Beyond Words: The Wisdom of Somatic Experience

Have you ever wondered why you feel immediately at ease with some clients whilst others leave you subtly drained, even when the session seemed to go well? Why your body tenses when certain clients enter your office, while you feel more at ease with others? And why sometimes you feel a sense of deep emotional engagement in the therapeutic process, whereas other times it feels like you and your client are waving at each other from distant shores?

Early on in my work as a group facilitator and therapist, I attributed these phenomena to psychological factors - transference, countertransference, the mysterious alchemy of personality matching. I spoke of "feeling states" and "emotional attunement" as if they were purely mental events while practising my “empathy face” in clinical supervision (yes, really) for the times I wasn’t really feeling it.

It has only been through the development of my own somatic practice that I have began to understand that so much of what happens in the therapeutic dyad occurs outside of words - and even outside of visible body language. And, in turn, so much of our capacity as therapists is influenced by our relationship with our internal experience.

As Chris Germer puts it: “To be open and receptive to our clients, we need to be open and receptive to our own experience, especially the impact our clients are having on us, mentally, physically, and emotionally...If we are capable of holding the “client within” in compassionate awareness, we are more likely to relate compassionately to the client sitting in front of us.”

Neuroception and emotional attunement

We are, all of us, walking around with an inbuilt surveillance system that operates far below the threshold of consciousness. This system, which neuroscientists have mapped with increasing precision, is constantly scanning our environment for cues of safety or danger. Stephen Porges calls it our "neuroception" - the unconscious detection of safety or threat that precedes and shapes our conscious experience.

What fascinates me is how this system operates not just within individuals, but between them. When I sit with a client, our nervous systems are continuously interacting - whether we are aware of it or not.

This insight has profound implications for how we understand therapeutic presence. When we speak of being "present" with our clients, we often think in psychological terms - being emotionally available, cognitively engaged, relationally attuned. But presence is also deeply somatic. It's about the state of our nervous system and how that state communicates safety, or lack thereof, to the person sitting across from us.

The Therapist's Nervous System as Co-Regulator

Consider this: a client arrives in your office carrying the weight of trauma, their sympathetic nervous system activated, their body prepared for fight or flight. Their breathing is shallow, their muscles tense, their eyes darting occasionally to the door. In this moment, your nervous system becomes their most important therapeutic tool.

If you are rushed from your previous session, still carrying the emotional residue of a difficult case, or preoccupied with personal concerns, your may struggle to create a regulating container for your client’s experience. Their already vigilant system may detect this, potentially unhelpful reinforcing beliefs that they carry - that world is not safe, that connection leads to danger, that they are “too much”.

But if you have taken a moment to ground yourself, to arrive fully in your body and in the present moment, your regulated nervous system begins to offer something precious: it provides a template for regulation that your client's system can begin to mirror.

I think of Elena, a young woman who had been exposure to immense trauma in a humanitarian setting. It took some time for us to be able to work together in the therapy room, so primed was she to bolt. When she made it through the door, she would perch on the edge of the couch, her entire being radiating hyperarousal. I learnt to begin our sessions by taking several deep breaths, allowing my shoulders to drop, consciously softening my gaze. I was, quite literally, using my nervous system to teach hers what safety might feel like.

The change was gradual but unmistakable. As my presence became more consistently regulated, Elena's body began to trust mine. Her breathing deepened, her posture softened, and eventually, she could relax into her own presence.

The Neurobiology of Felt Safety

The research on this is compelling. When we feel genuinely safe with another person, our vagus nerve shifts into what Porges calls "social engagement mode." Our heart rate becomes more variable, our facial muscles soften, our voice takes on warmer tones. We become literally more receptive to connection and healing.

But felt safety is not something we can manufacture through technique alone. Our clients' nervous systems are exquisitely sensitive to authenticity. They can detect, at levels far below consciousness, whether our calm presence is genuine or performed, whether our attunement is real or strategic.

This puts us in an interesting position as therapists. We cannot fake the nervous system state that promotes healing. We must actually inhabit it. This means that our own regulation - our own capacity to be present in our bodies, to tolerate difficult emotions without becoming dysregulated ourselves - becomes a fundamental aspect of our therapeutic competence.

Paradoxically, most of our professional training as therapists focuses on what to do with our minds: how to formulate cases, develop treatment plans, offer interpretations. We learn precious little about how to work with our bodies, how to recognise and regulate our nervous system states, how to use our physiological presence as a therapeutic instrument.

Yet the research tells us that the therapeutic relationship - that ineffable connection between therapist and client - is the strongest predictor of therapeutic outcome across all modalities. And at the heart of that relationship is this somatic negotiation about safety and trust that happens in the spaces between words.

Therapeutic Presence as Embodied Practice

This understanding has fundamentally changed how I prepare for sessions, but also my approach to interpersonal work in general. For many years I have worked as an academic, leading a team in an incredible competitive and high-pressure environment. I’ve also devoted a lot of time to holding space for others through meditation training, one-on-one sessions, retreats and workshops. Oscillating between the physiological states required of me to do these roles effectively has been extremely difficult at times. I have, on several occasions, stepped back from interpersonal work completely, because I did not feel that I was physiologically equipped to provide a supportive holding environment for those working with me.

When I am involved in therapeutic work, I've developed what I think of as a "nervous system check-in" - a brief practice of noticing the state of my body, my breathing, my level of activation or collapse. I take time to ground myself before entering the therapeutic space, but also after I leave it. Like many of us, I am very prone to “taking the office home” unless I implement some clear physiological spacers between work and home.

Sometimes this means a few minutes of deep breathing. Sometimes it requires a brief walk, a meditation, or a yoga session. Occasionally, it means acknowledging to myself that I'm carrying something from my personal life that needs attention before I can be fully present with my client.

While I used to feel cynical about “self-care,” I now recognise that my holding capacity is perhaps the most powerful tool I bring to the therapeutic encounter. It's what allows my clients' overactive alarm systems to finally rest, what permits their defensive strategies to soften, what creates the neurobiological conditions for healing to occur. Accordingly, I believe we each have a professional responsibility to support our holding capacity through whatever supports us to regulate..

Of course, there are times when our own nervous systems become activated during sessions. A client's story triggers our own trauma history. Their anger provokes our defensive responses. Their despair pulls us into our own wells of sadness.

Perhaps from the lens of my early training, I would have seen these moments as signs of failure - that I was struggling with boundaries, that I needed to be more professional. Now, I see these as windows into experience - my own, the clients, and the dynamic unfolding between us. Often, my body is often picking up what my mind has not yet processed; perhaps the client's unspoken rage, perhaps my own.

The key is not to avoid these reactions but to work with them skilfully. Sometimes this means taking a brief pause to breathe and reground. Sometimes it means acknowledging what's happening: "I notice I'm feeling some tension in my body right now as you talk about this. I wonder if that gives us any information about what you might be experiencing."

Such moments can become opportunities for deeper attunement, for modelling how to notice and work with nervous system activation rather than being unconsciously driven by it.

Toward a More Embodied Practice

As I reflect on this evolution in my understanding of therapeutic work, I'm struck by how it calls us toward a more embodied practice. It asks us to pay attention not just to what we think and feel, but to how we breathe, how we hold our bodies, what our nervous systems are communicating in each moment.

It invites us to see ourselves not just as thinking professionals but as whole human beings whose very presence can be healing. It reminds us that in the therapeutic encounter, we are not outside observers but full participants in a relational field where healing happens through connection, through the meeting of one nervous system with another in safety and trust.

This work has humbled me and brought new meaning to my personal practice of meditation and somatic work. It has shown me how much of what I thought I knew about therapy was incomplete, how much I was missing by focussing only on the mind whilst ignoring the wisdom of the body. But it has also filled me with wonder at the elegant simplicity of how healing occurs; not through complex interventions or brilliant interpretations, but through the fundamental human capacity for one nervous system to help regulate another.

In the end, perhaps this is what we offer our clients most fundamentally: not our theories or techniques, but our regulated presence. Not our ability to fix or cure, but our willingness to be present with them in their pain whilst maintaining our own groundedness. Not our interpretation of their experience, but our embodied demonstration that it's possible to be in relationship and remain safe.