A clear, everyday-language guide to two different paths through the same difficulties — with a short audio explainer from Abi Beri.
If you’ve been looking for support — for anxiety, stress, the after-effects of something hard, or just a sense of being stuck — you’ve probably come across the word “therapy” a hundred times. What you may not have come across is the fact that there’s more than one kind, and that they work in genuinely different ways.
Most people picture therapy as talking. Sitting in a room, telling someone what happened, trying to understand it. That’s talk therapy, and it helps a great many people. But there’s another approach — somatic therapy — that works through the body rather than mainly through conversation. And if you’ve ever felt that you understand your problem perfectly well and it still won’t shift, the difference between the two might be the most useful thing you read today.
What talk therapy does
Talk therapy — including approaches like counselling, psychotherapy, and CBT — works primarily through conversation and thought. You talk through your experiences, your patterns, and your feelings, and a trained therapist helps you understand them, make sense of them, and find new ways of thinking and responding.
It’s especially good at helping you gain insight, change unhelpful thought patterns, process events by putting them into words, and feel heard and supported. For many people, that understanding is exactly what’s needed.
What somatic therapy does
Somatic therapy works through the body and the nervous system. It’s based on a simple but powerful idea: that stress, emotion, and past experience aren’t only held in the mind — they’re held in the body too. The tension that won’t leave your shoulders, the tightness in your chest when you’re anxious, the exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix — these are the body holding something.
Rather than only talking about a difficulty, somatic therapy helps you notice how it actually lives in your body, and gently supports your nervous system to release it and settle. It uses body awareness, breath, and attention to physical sensation, working at a pace that feels safe.
The key difference, in one sentence
Talk therapy helps you understand your experience. Somatic therapy helps you feel and release how that experience lives in your body.
That’s why the two can work so beautifully together — and why, for some people, one reaches what the other can’t.
When talk therapy tends to help most
Talk therapy is often the right starting point when you want to understand a situation or pattern, when you’re working through a decision or a relationship difficulty, when you need a thinking space and a steady, supportive presence, or when putting things into words is itself what brings relief.
When somatic therapy tends to help most
Somatic therapy often reaches what talk alone can’t in a few specific situations. When you understand your problem but it won’t shift — when you can explain exactly why you feel the way you do, and the insight changes nothing — that’s often a sign the difficulty is held in the body, below words. When anxiety or stress lives physically — a racing heart, a tight chest, a constant sense of being on alert — somatic work addresses the physical pattern directly rather than only the thoughts around it. When you feel disconnected from yourself or your emotions, somatic therapy gently rebuilds that connection. And in the aftermath of trauma, where the body holds the imprint long after the mind has tried to move on, body-based work is often essential.
You don’t have to choose just one
This isn’t really a competition. Many people benefit from both — talk therapy for understanding, somatic therapy for release — and the two complement each other well. In an integrative practice, the approaches are woven together to suit the person rather than applied as fixed methods.
If you’re not sure which is right for you, that’s completely normal. The honest answer is that it depends on what you’re working with and how you’re built, and a short conversation is usually enough to point you in the right direction.
A simple way to tell
Here’s a rough guide. If your difficulty feels like something you need to understand, talk therapy is a natural starting point. If it feels like something stuck in your body — something you already understand but can’t seem to release — somatic therapy may reach it more directly. And if it’s both, which it often is, the two together tend to do more than either alone.
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited integrative therapist offering somatic therapy, inner child work and Family Constellations in person across Dublin and Kildare, and online worldwide. If you’d like to talk through which approach might suit you, get in touch — there’s no pressure, just a conversation.
