Somatic Therapy: Working With What the Body Is Holding
Somatic therapy refers to a family of therapeutic approaches that work with the body as a primary site of psychological experience and healing. They are grounded in the understanding that emotional experience, trauma, and psychological distress are not only cognitive or narrative phenomena — not only stories one tells about oneself — but are held in the body and may require body-based approaches for full resolution.
The theoretical basis of somatic therapy draws on neuroscience and on an understanding of how the nervous system organises responses to threat. When the fight, flight, freeze, or collapse responses organised by the autonomic nervous system are activated — in response to genuine threat, or in response to situations that resemble past threat — they are designed to return to a regulated baseline once the threat has passed. In the context of sustained stress, adverse experience, or trauma, these responses can become chronically activated, incomplete, or dysregulated. The body remains in a state of alert, or collapses into shutdown, in ways that affect functioning long after the original experience has ended.
The recognition associated with Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and others — that the body keeps the score, that unprocessed experience is held somatically — suggests that approaches working only with language and narrative may not reach what is held in tension, posture, breath patterns, and autonomic dysregulation. Verbal therapy is valuable; somatic approaches offer access to dimensions that verbal therapy may not fully address.
The specific modalities within the somatic therapy family include somatic experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine for trauma resolution; sensorimotor psychotherapy, which integrates somatic and cognitive approaches; EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), which has significant somatic dimensions; and body-oriented psychotherapy more broadly. These approaches share a focus on careful tracking of bodily sensation and the development of a more tolerable relationship with activation and physical experience.
Somatic therapy is particularly suited to trauma, chronic stress, dissociation, and presentations where cognitive or verbal approaches alone have not produced sufficient change. It also tends to be helpful for people who have difficulty accessing or articulating their emotional experience verbally, for whom a body-based entry point may be more available.
Maia, the AI companion in Asclepiad, offers space for what the body is holding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Asclepiad a somatic therapy?
Asclepiad is not a somatic therapy and does not work with the body directly. It offers a reflective space that can be valuable alongside or preparatory to somatic work — beginning to understand what one is carrying and what kind of support might address it. For somatic therapy itself, a practitioner trained in SE, sensorimotor psychotherapy, or somatic-informed approaches is needed. The UK Council for Psychotherapy (psychotherapy.org.uk) can help locate appropriately trained practitioners.
What if I am in crisis?
Asclepiad is not a crisis service. If you are in immediate distress or at risk to yourself or someone else, please contact the Samaritans on 116 123 (free, 24/7, UK and Ireland) or your local emergency services. Maia will also surface local helplines if something needs more than reflection.
Is it free?
Yes — begin with a 7-day free trial, no personal details required. Use AsclepiCoins after that: pay for what you use, nothing expires.
If talking has not been enough and you sense that what you carry is held somewhere the words do not reach, Maia is there.
Anonymous. No script. Just presence.