Somatic Therapy in Charleston, SC: What It Is, How It Works, and Who It Helps

If you’ve seen “somatic therapy” all over Instagram and you’re wondering what it

actually means, and whether it could help with anxiety, trauma, or burnout, you’re not alone.

Somatics is having a moment online, but it’s often presented in quick tips, trauma trends, or vague “nervous system hacks.” That can make it hard to understand what somatic therapy really is, what the research says, and whether it might be a good fit for you.

In this post, I’ll break down:

• What somatics and somatic therapy are (and what they’re not)

• Different somatic therapy approaches

• What the research says about trauma, PTSD, chronic pain, and stress

• What a somatic therapy session actually looks like

• How somatic therapy fits into healing work at Gnosis Wellness Collective in Charleston, SC
  

Who Might Somatic Therapy be Helpful For?

Somatic therapy can be especially supportive if you:

• Feel stuck in your head, but your body still feels wired, numb, or on edge

• Have a history of trauma, chronic stress/pain, or medical/relational trauma

• Are a veteran, first responder, or healthcare worker living in constant “go” mode

• Live with chronic pain that gets worse with stress

• Are high-functioning on the outside but feel burned out, shut down, or constantly braced on the inside
  

If some of that sounds familiar, somatic therapy gives you a way to include your body, not just your thoughts, in the healing process.

What Are Somatics?

The word somatics comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.” At its core, somatics is simply work that is done with and through the body.

But that can mean a lot of different things.

What Somatics Is Not

Somatics is not the same as:

• Somatization/Somatic Symptom Disorder in the DSM-5
  

Somatic Symptom Disorder describes a pattern in which a person experiences intense or excessive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about very real physical symptoms that are distressing and disrupt daily life, even when medical evaluations don’t find serious underlying causes, or when the cause is explained, but the emotional reaction remains overwhelming.

This is a very real experience that absolutely deserves mental health support. But it often gets confused with somatic therapy. Many people assume:

• That somatic therapy is only for Somatic Symptom Disorder, or

• That “somatic” means “you’re just imagining your symptoms.”
  

Both are incorrect. Somatic therapy is not about dismissing physical symptoms or telling you “it’s all in your head.”

Somatic Practices vs. Somatic Therapy Charleston, SC

There are many somatic practices that are primarily body-based but not necessarily psychotherapy. These include:

• Tai Chi

• Yoga

• Feldenkrais / Alexander Technique

• Authentic movement

• Breathwork

• Certain forms of dance or movement practices
  

These are intentional and helpful ways of working with the body to create a mind–body connection, support balance and ease, or deepen awareness, without a formal therapeutic lens.

What Makes Somatic Therapy Different?

Somatic therapy, in contrast, is:

A specific area of therapeutic work with a qualified provider that focuses on creating a connection between mind and body so you can better process and integrate emotional distress, trauma, or pain, and ultimately improve mental health.

Somatic therapy uses integrative approaches that combine physical interventions (such as movement, posture, breathwork, and body awareness) with talk therapy. These interventions help you become aware of thoughts and emotions that may not be fully conscious but are still driving reactions, patterns, and stuck places in your life.

Somatic therapy helps you:

• Understand your physiological reactions (what your body does under stress)

• See the links between body reactions, behaviors, and emotions

• Practice coping skills such as grounding, intentional movement, and breathwork

• Build greater influence over your nervous system, so you can negotiate complex situations and process past experiences with more capacity.
  

The goal isn’t to replace talk therapy, but to bring your body into the room in a safe, titrated way so change isn’t just something you understand, it’s something you can feel.

A Glimpse from the Research: Veterans and Somatic Experiencing

In the 2025 qualitative study by Harwood-Gross et al., Veterans’ experiences of Somatic Experiencing and prolonged exposure therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder: A qualitative analysis, veterans who received Somatic Experiencing® described meaningful changes in how they felt in their bodies and in daily life.

One participant shared:

“I suddenly notice that the last week went ok, I encountered a situation where two weeks ago I would have been with a very short fuse and now, suddenly, I'm more relaxed” (participant 9).

Another reflected more broadly:

“I feel alive and breathing” (Harwood-Gross et al., 2025).

For many people, this is the heart of somatic work: not erasing the past, but feeling more alive and less stuck in survival mode.

Why Might Somatic Therapy Work?

Our nervous systems are designed to be protective. They essentially run “programs” based on past experiences:

• If something in the present feels similar to a past threat, your body can react as if the threat is happening again.
  

• Those reactions, heart racing, shutting down, bracing, numbing, can then drive behaviors and emotions: snapping at loved ones, withdrawing, overworking, or feeling like you can’t ever fully relax.
  

Somatic and body-based psychotherapy helps you develop a deeper understanding of the interaction between body and mind, untangling the unconscious web of internal body-based cues, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings (Rosendahl et al., 2021).

It doesn’t ask you to force yourself out of these patterns. Instead, it gives you ways to work with your physiology so new choices become possible.

Types of Somatic Therapy Approaches

There are several kinds of somatic therapy and body psychotherapy approaches. A few you might see named:

Somatic Experiencing (SE): A body-focused trauma therapy developed by Peter Levine that helps people track sensations, gently discharge “stuck” survival energy, and support nervous system regulation after stress and PTSD.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: A somatic, body-oriented talk therapy developed by Pat Ogden that integrates mindfulness, attachment theory, and trauma research, using posture, movement, and sensation (alongside thoughts and emotions) to process trauma and developmental wounds.

Bioenergetics / Bioenergetic Analysis: A form of body psychotherapy rooted in Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen’s work that combines verbal therapy with expressive bodywork (like movement, grounding, and breathing) to release chronic muscular tension and address the emotional patterns underneath it.

Hakomi: A mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy method developed by Ron Kurtz that uses present-moment awareness, gentle experiments, and body cues to access core beliefs, heal attachment and developmental trauma, and support psychological growth.

Basic Body Awareness Therapy: A physiotherapy-based, body-oriented approach that uses simple movements, posture, balance, and breathing to increase body awareness, reduce tension, and support more efficient, easeful movement. It’s often used with chronic pain and stress-related conditions to improve function and quality of life.

Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT): A structured somatic therapy that teaches people how to notice, tolerate, and work with inner body sensations (interoception) through guided attention, breath, and gentle touch or movement. It’s used to help with chronic pain, trauma, stress, substance use, and emotion regulation by building a more compassionate, aware relationship with the body.

You do not have to know which modality you “should” pick before starting. Working with a provider can help you understand which approach you may align with and benefit most from.

What Symptoms Can Benefit from Somatic Therapy?

Neurology

Neuroscience research has shown that trauma affects key brain regions involved in threat detection, memory, and regulation, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex, as well as the body’s stress systems (such as the HPA axis and cortisol response). (See, for example, Ben-Zion et al., 2024; Hinojosa et al., 2024; Lawrence et al., 2024.)

Emerging evidence suggests that somatic and other body-based or trauma-focused therapies can reduce PTSD and distress symptoms, and that effective trauma treatment is

associated with measurable changes in brain structure and function on MRI and fMRI, particularly in networks involved in emotion regulation and salience (Manthey et al., 2021; van der Stouwe et al., 2021). Chronic Pain and Stress

Chronic pain and chronic stress share overlapping brain and stress-hormone pathways and often reinforce one another over time. Promising research on somatic and body-oriented therapies, such as Basic Body Awareness Therapy, movement and body-awareness–based physiotherapy, and Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT), suggests these approaches can reduce pain intensity, ease anxiety and stress, and improve health-related quality of life for people living with chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia and other long-term pain syndromes (Bravo et al., 2019a, 2019b; Price et al., 2025).

Trauma and PTSD

Somatic therapies such as Somatic Experiencing® (SE) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy have shown promising results for trauma and PTSD. Randomized controlled trials of SE report significant reductions in PTSD symptoms compared to waitlist or treatment-as-usual conditions (Brom et al., 2017; Andersen et al., 2017), and reviews of SE and related somatic interventions find overall improvements in PTSD-related symptoms, affect regulation, and well-being (Almeida et al., 2019; Kuhfuß et al., 2021). Body-oriented and somatic psychotherapies more broadly demonstrate medium effect sizes on psychopathology and psychological distress, including trauma-related distress (Rosendahl et al., 2021). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) group interventions for complex trauma show improvements in PTSD symptoms, dissociation, and daily functioning (Gene-Cos et al., 2016; Langmuir et al., 2012). Qualitative work with veterans receiving SE versus prolonged exposure also highlights meaningful changes in bodily experiences, coping, and sense-making of trauma (Harwood-Gross et al., 2025).

What Does a Somatic Therapy Session Look Like?

Somatic therapy is a collaborative process that moves at your pace. It’s meant to be gentle; it’s not about forcing big cathartic releases or pushing you beyond what you can tolerate.

In somatic therapy, we:

• Do not try to relive painful past experiences over and over

• Do aim to increase your capacity, resilience, and your “window of tolerance”, over time
  

Somatic therapy is often integrated with evidence-based cognitive approaches in talk therapy.

A session might include:

• Tracking where stress shows up in your body while you talk about something hard

• Experimenting with small movements, grounding, or breath to see what brings a 10/10 down to a 7/10

• Noticing moments of ease, connection, or relief and helping your system stay there a little longer

• Making sense of how your nervous system responses were once protective, even if they’re not helpful now, and learning how to respond in new ways

• Introducing cognitive skills and using talk therapy alongside body-based work

• In conjunction with cognitive interventions like CBT, ACT, and DBT, informed interventions

• Alongside mindfulness and nervous system education

• With attachment- and trauma-informed talk therapy

• May include gentle movement, breathwork, and grounding practices
  

How Does Somatic Therapy Fit into the Bigger Picture of Healing?

Somatic therapy is not magic or a quick fix. Like other therapies, it requires time, curiosity, and practice.

But for many people, it becomes:

• A way to build real tools for grounding and self-regulation

• A place to untangle long-standing patterns in relationships, work, and identity

• A bridge between insight (“I know why I’m like this”) and lived change (“my body actually feels different now”)

If you’ve ever thought, “I understand it all, but my body hasn’t caught up,” somatic therapy is often where that gap starts to shift.

Is Somatic Therapy Safe?

This is a deeply valid question, especially if you’ve had a complicated relationship with your body, or if you’ve felt dismissed or overwhelmed in medical or therapeutic settings before.

A few important points:

• The field of somatic and body-based psychotherapy is still emerging, but the research so far is promising.

• The quantity of research isn’t yet as large as for some more established models, and more randomized controlled trials are needed.

• A holistic mind–body approach might not be the right fit for everyone, and that’s okay.

If you value the mind–body connection, or if your body feels like it’s “stuck” in survival mode even after talk therapy, somatic therapy may be a helpful modality, particularly for those experiencing stress and trauma.

It's important to remember you can say “no,” “slower,” or “can we pause?” at any time, and go at the pace of your nervous system, not the pace of a trend.

REFERENCES:

Almeida, A. K., Macedo, S. C. G. de M., & Sousa, M. B. C. de (2019). A systematic review of somatic intervention treatments in PTSD: Does Somatic Experiencing® (SE®) have the potential to be a suitable choice? Estudos de Psicologia (Natal), 24(3), 237–246.

Andersen, T. E., Lahav, Y., Ellegaard, H., & Manniche, C. (2017). A randomized controlled trial of brief Somatic Experiencing for chronic low back pain and comorbid post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8(1), 1331108.

Bravo, C., Skjaerven, L. H., Espart, A., Guitard Sein-Echaluce, L., & Catalan-Matamoros, D. (2019a). Basic Body Awareness Therapy in patients suffering from fibromyalgia: A randomized clinical trial. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 35(10), 919–929.

Bravo, C., Skjaerven, L. H., Guitard Sein-Echaluce, L., & Catalan-Matamoros, D. (2019b). Effectiveness of movement and body awareness therapies in patients with fibromyalgia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, 55(5), 646–657.

Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic Experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312.

Harwood-Gross, A., Elias, S., Lerner, K., Nacasch, N., Lawi, C., Brom, D., & Barak, A. (2025). Veterans’ experiences of Somatic Experiencing and prolonged exposure therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder: A qualitative analysis. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 98(1), 175–192.

Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic Experiencing – Effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: A scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1929023.

Langmuir, J. I., Kirsh, S. G., & Classen, C. C. (2012). A pilot study of body-oriented group psychotherapy: Adapting Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for the group treatment of trauma. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 4(2), 214–220.

Price, C. J., et al. (2025). Patient outcomes improve in a pragmatic implementation pilot study of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT) for chronic pain. Global Advances in Integrative Medicine and Health.

Rosendahl, S., Sattel, H., & Lahmann, C. (2021). Effectiveness of body psychotherapy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 709798.