A somatic therapist in Dublin on the reframe that ends the war with the body, why the wellness industry’s “solve yourself” model produces exhaustion, and what it means to live with the body instead of optimising it.
By Abi Beri | Integrative Therapist & Nervous System Specialist · Somatic Therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Online
TL;DR. The body is not a problem to be solved. It is a presence to be lived with. Most modern wellness and even much of somatic-adjacent language subtly implies that the body is a malfunctioning machine in need of intervention — optimised, biohacked, regulated, fixed. That framing produces exhaustion, disconnection from the body’s own signals, and a chronic inability to rest. From a somatic therapy perspective — and as someone who practises as a somatic therapist in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online — the work is not to renovate the body. The work is to end the war with it, and to begin, often for the first time, the much older question: not how do I solve my body, but how do I live with it. This article explains the reframe, why it matters, and what it looks like in practice.
Key facts at a glance
- The body is not a project, a renovation site, or a malfunctioning machine. It is the place you live.
- The wellness industry has fused self-improvement with commercial subscription into one continuous “you are not yet acceptable as you are” message.
- Even somatic and trauma-informed language — nervous system regulation, somatic healing, somatic experiencing — can subtly reinforce the body-as-problem framing if not held carefully.
- Treating the body as a problem produces measurable consequences: disconnection from internal signals, chronic exhaustion, inability to rest, adversarial relationship with the self.
- The body, being intelligent, withholds information from a listener who consistently tries to fix everything it says.
- Somatic therapy at its best is not another optimisation protocol. It is the relational, body-based practice of meeting the body as a presence, not a problem.
- Somatic therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online — integrative practice rooted in Somatic Experiencing, polyvagal-informed work, inner child work and Family Constellations.
The sentence I now use, quietly, with quite a lot of clients
Quick answer: “The body is not a problem to be solved. It is a presence to be lived with.” Both halves matter. The first half is what the culture has been getting wrong. The second half is what most of us have not yet been offered as an alternative.
I want to begin with a sentence that I have been carrying for a while, and that I now use, quietly, with quite a lot of clients in my somatic therapy practice in Dublin, when they arrive in the room with another version of the same exhausted question.
The body is not a problem to be solved. It is a presence to be lived with.
I want you to hear those two halves equally. Both matter. The first half is what the culture has been getting wrong. The second half is what most of us have not yet been offered as an alternative.
We have been taught, from quite young, that the body is a project. A renovation site. A thing to be optimised, biohacked, regulated, toned, calmed, healed, fixed. The wellness industry has, in many ways, doubled down on what the diet industry started — the body as permanent improvement opportunity. Even the work I do, even the language I use — nervous system regulation, somatic healing, working with trauma in the body — even this language can subtly imply that the body is a malfunctioning machine that needs the right intervention to be made right. I want to question that framing in this article, because I think, somewhere underneath all the protocols and the optimisation, we have lost something. We have lost the older understanding that the body is not really a problem at all. The body is the place we live.
What the problem-to-be-solved framing actually does
Quick answer: Three measurable consequences: it makes the relationship with the body adversarial; it teaches the body to withhold information from a listener who tries to fix everything; and it makes rest neurologically unavailable, because a body at war with itself cannot drop into being-with.
Let me describe what the problem-to-be-solved framing actually does, in practice, to the people who absorb it. This is where the cost becomes visible.
When you treat your body as a problem, your relationship with it becomes adversarial. The body’s signals — tiredness, hunger, fullness, soreness, restlessness, sadness — are reframed as obstacles to overcome rather than as information to receive. You start to manage your body the way you would manage a difficult colleague — with negotiation, with strategy, with workarounds. The body, which is meant to be the place you live, becomes a thing you are constantly trying to outsmart.
And the body, being intelligent, responds to this. It starts to brace. It starts to withhold information. It learns, over time, that telling you things does not help, because you immediately try to fix whatever it told you. So it stops telling you. It goes underground. Symptoms become more diffuse, harder to locate, harder to read. People come into my somatic therapy room in Dublin with a particular kind of disconnection from their own bodies that is, in part, the legacy of years of trying to solve themselves.
The other thing the problem-to-be-solved framing does is exhaust you. Because if the body is always a problem, the work is never done. There is always another optimisation, another protocol, another regimen, another fifteen-minute morning routine to add to the existing forty-five-minute morning routine. You become, in a strange way, a project that never finishes. Which is exhausting not because of the actions involved, but because of the underlying message: you are not yet acceptable as you are.
And the most painful effect is what it does to your capacity for rest. Because rest is not really available to a body that is being treated as a problem. Rest, properly understood, is a state of being-with rather than being-against. A body that has been at war with itself, even quietly, even with good intentions, struggles to find that state. The war is always in the room.
The culture and its strange affection for solving
We live in a moment that has fused two very particular projects — the spiritual project of self-improvement, and the commercial project of selling solutions — into one big seamless story about how you, the listener, can be made more functional. There is a whole economy now built on the idea that something is wrong with you and that for a monthly subscription, you can become someone slightly closer to the version of you the algorithm thinks you should be.
I want to say this without contempt. The people producing this content are mostly trying. Many of them genuinely believe what they are selling. The teachers and influencers and supplement companies are responding to a real need — the need we all feel, sometimes, to suffer less. That is not contemptible. That is human.
But there is something a bit absurd, when you step back from it, about the spectacle of millions of people in a frantic project of trying to become more present. Trying to become more relaxed. Trying to win at calmness. The body — which is, by its nature, a place of presence and of slow biological time — has been recruited into a kind of high-performance arms race. And it is not designed for the arms race. It is designed to be a body. To breathe in and out. To digest. To rest. To be, slowly, here.
Optimisation vs Living-With — a comparison
| The optimisation framing (wellness default) | The living-with framing (somatic therapy) |
| Body as project, renovation site, problem. | Body as presence, place to live, inheritance. |
| Signals as obstacles to overcome. | Signals as information to receive. |
| Constant intervention. The work is never done. | Slow being-with. The work has rhythm. |
| Treats rest as a productivity input. | Treats rest as a state of being-with. |
| Generates wellness fatigue and disconnection. | Generates trust between you and your body. |
| The body braces, then withholds information. | The body softens, then offers information. |
| Exhausts. Makes the body adversarial. | Resources. Makes the body relational. |
| “How do I solve my body?” | “How do I live with it?” |
Even somatic language can carry the problem-framing
I want to be honest about my own field. Even somatic and trauma-informed language — nervous system regulation, somatic healing, working with the body — can subtly imply that the body is a malfunctioning machine that needs the right intervention to be made right. Sometimes the implication is small. Sometimes it is the whole frame. Either way, the listener absorbs it.
Good somatic therapy, in my view, holds the technical work lightly. Yes, we use what we know about the polyvagal system. Yes, we work with titration and pendulation and the window of tolerance. Yes, we are trained and we have rigour. But the technical work serves a deeper move that is not technical at all — the slow restoration of a relationship in which the body is met as a presence rather than diagnosed as a problem.
If somatic therapy stops doing that — if it becomes another optimisation protocol with better vocabulary — it has lost the very thing that makes it different from the wellness industry that produced the exhaustion in the first place.
Signs you are stuck in the body-as-problem framing
If several of these are familiar, the framing is probably running:
- You experience your body’s signals (tiredness, hunger, soreness, mood shifts) as obstacles to outsmart rather than information to attend to.
- You collect protocols and morning routines faster than you can integrate them.
- You feel guilty when you are not optimising — and judged when you are.
- You can describe your body in technical detail (heart rate variability, sleep score, biomarkers) but feel little when you actually inhabit it.
- Rest is uncomfortable; you fill it with podcasts about rest.
- You have a faint adversarial relationship with your body that you would not name out loud.
- You feel slightly behind on becoming the person the algorithm thinks you should be.
- You suspect the project never finishing is not a feature but a design.
What changes when the war ends
When clients in my somatic therapy practice in Dublin loosen the grip of the optimisation framing — and it is a slow loosening, in most cases — a few changes show up reliably.
The body comes back. Signals that have been muffled for years start to be readable again — clearer hunger, clearer tiredness, clearer emotional weather. The disconnection that came from years of trying to outsmart the body’s information starts to lift.
Rest becomes possible. Not because the listener has finally cracked the right wind-down protocol, but because the system is no longer at war with itself. Rest as a state of being-with, rather than as a productivity input, becomes structurally available.
The body’s ageing softens. The body changes, as bodies do, and instead of grief and panic, there is, more often, something closer to acceptance. The body that is forty is not the body that was twenty. That is not a tragedy. That is the body, doing what bodies do.
And the relationship to other people deepens. Because you meet others from the body you actually have, in the state it is actually in, and that turns out to be where actual contact is available. The optimised body is a kind of armour. The lived-with body is permeable. Other people can land on it. You can land on yourself.
How somatic therapy supports the living-with stance
Good somatic therapy supports this shift in three ways. First, it provides a relational container in which the body is met as a presence — not interrogated, not diagnosed, not optimised. The therapist’s nervous system, paced and attentive, models a way of being-with that the system can begin to internalise.
Second, it works directly with the body’s own signals, slowly, in doses the system can integrate. The technical concepts — window of tolerance, titration, pendulation — exist to keep the work within the range the nervous system can actually metabolise. The body, treated this way, begins to trust the listener again.
Third, it explicitly names the framing problem. Many people who come to somatic therapy have spent years inside the optimisation cycle and need permission to leave it. Sometimes the most powerful thing a therapist offers is the modelled stance that the body is not the problem, and that the work is not to solve it.
Frequently asked questions
What is somatic therapy? Somatic therapy is body-based psychotherapy: it works with the nervous system, breath, sensation and the body’s own signals, alongside language, to support the slow restoration of regulated states and the resolution of stored stress. It is grounded in decades of research from Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges and others.
Is somatic therapy different from talk therapy? Yes, in emphasis. Talk therapy works largely with thought and narrative. Somatic therapy works with thought and narrative AND with what the body is doing while you talk — tracking sensation, breath, posture, micro-movements. It tends to reach the layers of trauma and stress that have not responded to talk-only work.
What does somatic therapy in Dublin look like in practice? Sessions are typically 60–90 minutes, in person in Dublin or Kildare or online. The work is paced, body-based, and relational. We slow down. We track what is happening in the body alongside what is being said. We use the nervous-system technical concepts as tools, not as ends in themselves. The deeper move is the restoration of a relationship with the body — yours.
Who is somatic therapy good for? People living with chronic anxiety that has not responded to talk therapy; people in burnout from the optimisation cycle; people carrying developmental trauma, attachment wounds, mother and father line patterns; people who feel disconnected from their bodies; people doing inner child work; people in life transitions. And, more broadly, anyone who is tired of being a project and ready to begin a different conversation with their own body.
Do I have to do somatic therapy in person, or is online available? Both are available. I see clients in person in Dublin, Naas and Newbridge, and online from anywhere in Ireland or the world. Online somatic therapy works well with a trained practitioner — the relational field and the body-based attention travel through a screen better than people often expect.
What credentials should a somatic therapist have? Look for clinical training (somatic methods, trauma-informed practice, psychotherapy qualification), professional accreditation (IPHM, IACP or similar), ongoing professional development and supervision. I am IPHM-accredited, trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work, and have recently completed my Higher Diploma in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy at IICP College Dublin, continuing on the MSc.
Is somatic therapy near me available? If you are in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or anywhere in Kildare and surrounding counties, in-person somatic therapy is available with me. If you are elsewhere in Ireland, the UK, Europe or globally, online somatic therapy is available.
How do I book? The easiest first step is a short, no-pressure intro call. You can book one at somatictherapyireland.com. Or read more about my approach there before deciding.
Working with a Somatic Therapist in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Online
If you have read this far and recognise yourself — tired of the optimisation cycle, suspicious of the body-as-problem framing, ready to try a different conversation with your own body — this is what my one-to-one practice is for.
I am Abi Beri, an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist based in Dublin. I am trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work am IPHM-accredited. I work as a somatic therapist in Dublin and Kildare in person, and online from anywhere in Ireland or the world.
The work is integrative. Somatic practice rooted in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, polyvagal-informed nervous system work, inner child work, and Family Constellations (the Hellinger method) woven together. The pacing is slow, relational, body-based. We do not push. The body sets the rhythm, and we move at the rhythm the body can integrate.
Common reasons people come to me for somatic therapy in Dublin: chronic anxiety that has not responded to insight or talk therapy alone; burnout from the optimisation cycle; the wound with no story (childhood emotional neglect, the absence of attunement, growing up in a family that ran on logistics); the mother wound and family-line patterns; rejection sensitivity and the fawn response; chronic stress held in the body; the long shadow of growing up in a system that needed someone to be the calm one. None of these get solved with a protocol. All of them respond, slowly, to the kind of relational, paced, body-based work somatic therapy at its best provides.
If you would like to find out whether we would be a good fit, the easiest next step is to book a short, no-pressure intro at somatictherapyireland.com. Sessions are available in person in Dublin and Kildare (Naas, Newbridge) and online from anywhere. And if you would like a long audio companion to this article, the somatic talk — The Body Is Not a Problem to Be Solved — is on Insight Timer and wherever you listen.
Whatever you decide. The body is not a problem to be solved. It is a presence to be lived with. That stance is available to you tonight, whether or not you ever work with me. It deserves, at minimum, a hello.
About the author
Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist based in Dublin, Ireland. He is trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work, and has recently completed his Higher Diploma in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy at IICP College Dublin, continuing on the MSc. He is IPHM-accredited. He sees clients in person from a practice base across Dublin and Kildare, and online globally. More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.
Further reading & references
- Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
- Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice. North Atlantic Books.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.
- Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal. Knopf.
- Cederström, C. & Spicer, A. (2015). The Wellness Syndrome. Polity.
- Companion somatic talk: The Body Is Not a Problem to Be Solved (Insight Timer, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube).
