’t avoid it. As the founder of ISP says, sometimes the fastest way to healing is straight through the pain—not around.

“In ISP, we don’t just talk about emotions—we expand the body’s ability to tolerate and embody them.”

- Raja Selvem, creator of Integral Somatic Psychology