FREE TRAINING ARTICLE - TRAUMA INFORMED PRACTICE & SOMATIC HEALING AS INSEPERABLE

TRAUMA INFORMED SOMATIC HEALING AND THERAPY

There’s something important that’s getting lost in the way a lot of therapeutic work is being taught right now.

Two of the biggest movements in this field — trauma-informed practice and somatic therapy — are often being presented as though they can stand alone. Training in one does not by default always include training in the other. Even in some of the most well-known modalities in both arenas, they are not truly integrated - which is odd - because the reality is, that they are inherent to one another.

When “trauma-informed” becomes something else

There are very well-known approaches to trauma-informed work that place a strong emphasis on something important:

That to be trauma-informed means to non-pathologise. To understand that every symptom has its cause. That every symptom is, or at least once was, adaptive — serving to protect the individual from physical harm, emotional pain, or something that was too much at the time. It emphasises the importance of finding the emotional root – which is often invisible to the untrained eye. This is powerful work. It’s important work. My own practice has always encompassed this view.

But, when trauma-informed becomes reduced to this idea alone, something paradoxical can happen. It can begin to produce therapeutic work that is actually not trauma-informed at all – something that is actually very similar to old school psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic digging — just with a new mask, a more modern face.

The priority becomes: enquiry - trying to get to what the problem really is. And although that can be useful, the reality of skilled trauma-informed work is that we understand this can also be the most damaging and dangerous thing to do. In trauma informed work we don’t just non-pathologise, we also understand that going straight for the wound isn’t always wise.

Even when we can see it.

Because the truth is, over time — particularly after cultivating a deep understanding of complex trauma, attachment theory and relational wounding — it is very common that as a practitioner, you begin to recognise quite quickly (even at consult) what may sit at the root of someone’s pain, often long before it becomes clear to them. We develop trauma-vision, we see. To see what the client yet cant is part of our job.

But to put that straight on the table, to deliver what feels like the truth of what’s really going on, is not always smart. Truth is a sword. In tantra we understand the power of the sword - of the compassionate power of cutting through. But we also know that’s its use requires what is often referred to in Buddhism as “skilful means” - immense discernment - because the sword of truth is not a sword we are always ready to receive.

To offer it too soon can rupture the therapeutic relationship. It can destabilise the client. It can bring forward pain that their system has been protecting them from for a very long time. So to work in a trauma-informed way means we have to learn how to pace.

We have to learn how to really serve the client — not let our therapeutic ego get in the way, wanting to be the one who sees, who names, who delivers. And instead, to become able to offer insight slowly, carefully, as and when the client shows us that they may be ready to receive it. And, to read how it lands when we do decide to offer it, so we know whether to proceed, or gently pull back. This is a very different kind of skill.

Why this requires somatic training

To be able to do this, we need to understand what we call the client’s "window of tolerance" - how much emotional experience and information their nervous system can actually hold and process. How able their system is to feel the pain that, at one time, was too much. And we also need to be able to help them expand that capacity over time.

This is not something we can determine through words alone. We need to be able to read somatic cues and visible signals.

Through their gaze

Their tone of voice

Their movements

The way tension, stiffness, or holding shows up in the body

In Hakomi, this is often described as listening to the storyteller, not the story. Not what someone says about how they are — but what their body tells us about how they are. These are core skills. And yet, even though it is now widely talked about that trauma is held in the body, many trauma-informed modalities offer little to no real training in these areas.

So to work in a trauma-informed way requires us to work somatically. Really good somatic therapy isnt all about processing and regulation tricks and techniques - it is a relational way of working in, with and through the body as all times - in ways that might even be invisible to the client.

The flip side: somatics without trauma-informed skill

If we take the other side of this, we see something similar happening within somatic work. There are now many trainings and modalities oriented around somatic processing. And again — many of them are powerful. When we first experience trauma unwinding experientially, or joy arising spontaneously, it’s a magnificent thing. It can feel like, wow! This is the only way to do things!

But more often than not, the methods are not deeply trauma-informed in how they are applied.

Even where these modalities or trainings include principles like titration and pendulation — as made well known through the work of Peter Levine — meaning that we are not overwhelming the system, but slowly “leaking” the energy that got stuck, and moving in and out of experience to prevent “flooding”, something is often still amiss.

The missing piece: preparation and capacity

There is often very little therapeutic training in how to prepare a client for this kind of work. How to help them come into relationship with their body slowly, safely, and steadily over time. There is often a lack of understanding of just how much pain, distress, and trauma can be held in the body — especially in clients who do not superficially present as having suffered acute trauma (many of us initially).

So what happens is this:

Clients are taken into somatic work assuming a level of capacity that simply isn’t there. Particularly interoceptive capacity — the ability to feel and sense what is happening inside the body and be in relationship to it. Bessel Van Der Kolk often cites that when it comes to the crunch “interoception heals trauma”. Its that simple. Interception is taught, and it takes time – months, years.  It is a skill very few people have, both because of the innately dissociative character of our collective culture, and because of the adaptive numbing caused by the traumas that have brought them to therapy in the first place

When somatic work doesn’t land — or goes too far

So people seek out these modalities, often because they want to avoid talking, avoid exploring the wound. Embodied work is often driven by the desire to continue to dissociate. Interesting to consider huh?

We get drawn to the idea that this somatic stuff will be the secret ingredient, the quicker fix. And then they are taken straight into the body. The body they cannot feel. The body they are afraid of. The body they are afraid of for good reason. So one of two things happens:

The first is … nothing.

The client has no idea what is alive inside. They notice little. They follow somatic instructions or invitations like a good girl, boy or person trying to “get therapy right”, but are entirely disconnected from any real felt experience.

And so they come away saying: “I don’t really know what that was about” or “It didn’t do anything for me.” Or “I dunno, it was a bit weird”.

The other is that they dive in deep, and get flooded fast.

The trauma work becomes traumatic. The client will not always admit this to the practitioner because of their attachment wounding. They will mask and feign positive effect. This is another reason we have to be able to see the storyteller beneath their story.

Many people found their way to me over the years traumatised by somatic healing and trauma processing protocols, but always inverted the confusion and negative experience placing blame and shame on themselves assuming it was because they couldn’t “handle it yet” (like a personal failing) or there must have been something wrong with the way they did it. This was never the case. I could always hear that right preparation and a safe container had been missing. The re-traumatisation, sadly, had been almost inevitable.

Even with principles like pendulation and titration in place this outcome is still common because not enough preparation and stablisation takes place. Judith Herman famously names this as the first vital stage in trauma recovery - and more often than not in somatic therapy models, its is largely neglected.

The deeper risk: destabilisation over time

Even when the client seems to be handling the work well or “enjoying” the approach, somatics alone can still be destabalising over time.

Going in to the body week in week out can slowly overwhelm the system – offering little time for integration and creating “psychological stacking” that could be relieved through good relational work (yes – talk therapy!)

Sometimes these experiences feel powerful. In a culture that chases experience, that can feel satisfying — like something meaningful is happening.

But bigger experiences do not necessarily mean deeper healing. More experiences don’t mean more healing. In fact, often the opposite is true.

Because when the nervous system is repeatedly exposed to more than it can handle, even in the name of healing, it can lead to what we call decompensation. A gradual worsening of symptoms.

Now, there is a place for symptoms to increase within therapeutic work. It is not uncommon that anxiety, depression, or emotional intensity may rise at certain stages. Because something is shifting. Because the client is coming into deeper contact with the reality of their inner world. But it takes real training and discernment to know whether this reflects: movement and integration, or overwhelm and too much, too soon.

This is why I emphasise over and over, there’s no danger in moving too slow. Slow and steady wins the race. It might not be a sexy thing to teach. But it keeps people safe. And I think that might be more important.

We are not here to satisfy our clients desire for effect – nor our own need to feel masterful for that matter - we are here to help them heal. Often that means going slower than they believe is necessary. Early on I had wonderful teachers who taught me that they would rather I didn’t like them, than do me damage.  Babette Rothschild often echoes something similar in her trauma informed approach to practice – that we must lovingly refuse to collude with a clients yearning to “move fast and fix” – that we must refuse to risk re-traumatising them.

This isn’t about nervous practice, about being scared to take measured risks rooted in experience. I am not afraid to take people to dark, potent places. I am not afraid of their untamed pain - or their ecstasy for that matter. But equally I will not take you there until I know your nervous system can handle it, until I  know you are psychologically ready to look in the box your trauma had to lock away. This has nothing to do with courage. Many of us are fierce and totally game to “go there”. But whether or not we yet should is another matter entirely.

The role of the therapeutic relationship

This is where something else becomes essential. The therapeutic relationship. We know statistically that this is the number one predictor of positive therapeutic outcomes. Not the modality. Not the technique. The relationship.

And yet, in many somatic trainings, therapists are not given enough support to develop these core relational skills.

How to be with a client

How to co-regulate

How to stay in connection and conversation without neurotically filling the space

How to track and respond

How to offer insight without presuming or imposing

How to ground and integrate what is happening

How to offer cues of relational safety

What to do when you rupture it (which we will!)

How to identify transference, counter transference and understand them as part of the therapy

And so much more

Without this training, the work lacks a container.

This matters in trauma work, because the majority of trauma is relational. It comes from ruptured relational experience. It is not just what happened — but to quote Levine – “what happened in the absence of an empathetic witness”

So healing must also be relational. We have to learn how to become that empathetic witness. That is where general counselling skills rooted in somatic principles and trauma informed practice must not be overlooked in training - but sadly often are.

Bringing it all together

Without somatics, trauma-informed work risks becoming intellectual and prematurely exposing.

Without trauma-informed skill, somatic work risks becoming too much, too fast — or simply not landing at all. And without strong relational skill, neither can truly take root.

You can have as many somatic experiences as you like — but without the relational container, without the dialogue that allows integration, without the gradual development of capacity — it will not necessarily lead to meaningful change.

What this really asks of us, as practitioners, is a shift in what we value.

Less focus on doing something impressive, or getting somewhere quickly — and more focus on developing the sensitivity to know what is actually needed, moment by moment, for the person in front of us.

When somatics, trauma-informed understanding, and relational skill come together, the work stops being about technique altogether — and becomes something far simpler, and far more profound:

The capacity to sit with another human being in a way that is safe enough, steady enough, and attuned enough that change can happen naturally.

And this is what is so often misunderstood in both areas of practice.

The skills can take on a performative quality — particularly in the way they are demonstrated in online spaces and public settings — where it can look as though something is being done to create healing. But in reality, these approaches are not a magic wand. What they do, over time, is give us ways to help a client access their own organic capacity to heal. The process itself is natural.

All of these techniques, when used well, are not creating healing — they are creating the conditions in which healing can emerge. And in my experience, that only happens when they are brought together, not in isolation, but in synthesis — somatic awareness, trauma-informed insight and pacing, and relational depth working as one.

Because ultimately, healing is not something we impose on ourselves or others. It is something that returns — as the system moves back towards the natural state of homeostasis - of equilibrium, balance, and wholeness - that the trauma once disrupted.

Aimee Rai

ISOHH Founder

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