How do we ‘listen to the body’ in somatic psychotherapy?

By Kathleen Kingsley-Hughes

When people hear “body-based therapy,” they often imagine massage or movement. But in the psychotherapy I offer, working with the body is something subtler, deeper, and profoundly healing. It’s about listening to the body—not just as a physical structure, but as a place of emotional intelligence, memory, meaning, and transformation.

The Body Remembers—And It Knows How to Heal

Our bodies are shaped by everything we’ve lived through—from our earliest attachment patterns to the traumas we couldn’t process at the time. Long after the thinking mind has moved on, the body may still hold fear, tension, grief, or confusion.

Modern neuroscience helps us understand this: trauma, attachment wounds, and chronic stress can bypass the rational brain and live on in the nervous system. That’s why we can’t simply think our way out of anxiety, depression, or relational pain. This is especially relevant for those who’ve experienced marginalization or relational trauma, including many neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ clients. That’s why real healing often begins not with explanation, but with reconnection—through the body, in relationship, and at your own pace. Real change requires a felt shift—one that arises from the inside out.

My work supports this kind of inner shift by creating the conditions in which your body’s wisdom can come forward, speak, and be heard. And allowing a new relationship with yourself to develop and learning essential skills to support yourself going forward in life, listening to the whole of yourself.

The Felt Sense: A Gateway to Transformation

Central to my approach is the concept of the felt sense, a term from Focusing-Oriented Therapy developed by Eugene Gendlin. The felt sense is a subtle, bodily awareness of a situation or emotion—often unclear at first, but full of meaning. You might feel it as a knot in the stomach, a catch in the throat, or an intuitive sense that something’s not quite right (or beautifully right).

When we give the felt sense space and attention in a safe, compassionate environment, it can begin to unfold. New insights, memories, or inner movements emerge. Something stuck can finally shift.

A Weaving of Somatic, Creative, and Compassion-Focused Therapies

While Focusing is a core practice, I draw from a wide range of approaches to support each person’s unique process, including:

• Hakomi: A gentle, mindful body-centered therapy that helps us uncover unconscious beliefs and emotional patterns rooted in early experience.

• Somatic Experiencing principles: Supporting the body to safely release stored trauma without re-traumatization.

• Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Adapting mindfulness practices to support safety, regulation, and presence.

• Compassion-Focused Therapy: Building a compassionate inner relationship and developing a secure attachment to yourself, especially where early attachment wounds may have left lasting imprints.

• Expressive therapies: Inviting creativity as a healing force—whether through music, sound, movement, therapeutic journalling, creative writing, or art-making. These can offer powerful ways for the body to express what words alone cannot reach.

• Nature-based therapy: Sometimes we take our work outside, allowing the rhythms, metaphors, and quiet wisdom of the natural world to support the process.

• Meditation and relaxation techniques: Supporting nervous system regulation, grounding, and access to deeper layers of awareness.

  
  

A Trauma-Informed, Client-Led Approach

I work from a trauma-informed, attachment-aware foundation. That means I take care to create a space that feels emotionally and physically safe, where nothing is forced and everything is invitational. You’re not broken or in need of fixing—you’re holding something important that’s been waiting for the right conditions to come into awareness.

Many clients come in feeling disconnected from their bodies or unsure how to access inner awareness. Clients often have felt sensations that they struggle to avoid and they are frequently surprised to find that they don’t need to distract themselves from it any longer. In fact they don’t even need to learn to tolerate it, but rather that they can develop a relationship with it where they discover how it has been supporting them. And when something comes into awareness, just as fully as it wants to be known, there’s an opportunity for shifts and change and for something new to happen.

You don’t need to know how to “do” this kind of work in advance. That’s completely okay. We begin right where you are. Our bodies are the experts and they know how to do this. We just need to learn how listen to their wisdom.

Working in the Moment, Following What Wants to Happen

Each session is unique. I don’t follow a script or fixed method. Instead, I draw from my training and experience in all these approaches to respond in the moment to your needs and your inner process.

Sometimes we follow a felt sense into a deep emotional release. Sometimes we stay with the body’s subtle signals. Sometimes we explore through image, metaphor, gesture, or sound. Sometimes we write, paint, sing, or sit in silence beside the sea.

My role is to attune to you—to walk beside you with care and curiosity—as your system finds its own way to heal. Often, this process leads to gentle but profound inner transformations: the kind your body has been waiting for, sometimes for years.

Integration and Self-Attunement

At the heart of this work is integration—the bringing together of fragmented experiences, parts of the self, and layers of meaning into a coherent whole. Many of us have adapted by splitting off emotions, sensations, or memories that were too overwhelming to process at the time. In therapy, we gently welcome these aspects back into awareness, not to analyse or judge them, but to listen, feel, and allow them to be known. This requires self-attunement: the ability to be in sensitive, compassionate relationship with one’s own internal experience.

Developing this capacity is central to healing. It allows us to meet our pain without being overtaken by it, and to trust our body’s signals rather than fearing or ignoring them. Through this process, we gradually become more whole, more grounded, and more able to inhabit our lives with authenticity and presence.

Inclusive, Affirming, Neurodivergent-Aware Therapy

I work with many clients who identify as neurodivergent (including autistic, ADHD, highly sensitive, or otherwise non-normative in sensory or cognitive processing). I also welcome those exploring or living into queer, trans, nonbinary, bisexual, or otherwise LGBTQ+ identities.

In many cases, the body has learned to mask, hide, or brace in response to social pressure, fear, or rejection. In therapy, we gently support the unmasking process—not to make you fit a norm, but to help you come home to yourself. I approach this work with deep respect, openness, and a commitment to co-creating safety and trust.

Your experience is valid. You don’t need to explain or justify how you move through the world. I don’t believe in “fixing”—I believe in liberating what was never broken.

Coming Home to Yourself

Ultimately, this is a journey of reconnection. Not just to your body, but to your wholeness. To your capacity to care for yourself with kindness. To a secure inner base that can hold all parts of you, even those that once felt too much or too hidden.

If this kind of work resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. You’re welcome exactly as you are.