Where Somatic Therapy Comes From

And why therapy began to include the body

Where does somatic therapy come from? Learn how body-based approaches developed and why they can help with trauma, anxiety, and patterns that don’t shift through insight alone.

When something doesn’t shift through understanding alone

A lot of people come to therapy having already spent time trying to understand themselves. They’ve reflected on their patterns, noticed how their mind works, and often have a clear sense of where things come from. And still, something doesn’t quite change.

You might understand why you feel anxious, or notice your mind looping, but the experience itself stays the same. Insight can take you part of the way, but not all the way. That gap—between understanding and actually feeling different—is often what leads people to explore somatic therapy, even if they first come in thinking about anxiety or overthinking.

A shift in attention

For a long time, therapy focused primarily on thoughts, emotions, and interpretation. That work can be meaningful and helpful. But over time, some clinicians began to notice that certain patterns didn’t fully shift through insight alone. This reflects my experience as well. Just because someone can say “This happened to me in childhood,” and have a theory about why it connects to their current life, does not mean that person has changed.

People might explain their experiences clearly. They could track their thoughts and make sense of them. But their bodies were still responding in familiar ways—holding tension, staying activated, or not quite settling, even when nothing was wrong.

Gradually, attention began to shift. Instead of only asking what someone was thinking or feeling, there was growing interest in what was happening physically, in real time.

Early roots

Some of the earliest work in this direction came from Wilhelm Reich, who explored the idea that emotional patterns could be held physically, not just psychologically. His work was controversial and not always integrated into mainstream therapy, but it opened the door to including the body as part of psychological work.

At the same time, developments within psychoanalytic thinking were moving in a related direction. After Sigmund Freud, some analysts began to emphasize lived experience, early development, and the conditions that allow a person to feel real and integrated. Donald Winnicott, in particular, spoke directly about the psyche–soma—the sense that psychological life and bodily experience are not separate, but part of a single process. In his work, difficulties could be understood not only in terms of thought or emotion, but in how this integration develops, holds, or at times becomes disrupted.

Later, others developed this further in ways that were more explicitly grounded in bodily awareness. Eugene Gendlin emphasized what he called the “felt sense”—a subtle, bodily knowing that isn’t always captured in words, but can guide meaningful change when it’s given attention. Around the same time, approaches emerged that focused more directly on how the nervous system responds to stress and trauma. Clinicians like Peter Levine and Pat Ogden helped bring this perspective into trauma work, highlighting how patterns of activation and regulation shape our experience.

A shared understanding

While these approaches differ, they share a similar foundation. They recognize that our experiences don’t live only in thought. They also take shape in the body—in patterns of tension, activation, and response that develop over time, especially in response to stress or overwhelming experiences.

In that sense, this isn’t an entirely new idea. It reflects a longer-standing understanding, present across different strands of psychotherapy, that experience is always both psychological and bodily—what Donald Winnicott described as the psyche–soma. And importantly, these patterns don’t always change just because we understand them. They tend to shift through experience.

Why this matters for anxiety, overthinking, and trauma

This becomes especially relevant with patterns like anxiety, overthinking, and people-pleasing. You might understand why your mind returns to something, or notice yourself analyzing a situation again and again. But your system can still feel engaged—still slightly on, still looking for resolution.

From a somatic perspective, that makes sense. If your nervous system has learned to stay activated, your mind will often follow. Thinking becomes one way your system tries to create stability or anticipate what’s next. This is often where anxiety and trauma overlap—not necessarily in obvious ways, but in how the body continues to respond, even when you know you’re safe.

What somatic therapy is, in practice

Somatic Therapy isn’t about focusing on the body instead of the mind. It’s about including both. It is about making the implicit more explicit, and creating connection between our intellect and bodies. Some psychotherapists call this “name it to tame it.” In practice, that might mean noticing what happens physically as you talk about something, or slowing down enough to stay with an experience rather than moving past it.

The work is gradual. Not about pushing for change, but allowing patterns to unfold and shift in a way that feels manageable.

A different kind of change

Over time, this can lead to a different experience. You may still have the same thoughts, but they don’t carry the same weight. Your system may settle more easily, and patterns that once felt automatic may begin to loosen.

Not because you’ve forced anything—but because something underneath has shifted.

Somatic therapy in the North Bay

I offer somatic therapy for adults in the North Bay and across the SF Bay Area who are dealing with anxiety, overthinking, and patterns that don’t seem to shift through insight alone.

If you’d like to learn more, you can visit my somatic therapy page or explore related articles on high-functioning anxiety, overthinking, and people-pleasing, which often connect with this work in less obvious ways.

People-Pleasing in Adults: Why It’s So Hard to Stop

And why it often continues even when you can see it happening

People-pleasing isn’t just about saying yes too often. Learn why it’s hard to stop, how it connects to anxiety, and how therapy can help shift the pattern.

You notice it, but it still happens

At some point, you may start to recognize your own people-pleasing. It might show up in small ways—agreeing to something you’re not fully on board with, softening what you actually think, or responding in a way that feels easier in the moment. Sometimes you can even feel it as it’s happening, a kind of split-second awareness that you’re not quite saying what you mean. And even with that awareness, it can still be difficult to do something different.

It doesn’t always look the way you expect

People-pleasing is often described as being overly accommodating or conflict-avoidant, but that doesn’t always capture the experience. For many people, it’s less a conscious decision and more an ongoing way of relating. You might find yourself tracking how you’re coming across, adjusting in small ways, or staying attuned to how the other person might be feeling. Not in an extreme or self-sacrificing way, but in a quieter, more continuous way that can be easy to overlook. It can feel less like trying to be liked and more like staying aligned—keeping things smooth, predictable, and connected.

How it develops

These patterns usually develop for understandable reasons. At some point, being aware of others: responding carefully, getting things right relationally mattered. It may have helped reduce tension, avoid conflict, or make relationships feel more stable. This often begins in childhood, where we learn that in order to feel secure we need to be aware of other people’s emotions. Over time, that way of being can become familiar. It can become automatic.

Where anxiety comes in

There’s often a close connection between people-pleasing and anxiety, even if it doesn’t feel obvious at first. When your system is oriented toward anticipating how something might go or how it might land, it makes sense that you would adjust in response. You might think ahead in conversations, choose your words carefully, or find yourself going back over interactions afterward. There can be a subtle pressure to keep things steady—to avoid moments that feel off or uncertain. It doesn’t always feel like anxiety in a clear or overwhelming way, but it can carry a kind of underlying activation that makes it harder to fully relax into being as you are. In nervous system terms, we may consider this an expression of hypervigilance.

Why awareness doesn’t immediately change it

One of the more confusing parts is that awareness doesn’t necessarily shift the pattern. You might know, in a general sense, that you don’t have to agree or accommodate in the same way. But in the moment, there can be a pull to respond quickly, to keep things moving, or to avoid creating discomfort—for yourself or for someone else. By the time you’ve had space to think about it, the moment has already passed, and it’s often clearer afterward what you would have wanted to say.

What’s happening underneath

Like overthinking, people-pleasing isn’t only about conscious choice. It’s also connected to how your nervous system has learned to respond in relationships. If your system is used to staying attuned and adjusting, that response can happen before there’s much space to consider something different. That’s where approaches like Somatic Therapy can be helpful. Alongside understanding the pattern, we begin to notice how it shows up in your body—subtle tension, urgency, or shifts in attention—and what happens as there’s more room around those responses.

What begins to shift

Change here tends to be gradual. It often starts with noticing the moment a bit earlier, or feeling a little more space before responding. At times, you might find yourself saying something that feels slightly more aligned with what you actually think or feel—not in a dramatic or confrontational way, but in a way that feels more like you. Over time, people-pleasing often becomes less automatic. You may still be thoughtful and attuned to others, but with less internal pressure to get it right or keep everything smooth. Relationships can begin to feel more direct, and less effortful. You grow an ability to trust your experience and set limits when appropriate. You learn to tolerate other people’s emotional states a little better.

Therapy for people-pleasing and anxiety in the North Bay

I work with adults in the North Bay and across the SF Bay Area who find themselves in these kinds of patterns—often thoughtful, relationally aware, and capable, but feeling like they lose touch with themselves in certain moments. Therapy can be a place to slow this down and begin to shift it in a way that feels more natural and sustainable.

If you’d like to learn more about how I work with anxiety, you can visit my anxiety therapy page. You might also find it helpful to read more about overthinking, which often overlaps with people-pleasing in subtle ways.

Why Overthinking Doesn’t Go Away (Even When You Understand It)

And why insight alone often isn’t enough to change it

You understand your anxiety—but still overthink. Learn why overthinking persists and how therapy can help you feel more settled and less stuck in your head.

You already see it happening—so why does it keep going?

If you tend to overthink, there’s a good chance you’ve already spent time trying to understand it. You might notice when your mind starts looping. Catch yourself replaying something. Or tell yourself, “this isn’t helpful,” while it’s happening.

You may even have a sense of why you do it. And still, it keeps going. You try to let something go—but your mind comes back to it later. A conversation. A decision. And it’s not just that your mind comes back to it— it’s the sense of pressure and urgency that comes with it. At a certain point, it stops feeling like something you’re choosing.

Overthinking isn’t just a habit

It can look like a mental habit—but it usually serves a purpose.

Often, it’s a way of:

• Trying to get things right

• Avoiding mistakes

• Making sense of how something landed

• Staying a step ahead of what might happen next

In that sense, it’s not random. It’s something your system has learned to rely on. Which is part of why it doesn’t just turn off. It is an adaptive strategy, but there are side effects.

The role of perfectionism and responsibility

Overthinking is often connected to perfectionism.

In essence, perfectionism is a difficulty tolerating what could be perceived as imperfection.

You might notice:

• Going back over what you said, even when nothing went wrong

• Taking extra time with decisions, even small ones

• Feeling some responsibility for how things turn out—or how others experience you

It’s not just about thinking more.

It’s about carrying a certain level of internal pressure—and thinking becomes one way of managing that.

Why thinking your way through it doesn’t work

At some point, most people try to solve overthinking with more thinking.

Trying to reason through it. Find clarity. Land on the “right” perspective. Even some therapies are very focused on thinking. And while altering the patterns of our thinking can help, they often don’t address the other aspects of our experience that are involved. In some cases, trying to change the thought actually backfires and leads to more tension.

Because even when you understand what’s happening, thinking your way through it doesn’t always change your ability to tolerate that experience or how you feel about it.

And that keeps the loop going.

What’s happening underneath

Overthinking isn’t only happening at the level of thought. It’s also connected to how your nervous system responds. If your system is used to staying slightly activated—alert, engaged, a bit on edge—your mind will keep working, even when there’s nothing urgent to solve.

So the urge to keep thinking something through isn’t just mental. It’s also a physical state. That’s where approaches like Somatic Therapy can be helpful.

Alongside understanding the pattern, we also begin to notice how it shows up in your body—and what happens as that starts to shift.

What actually begins to change

Change doesn’t usually come from forcing your mind to stop. It tends to happen more gradually. You might start to notice when your system is getting pulled in, rather than only realizing it afterward. There may be a little more space before you follow a thought all the way through. Not because you’re stopping it—but because it doesn’t pull as strongly.

A different experience over time

Overthinking doesn’t necessarily disappear overnight. But it often becomes less automatic.

You may find:

• Thoughts come up, but don’t hold your attention in the same way

• It’s easier to leave things where they are

• You don’t need the same level of certainty to feel settled

And over time, that can create a different kind of ease. Not because everything is resolved—but because it doesn’t feel like it has to be.

You’re not doing it wrong

If you’ve tried to think your way out of overthinking and it hasn’t worked, that doesn’t mean you’re missing something.

It usually means the pattern isn’t only cognitive.

And that shifting it involves something more than insight alone.

Therapy for overthinking and anxiety in the North Bay

I work with adults in the North Bay and across the SF Bay Area who feel caught in patterns of overthinking, internal pressure, and constant mental activity.

Many of the people I work with are thoughtful and self-aware—but still find that understanding alone doesn’t change the experience.

Therapy can be a place to slow this down and begin to shift it in a way that feels more sustainable.

If you’d like to learn more about how I work with anxiety, you can visit my anxiety therapy page.

If you relate to this pattern, you might also resonate with this article on high-functioning anxiety.

High-Functioning Anxiety in the North Bay: Why You Look Fine but Feel Overwhelmed Inside

High-functioning anxiety can look like success on the outside but feel exhausting internally. Learn how overthinking, perfectionism, and people-pleasing are connected—and how therapy in the North Bay can help.

You Seem Fine—So Why Does It Feel Like This?

From the outside, your life might look pretty together. You get things done. You show up for people. You follow through. But internally, it doesn’t feel that simple. Your mind keeps going, even when you want to rest. You replay conversations after they happen. There’s a quiet pressure to stay on top of everything—like if you slow down, something might slip.

Even when you do take time off, it’s hard to fully land in it. This is often what high-functioning anxiety feels like. If you're looking for support, you can learn more about my approach to anxiety therapy for adults navigating these patterns.

And because things are still “working,” it can be hard to take seriously.

When Anxiety Doesn’t Look Like Anxiety

Not all anxiety is obvious. Sometimes it looks like being reliable. Thoughtful. Self-aware. You might be the person others count on. The one who anticipates needs, keeps things running, avoids mistakes. And in many ways, those are real strengths. But underneath that, there can be a constant sense of tension—like your system doesn’t fully power down.

The Link Between Anxiety, People-Pleasing, and Perfectionism

For many people, high-functioning anxiety is closely tied to patterns like people-pleasing and perfectionism. Not in a surface-level way—but in something more automatic.

You might notice that you:

• Feel responsible for how other people experience you

• Replay interactions, wondering if you said the “right” thing

• Have a hard time disappointing people, even in small ways

• Set a high internal bar—and feel unsettled when you don’t meet it

• Struggle to relax because there’s always something you could be doing better

Over time, these patterns can start to feel less like choices and more like defaults. They often develop for good reasons—adapting to environments where being attuned, capable, or “getting it right” really mattered. But as an adult, they can keep your system in a quiet state of alertness. And it starts to feel like pressure.

The Part That’s Easy to Miss

One of the hardest things about this kind of anxiety is that it’s reinforced. The same patterns that wear you out are also the ones that help you succeed. They help you stay organized. Thoughtful. Prepared. So your system learns: keep doing this. At some point, though, trade offs start to accumulate. These trade offs become harder and harder to ignore. Sometimes, it may just be a constant tension in the background.

Why It’s Not Just in Your Head

A lot of people have already tried to think their way through this. They understand their patterns. They can explain where it comes from. But the feeling doesn’t really shift. That’s because this isn’t only cognitive—it’s also physiological. Your nervous system has learned to stay on alert.

So even when nothing is wrong, your body can still feel like it needs to stay on. That’s where approaches like Somatic Therapy can be helpful. Instead of only working with thoughts, it helps you begin to notice and shift what’s happening in your body as well.

What Change Can Look Like

The goal isn’t to lose what makes you capable or thoughtful. It’s to feel less driven by pressure—and more able to choose how you respond. Over time, that can look like:

• Being present without constantly scanning for what’s next

• Letting interactions end without replaying them

• Feeling more settled, even when things aren’t perfect

• Having a different relationship to rest—not something you have to earn

This kind of change tends to be gradual, but meaningful.

Therapy for High-Functioning Anxiety in the North Bay

If you’re in the North Bay or elsewhere in the SF Bay Area, you aren’t alone in this.

A lot of high-functioning adults reach a point where things look fine externally but don’t feel sustainable internally.

Therapy can be a place to slow this down and understand what’s actually driving these patterns, not just manage the symptoms. In my work, I focus on helping people move beyond coping and start shifting the underlying patterns—especially when anxiety is tied to overthinking, people-pleasing, and perfectionism. If you’re in the North Bay and want to explore this further, you can read more about working together on my anxiety therapy page.

When to Consider Reaching Out

You don’t have to wait until things fall apart.

Sometimes the reason to reach out is simpler than that: You’re tired of feeling like your mind never fully turns off.
You want to feel more at ease in your own life. You’re ready for something to actually shift—not just be managed.

If that’s where you are, therapy might be worth exploring.

Final Thought

If part of you keeps saying,
“I should be able to handle this,”

that makes sense.

You probably have.

But that doesn’t mean you have to keep carrying it in the same way.

Looking for therapy in the North Bay for anxiety, perfectionism, or people-pleasing?
I offer somatic therapy for high-functioning adults who want to feel more grounded, less stuck in their head, and more at ease in their relationships.

Why Somatic therapy?

Understanding some therapy terminology can also help you find a therapist that will work for you. In this post I wanted to speak to a prominent modality that has many diverse expressions. Somatic therapy is a broad term to describe a therapeutic approach that emphasizes the body of the client. There are many ways this might happen, although generally in therapy we are focusing on the experience inside our bodies. This is what Gendlin (1) and later Peter Levine (2) have called the felt sense. 

In Ancient Greek, soma meant '“body.” The famous researcher and British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (3) termed  the connection between mind and body the "psychesoma." One could argue that the whole of psychotherapeutic history is based on an assumed and observed connection between body and mind.

There are many strands of somatic theory that run through the history of psychotherapy. Rather than just listing them I want to focus more on the why and how of somatic therapy in a general sense.

Somatic therapy is about the body-mind connection

That is the simplest way to understand it. More and more we understand that body and mind are not somehow isolated, but are interwoven. In Dan Siegel’s work on interpersonal neurobiology, he discusses the embodied brain, the mind, and relationships as all being connected. In traditional forms of medicine this is also understood in great depth such as in Ayurveda, Tibetan, and Chinese medical systems.

In the context of therapy, when we pay attention to the body we are recognizing that our bodies are intimately involve with our psychological lives. Emotions are not abstract thought-based experiences, rather they occur in our bodies as different kinds of sensations and felt-experiences. For example when we are scared we might have a pit in our stomach. This connection isn’t some isolated event. Our bodies are always giving and receiving signals. And when we experience emotion, it is a bodily experience.

So why does this matter for therapy? Most of us have an ambivalent relationship with our body-experience. I am not just talking about body-image, but our actual experience in our bodies. Most of us are not taught how to relate to our emotions from a young age. We go to school, and we begin our cognitive development. Meanwhile, our emotional development is left arrested.

If we have experienced trauma or even more subtle emotional neglect, our ability to process and release our emotions does not develop evenly. We rely on adults to teach us how to relate to these very scary and intense feelings inside of us. Without emotionally attuned caretakers, we do not develop the capacity to digest our emotional states. Sometimes they get frozen, sometimes they come out in other ways. All of this plays out in the body. Not just in our thoughts. 

Decades of research around attachment suggests that our ability to feel soothed as young children is totally dependent on our caretakers. Our nervous systems develop in relationship to our caretakers. I know parents feel a lot of pressure around this, and it isn’t my goal to blame anyone. This is just the truth that psychologists have observed and it gives us important information about how we develop in relationship.

In my experience, working with thoughts just isn’t enough

Some forms of therapy and new-age practice focus very much on our thinking. This can be helpful because our thoughts do strongly influence our experience. However, often what I find is clients use their thoughts to criticize their emotional reactions rather than learning to relate to them. This keeps them stuck in neutral. Because if we keep having to fight the emotion that comes up we are going to have to tense or shut down more. It's a survival response that has big trade-offs. 

So what I tell clients is that we can’t impose the rules of the left-brain (cognition, language) on the right-brain (emotion, intuition). While this may be an oversimplification of brain anatomy, I find it to be helpful. So many of us want our emotions to be a certain way. Most often it is some version of “I shouldn’t feel _______.” We try to set rational parameters for what is acceptable to feel, and what is not.

But that is not how our emotional brain works. When we have a feeling, it just happens. If we expend so much energy telling ourselves it shouldn’t be happening we are just going to tense more… and that is going to exacerbate things like anxiety and depression. I have never seen anyone make progress by rejecting their emotions. This is a survival strategy, not a therapeutic strategy. 

We need to learn that we can tolerate emotions in our body, and the way we do that is by learning to contact them with our attention, to be curious with sensations in our bodies. Often we need help to learn how to do this! Otherwise we stay in our automatic rejection and avoidance patterns. The good news is that it is a skill that can be gradually developed, like a muscle. 

Sometimes we are going to do whatever we can to avoid our feelings because it’s too painful. And that can be okay, too. We just want to begin to notice the way our fear causes us to disconnect from ourselves moment-by-moment without pressure. Believe or not, this is what helps to develop our capacity to both regulate and communicate our experience.

If you want to explore Somatic Therapy further, reach out for a free consultation. I’d be glad to discuss how it may help you.

References:

(1) Gendlin, E. (1978). Focusing

(2). Levine, P. (1997). Waking the tiger.

(3) Winnicott, D.W. (1954). Mind and it’s relation to psychesoma: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Winnicott_PsycheSoma.pdf