The body keeps the score — and the way through

When you understand it and it still won't shift

Most of us grow up believing that if you can understand a problem, you can solve it. Name the pattern, find the trigger, trace it back to where it started, and the healing should follow. A lot of therapy is built on that hope.

And sometimes it works. Insight matters. But for a lot of the people I sit with — people carrying trauma, grief, the kind of anxiety that's been around for years — there's a gap between knowing something and feeling it change. You know the person across from you isn't a threat. Your body hasn't got the memo. You know, in your head, that you're allowed to be loved. Your chest still tightens the moment someone gets close.

That gap isn't a sign you're not trying hard enough, or not clever enough. It's just how the nervous system works. What overwhelms us doesn't only get filed away as a memory we can talk about — it gets held in the body as a physical state. Tight muscles, a held breath, the way you sit, the clench in your gut. None of that is a figure of speech. It's the body still bracing for something that finished a long time ago.

So what is somatic psychotherapy, really

"Somatic" just means of the body. Somatic psychotherapy is a family of body-oriented ways of working, and the ones I draw on most are Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), Focusing (Eugene Gendlin), and the Hakomi Method (Ron Kurtz). Different lineages, same starting point.

That starting point: when something overwhelms us, the nervous system fires off a survival response — fight, flight, or freeze. In the wild it runs its course. The animal bolts from the predator, the energy of the escape moves through the body, and the system settles back to baseline. It's designed to finish.

In a human life it usually doesn't get to. You couldn't run. You couldn't fight back. You froze, and then there was never a moment safe enough to thaw. So the response stays half-finished, held in the body — and that holding becomes either a kind of permanent revving (anxiety, hypervigilance, restlessness) or a shutting down (depression, numbness, the sense of being far away from yourself).

What it actually looks like in the room

People sometimes picture somatic therapy as lying on the floor, or doing something a bit strange and woo. Mostly it's far more ordinary than that.

We sit and talk, like any therapy. I ask what's going on in your life, what's been on your mind, what's brought you in. What's different is where my attention goes. While I'm listening to the words, I'm also watching your body — how you're breathing, where the tension gathers, whether your hands are still or restless, where your eyes go when something gets close.

At some point I might point gently to something I've noticed. "Your shoulders have come up toward your ears — can you feel that?" Or, "You took a big breath just then, when you mentioned your mum. What's happening in your chest right now?"

These aren't interrogations. They're invitations to slow down and feel. There's almost always a flicker of resistance first — a "this is silly," a wanting to explain it away, a pull back up into the head. That's not in the way of the work; it often is the work. When you can stay with the sensation a moment longer than feels comfortable, something tends to give.

Sometimes a fine trembling starts and something lets go. Sometimes tears come from somewhere that has nothing to do with the story being told. Sometimes an impulse surfaces — hands wanting to push away, arms wanting to reach, legs wanting to run — and when it's followed slowly and carefully, the body gets to finish a response it's been holding for years, sometimes decades.

It's rarely dramatic. More often it's a slow softening. A breath that drops lower than usual. The stomach unclenching, and the person going, "Huh. I didn't know I was holding that."

Who this tends to suit

Somatic psychotherapy often fits people who've done talk therapy, found it useful, and still came away feeling something underneath never got reached. If you understand your patterns inside out and still find yourself stuck in them, body-based work can get to what talking around it couldn't.

It tends to suit trauma; anxiety that lives in the body before it's a thought — tight chest, racing heart, knots in the stomach; depression that feels more like heaviness and shutdown than plain sadness; chronic pain with no clear medical cause; and dissociation, that sense of watching your own life from a few steps back.

It isn't only for people in crisis, though. It's also for anyone who wants a closer relationship with their own body and inner life — who can feel there's more going on underneath and wants to get to know it.

Working in the Macedon Ranges

Living out this way leaves a bit more room for this kind of work — the pace is slower, and there's space to drop back into your body: cold air on your skin, magpies carrying on in the gums, the simple fact of being where your feet are instead of three thoughts ahead.

If you're in Kyneton, Woodend, Gisborne, or anywhere across the Macedon Ranges and somatic psychotherapy has caught your interest, get in touch. We'd start with a free 15-minute discovery call — a chance to talk about what you're carrying and feel out whether it's right for you.

Sebastian Kitchen is a PACFA-registered integrative psychotherapist (Reg. #32932) working in Kyneton, Bendigo, and online. He draws on Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and attachment theory, and works under supervision with Dr Tra-ill Dowie.

If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. These services are free and available 24/7.