Not all mental health is solely in our thoughts and actions. Sometimes, they’re stuck in our body. They’re feelings that we have, physically, that are related to mental health but do not present themselves the way we traditionally imagine these conditions to be.

Somatic therapy works on a different, often deeper layer. At Nassau Counseling Services in Wantagh, our therapists use somatic approaches as part of a personalized treatment plan for clients whose distress lives not just in their thoughts but in their bodies — in chronic tension, physical anxiety symptoms, disconnection from physical sensation, or a nervous system that stays activated long after the threat has passed.

To learn more or schedule an appointment, call (516) 973-1032 or reach out through the contact form on our website.

Why the Body Holds What the Mind Remembers

Trauma and chronic stress don’t only affect how a person thinks and feels — they change the nervous system. When a person experiences something threatening or overwhelming, the body activates a survival response: fight, flight, or freeze.

That response is automatic and appropriate in the moment. The problem for many people is that the nervous system doesn’t fully return to baseline once the threat passes. The body stays in a state of readiness — braced, activated, scanning for danger — long after the circumstances that produced that response are gone.

This is the core insight that somatic therapy builds on. Research by Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, and others in the field of trauma treatment has demonstrated that traumatic experience is stored somatically — in the body’s tissues, musculature, and nervous system — in ways that cognitive approaches alone don’t always reach.

A person can know intellectually that they are safe, understand the origins of their anxiety, and have full insight into their patterns, and still find that their body responds as though danger is present. Somatic therapy addresses that gap directly.

What Somatic Therapy Involves

Somatic therapy is an umbrella term for a range of body-based approaches that integrate awareness of physical sensation, movement, and nervous system states into the therapeutic process. Rather than focusing exclusively on thoughts and narrative, somatic work attends to what is happening in the body in the present moment — where tension is held, how the breath moves, what physical sensations arise in connection with emotional experience.

The specific techniques vary depending on the therapist’s training and the client’s needs. Common somatic approaches include:

• Somatic Experiencing — Developed by Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing focuses on tracking and completing the body’s interrupted survival responses. Rather than revisiting traumatic content verbally, it helps clients gently complete the physical responses that were activated during the traumatic event and never fully discharged.
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy — Developed by Pat Ogden, this approach integrates body-based interventions with talk therapy, helping clients process trauma stored somatically by working with physical sensation, posture, movement, and gesture alongside verbal processing.
• Polyvagal-Informed Therapy — Rooted in Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, this approach helps clients understand and work with their nervous system states. The goal is building the capacity to recognize when the nervous system has shifted into threat response and develop the resources to return to a regulated, connected state.
• Grounding and Regulation Techniques — Breathing practices, body awareness exercises, and mindful movement that help clients develop greater access to the present moment and build the nervous system’s capacity for regulation between and during sessions.

All of these approaches share a common focus: working with the body as an active participant in healing rather than simply a vehicle for the mind.

What Somatic Therapy Treats

Somatic therapy is particularly effective for conditions where the body’s stress response is a central part of the clinical picture. At Nassau Counseling Services, our therapists use somatic approaches with clients dealing with:

• Trauma and PTSD — Somatic therapy addresses trauma stored in the nervous system in ways that talk therapy alone often cannot. For clients with PTSD, complex trauma, or unresolved traumatic experiences, somatic work can reach material that has been inaccessible through cognitive approaches.
• Anxiety — Anxiety has a significant physical dimension — racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, digestive disruption. Somatic approaches work directly with those physical symptoms and the nervous system activation underlying them.
• Depression — Depression often manifests as physical heaviness, fatigue, and disconnection from bodily experience. Somatic work helps reconnect clients with their bodies and with the present moment in ways that support the broader treatment of depression.
• Stress — Chronic stress produces physical effects that accumulate over time. Somatic approaches build the nervous system’s capacity to regulate and recover from stress responses rather than staying chronically activated.
• Eating Disorders — Disordered eating is frequently connected to a disrupted relationship with the body. Somatic work supports the process of rebuilding body awareness, interoception, and the capacity to experience physical sensation without distress.
• Relationship Difficulties — Early relational experiences shape the nervous system’s patterns of connection and safety. Somatic approaches help clients recognize and gradually shift those patterns at the level where they’re stored.
• Women’s Mental Health — Somatic therapy is particularly relevant for women navigating the impacts of relational trauma, body image, reproductive experiences, and the specific ways stress and trauma manifest in women’s bodies and lives.

The common thread across all of these is that distress has become embedded in the body’s patterns in ways that cognitive work alone hasn’t fully addressed.

Who Somatic Therapy is Best For

Somatic therapy suits clients who have a sense that their difficulties live in the body as much as in their thoughts — people who notice that their physical responses feel disconnected from their circumstances, who carry chronic tension or physical symptoms connected to stress, or who feel emotionally shut down or numb despite having insight into their experience.

It also suits people who have found talk therapy useful but feel they’ve plateaued — that understanding what happened and why hasn’t been enough to change how they feel and respond in their bodies. Somatic work often reaches what talk therapy has circled without resolving.

Somatic therapy doesn’t require clients to be highly articulate about their emotional experience. The work happens at the level of physical sensation and nervous system response, which makes it accessible for clients who find verbal emotional processing difficult or who have limited language for their inner experience.

Somatic Therapy at Nassau Counseling Services

Here at Nassau Counseling Services, our therapists integrate somatic approaches within a broader, personalized treatment framework alongside other evidence-based modalities including CBT, DBT, and EMDR. The combination of approaches is determined by what each client’s specific presentation calls for, and it shifts as treatment progresses and needs change.

Nassau Counseling Services is located in Wantagh, NY, serving clients throughout Nassau County and Long Island — including Bellmore, Massapequa, Merrick, Seaford, Freeport, and surrounding communities. To connect with a therapist and learn more about whether somatic therapy is the right fit for your situation, call (516) 973-1032 or fill out the contact form on our website.