Why Choose Somatic Therapy?

In a world that often encourages us to disconnect from our bodies whether through stress, trauma, or cultural conditioning, somatic therapy can offer a powerful invitation to come back home to our bodies and ourselves. Somatic therapy, like EMDR, helps clients process trauma by engaging the body and nervous system, offering an alternative to traditional talk therapy that supports deeper emotional integration and long-term healing.

Unlike talk therapy alone, somatic therapy brings the body directly into the therapeutic process. It recognizes that our stories, pain, and resilience don’t just live in the mind. They’re also held in our muscles, breath, nervous systems, and patterns of tension. By tuning into sensation, movement, and the felt sense, we can begin to process emotions and experiences in a fuller, more integrated way.

The Body is Part of the Story

Many of us have learned to leave the body out of the conversation when it comes to healing. We intellectualize. We cope from the neck up. But the body remembers whether through shutdown, tightness, restlessness, or a sense of numbness that’s hard to name.

Somatic therapy invites us to slow down and listen to what our bodies might be trying to tell us. This might look like tracking sensation, noticing breath, exploring posture or movement, or simply learning how to stay present with our experience without needing to change it.

Bringing the Body into Practice

Over time in my work as a therapist, I noticed a common theme: so many people were talking about their experiences without actually feeling them. They were insightful, reflective, and articulate but still disconnected from their bodies. And I could relate. Our culture doesn’t often support embodied awareness, especially when trauma or marginalization are part of the picture. This led me to begin bringing the body more intentionally into my therapeutic practice, not through anything forceful, but through gentle, body-based invitations that help clients build safety, awareness, and connection from the inside out. I also took a 2-year training course from Dr. Lisa Mortimore on somatic attachment therapy (https://bringingthebody.ca/somatic-attachment/).

Why Somatic Therapy Matters for Queer and Trans Folks

For queer and trans people, our relationships with our bodies are often shaped by experiences that go beyond the personal. From an early age, we may be met with messages that our bodies are wrong, too much, or not truly ours to define. Whether it’s from family, medical systems, media, or broader societal norms, these messages can lead to a deep and protective disconnect from our own embodied experience. This disconnection isn’t random. It’s a survival strategy—a way to cope in environments that have not always been safe. Many queer and trans folks learn to move through the world by tuning out sensation, flattening emotion, or leaving the body altogether. And while those strategies may have helped us survive, they can eventually leave us feeling numb, anxious, or cut off from ourselves.

Somatic therapy offers a space to gently begin reversing that disconnect. It doesn’t demand immediate comfort with embodiment—it respects that this process takes time. Instead, it supports you in building a relationship with your body that is rooted in choice, safety, and self-definition. You get to decide what embodiment means for you. It may not look like anyone else’s version, and that’s the point.

This work can be especially valuable if you’ve experienced medical trauma, dysphoria, or chronic hypervigilance. It can help reconnect you with your own sensations, boundaries, pleasure, intuition, and agency—all at a pace that feels right for you. Somatic therapy doesn’t pathologize your experience; it honours the wisdom of what you know about your body and the ways you’ve learned to protect yourself, while offering new pathways toward connection.

Whether you’re navigating transition, unpacking layers of systemic harm, wanting to feel more connected to joy and pleasure or simply longing to feel more at ease in your body, somatic therapy creates space for that healing to unfold. It’s not about fixing what’s wrong, it's can be about noticing what's right and making space to be with yourself more fully to listen, feel, and move in ways that reflect who you truly are.

Disconnection from the body can become a way of surviving in a world that hasn’t always made space for us. 

But over time, that disconnection can also mean losing access to feeling, intuition, pleasure, and agency. Somatic therapy creates space to rebuild that connection gently and on your own terms. It offers a way to reclaim embodiment, joy and pleasure not defined by others, but self-directed and affirming. Whether you’re exploring gender, navigating transition, or simply wanting to feel more at home in yourself, somatic work can support that journey in deeply meaningful ways.

The body, like the tree, remembers and continues to grow.

It’s Not About Forcing Change

Somatic therapy isn’t about pushing the body or doing something dramatic. It’s about creating the conditions for presence and building a relationship with our bodies. It’s about learning to feel safe in your body not all at once, and not perfectly but gradually, in a way that feels grounded and real. The work is subtle and sometimes it’s quiet but it’s powerful. Because when we learn to stay with ourselves breath by breath, sensation by sensation we begin to build trust and from that trust, real transformation can happen.

A Path Back to Yourself

Whether you're queer, trans, neurodivergent, or simply longing to feel more connected to yourself, somatic therapy offers a compassionate way in. It’s a way to reconnect with your body without pressure or judgment. A way to remember that healing isn’t something we just think about it’s something we live, feel, and allow. If you’ve been feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or simply curious about what it means to reconnect with your body, somatic therapy might be a meaningful next step.