What Is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy treats the body, not just the mind, as a place where stress and trauma are stored. Rather than focusing only on narrative, a somatic therapist tracks physical sensation (tension, heat, numbness) and works with it directly. Some practitioners work through stillness; others, like dance movement therapy, use motion to reach memory that sits underneath language.

This isn’t just theory. A 2017 randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress assigned 63 people with PTSD to either 15 weeks of Somatic Experiencing or a waitlist, and found large, statistically significant reductions in both PTSD severity and depression in the treatment group (Brom et al., 2017). It’s one of relatively few body-based trauma therapies with controlled-trial evidence behind it.

The Nervous System Science Behind It

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, now supported by decades of research into the vagus nerve, describes how the autonomic nervous system cycles through distinct states below conscious awareness (Porges, 2025):

• Safe and connected: calm, able to think clearly.
• Fight or flight: heart racing, muscles tensed.
• Freeze or shutdown: numbness, feeling “checked out.”
• Fawn: appeasing or over-apologizing to stay safe.

If speaking up felt unsafe growing up, your body may still default to freeze or fawn decades later, even somewhere objectively safe. That’s a nervous system doing what it learned, not a personal flaw, and it’s closely tied to how intergenerational trauma gets carried without our knowing it.

Why This Resonates in South Asian Homes

In many South Asian households, emotional pain gets translated into the body instead of named directly: a racing heart becomes “weakness,” tension becomes “just tiredness.” Add pressure not to disappoint family, and it’s easy to see why so much stress gets carried in the body with no name for it, sometimes showing up as sleep that won’t come even when nothing is obviously wrong.

What Happens in a Session

A somatic session guides your attention to what’s happening in your body right now, using two core Somatic Experiencing techniques: titration (working with small, manageable pieces of a difficult experience) and pendulation (moving attention between a stressful sensation and a calmer one, so the nervous system learns it can return to calm). Depending on the therapist, this can extend into movement: dance-based work accesses implicit memory that talking alone often can’t.

Signs It Might Help You

• You have chronic tension or fatigue with no clear medical cause.
• You struggle to relax even when you’re objectively safe.
• You shut down or dissociate during conflict.
• You people-please even when you don’t want to.
• You’ve gained insight in talk therapy but still feel physically “stuck.”

The Body Can Learn Something New

Your stress responses developed to protect you. Somatic therapy doesn’t override them; it teaches your nervous system it has more room to move than it thinks. At Sukoon, this work is offered by Antara Gupta, MSW, MA-DMT, a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist trained in somatic and dance movement therapy, who brings her own understanding of unlearning “log kya kahenge” as a first-generation immigrant herself.

Ready to explore what this could look like for you? Book a consultation with Antara to get started.