You’ve been in therapy for months, maybe years. You’ve talked about your trauma extensively. You understand what happened, why it happened, how it affected you. You’ve gained insight, processed memories, worked through cognitive distortions. Your therapist is skilled, compassionate, and committed to your healing.
Yet something crucial remains unresolved. Your body still tenses when triggered. You still experience panic attacks, dissociation, or overwhelming anxiety. Your sleep is disrupted. Intimacy feels impossible. You understand your trauma intellectually, but your nervous system hasn’t gotten the memo.
This isn’t a failure of therapy or of you. It’s a limitation of an approach that, while valuable, isn’t designed to address where trauma actually lives—in your body and nervous system, not just your mind.
As a somatic therapist and holistic healer working with trauma survivors in Ireland and internationally, I’ve witnessed this pattern countless times. People who’ve done extensive talk therapy, gained profound insights, and still struggle with the visceral, embodied effects of trauma. They’re frustrated, confused, and wondering if healing is even possible.
The answer is yes—but it requires understanding why talk therapy alone isn’t sufficient for trauma, and what somatic approaches offer that traditional therapy cannot provide.
Understanding Where Trauma Actually Lives
The fundamental issue is this: trauma is not primarily a cognitive or psychological phenomenon. Trauma is a physiological event that disrupts your nervous system and becomes encoded in your body.
When you experience trauma—whether acute trauma like an assault or accident, or complex developmental trauma from childhood—your brain and body respond through ancient survival mechanisms. Your autonomic nervous system triggers fight, flight, or freeze responses. Stress hormones flood your system. Your body braces for danger.
If the threat passes and you can complete the defensive response—fight off the attacker, run to safety, discharge the activation—your nervous system can return to baseline. But when trauma occurs, these responses are often thwarted. You couldn’t fight or flee. You froze instead. The survival energy got trapped in your system.
This is what Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s leading trauma researchers, meant when he titled his groundbreaking book ‘The Body Keeps the Score.’ Your body quite literally keeps score of unresolved trauma—in muscular tension, breathing patterns, chronic pain, digestive issues, hypervigilance, and dysregulated nervous system responses.
Talk therapy primarily engages the cortex—the thinking, reasoning, language-processing parts of your brain. But trauma affects subcortical structures: the amygdala (threat detection), the hippocampus (memory consolidation), the brainstem (autonomic regulation). These areas don’t respond to words and insight alone. They need different interventions.
Four Critical Limitations of Talk Therapy for Trauma
Limitation 1: Language Requires Cortical Processing
Talk therapy depends on your ability to verbalize experience, think about your feelings, and cognitively process what happened. This engages your prefrontal cortex—the most recently evolved part of your brain, responsible for language, reasoning, and executive function.
But trauma disrupts the connection between cortical and subcortical brain regions. During trauma, your thinking brain essentially goes offline. Broca’s area—the speech production center—can become deactivated. This is why trauma survivors often describe being ‘speechless’ or having ‘no words’ for their experience.
When you’re triggered, you’re not in your cortex anymore. You’re in your amygdala, your brainstem, your survival brain. Trying to think your way out of this state is like trying to reason with a fire alarm that’s going off. The alarm isn’t listening to logic—it’s responding to perceived threat.
This explains why you can understand what happened, know rationally that you’re safe now, yet still experience intense bodily reactions. The understanding lives in your cortex. The trauma lives deeper—in parts of your brain that don’t speak language.
Limitation 2: It Doesn’t Address Nervous System Dysregulation
Trauma fundamentally dysregulates your autonomic nervous system—the system that controls breathing, heart rate, digestion, and your basic sense of safety or danger. Your nervous system becomes stuck in survival mode, chronically activated even when there’s no actual threat.
This creates the symptoms that make trauma so debilitating: hypervigilance, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, dissociation, emotional flooding, or complete numbness. These aren’t psychological problems that need cognitive intervention. They’re nervous system dysregulation that needs physiological intervention.
Talking about your feelings doesn’t regulate your nervous system. Understanding why you’re hypervigilant doesn’t bring you out of chronic sympathetic activation. Gaining insight into your freeze response doesn’t help you unfreeze.
Your nervous system needs direct, body-based interventions: breathwork to shift autonomic state, movement to discharge activation, sensory awareness to increase present-moment grounding, touch or pressure to signal safety. These are bottom-up interventions that can’t be replicated through top-down talking.
Limitation 3: It Can Reinforce Dissociation
Here’s a paradox: for many trauma survivors, talking about trauma can actually increase disconnection from the body. This isn’t a flaw in the therapy—it’s how many people survive traumatic experiences in the first place.
Dissociation—the ability to disconnect from overwhelming experience—is a brilliant survival mechanism. When you can’t escape physically, you escape mentally. You leave your body, float above the experience, go numb. This allows you to endure what would otherwise be unendurable.
The problem is that many trauma survivors remain dissociated long after the trauma ends. They’ve learned to live ‘from the neck up,’ disconnected from physical sensations, emotions held in the body, and their felt sense of embodiment.
Traditional talk therapy, which engages primarily with thought and narrative, can inadvertently reinforce this pattern. You can analyze your trauma, develop complex understanding, create detailed narratives—all while remaining completely disconnected from your body and what it holds.
I’ve worked with clients who could articulate their trauma story perfectly, explain every psychological dynamic, and remain entirely numb to the feelings in their chest, the tension in their shoulders, the collapse in their belly. The dissociation that protected them during trauma continues to prevent healing after trauma.
Limitation 4: It Doesn’t Complete Interrupted Survival Responses
Perhaps the most crucial limitation: trauma isn’t primarily about what happened to you. Trauma is about what got stuck inside you—the survival response that never completed.
When you face danger, your body mobilizes enormous energy to fight or flee. If you couldn’t complete these responses—if you had to freeze instead, or pretend everything was fine—that survival energy remains trapped in your system.
Your body is still braced for the fight that never happened, still holding the energy for the flight that was impossible. Your muscles still contract in incomplete defense patterns. Your breathing still holds the incomplete scream or sob.
Talk therapy can help you understand why you froze, but understanding doesn’t help your body complete the freeze response and return to safety. Insight doesn’t discharge the trapped activation. Narrative doesn’t release what your muscles are holding.
This is why somatic approaches are essential—they provide ways to finally complete what was interrupted, to discharge what’s been held, to allow your nervous system to finish the defensive sequence and return to baseline.
What Somatic Therapy Offers That Talk Therapy Cannot
Somatic therapy—from the Greek ‘soma’ meaning body—works directly with your body and nervous system to resolve trauma where it actually lives. Rather than talking about your experience, you work with your direct felt experience in the present moment.
This isn’t instead of talk therapy—it’s complementary. The most effective trauma healing often integrates both: understanding your story (cognitive) AND releasing what your body holds (somatic).
Here’s what somatic approaches uniquely provide:
Bottom-Up Processing: Starting Where Trauma Lives
Traditional talk therapy is ‘top-down’—it starts with your thinking mind and works toward your emotional and physical experience. You think about feelings, analyze patterns, develop cognitive insight.
Somatic therapy is ‘bottom-up’—it starts with your body’s direct experience and works up. You notice sensation, track movement, feel into what your body holds. The nervous system changes first, and understanding often follows naturally.
This matters because trauma affects bottom-up systems first. Your body responds to threat before your mind interprets what’s happening. Healing needs to happen in the same direction—starting with the body, not just the mind.
In somatic sessions, you might work with the tightness in your chest, the clench in your jaw, the shallow breath—not analyzing what caused them, but allowing them to shift, discharge, and reorganize. The story often emerges organically as the body releases, but the body work comes first.
Direct Nervous System Regulation
Somatic approaches use specific techniques to directly regulate your autonomic nervous system—bringing you out of fight/flight/freeze and into a state of safety and connection.
This might include breathwork patterns that shift autonomic tone, gentle movement that discharges activation, orienting exercises that help your nervous system recognize present safety, or grounding techniques that anchor you in your body.
These aren’t conceptual exercises. They’re physiological interventions that change your actual nervous system state in real-time. You can feel the shift—from tense to relaxed, from scattered to grounded, from numb to present.
Over time, these practices help retrain your nervous system. You’re not just managing symptoms—you’re creating new neural pathways, establishing new baseline states, teaching your body that it can return to calm and safety.
Completing Interrupted Defensive Responses
One of the most powerful aspects of somatic trauma work is the ability to finally complete defensive responses that were thwarted during the traumatic event.
This might look like: slowly, carefully, titrating into the sensations of fighting back—feeling your arms want to push, your voice want to say ‘no,’ your body want to defend. Or it might involve completing a flight response—feeling your legs want to run, allowing that energy to discharge through trembling or small movements.
For freeze responses, somatic work helps you gradually unfreeze—warming the immobility, bringing circulation and sensation back, allowing your system to move from freeze toward fight/flight and then finally to safety and connection.
This isn’t about dramatic catharsis or reliving trauma. It’s about gentle, titrated work with small sensations and movements that allow your nervous system to complete what was interrupted, discharging trapped energy bit by bit.
Building Embodiment and Presence
For trauma survivors who live dissociated from their bodies, somatic therapy provides a path back to embodiment—the ability to inhabit your body, feel sensations, be present in your physical experience.
This begins with simple practices: noticing your feet on the floor, feeling your breath, sensing where your body makes contact with the chair. Over time, you develop interoception—the ability to sense what’s happening inside your body.
As embodiment increases, you gain access to your body’s wisdom. You can feel when something isn’t right, sense danger more accurately (instead of feeling danger everywhere), and trust your gut instincts. You’re no longer living from the neck up—you’re integrated, whole, embodied.
This embodied presence becomes a resource. When you’re triggered, you have ways to ground yourself, return to your body, regulate your nervous system. You’re not at the mercy of flashbacks and panic—you have embodied tools for coming back to safety.
Experience this body-based approach firsthand with our comprehensive somatic meditation designed to help you begin releasing what talk therapy cannot reach.
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Moving Forward: Integrating Talk and Somatic Approaches
Understanding why talk therapy alone isn’t enough for trauma isn’t about dismissing its value. Talk therapy provides crucial benefits—insight, narrative, relationship, cognitive restructuring, pattern recognition.
The point is that trauma is multifaceted. It affects your entire system—mind, emotions, body, nervous system. True healing addresses all these dimensions.
If you’ve been working hard in traditional therapy but still feel stuck, it doesn’t mean therapy isn’t working or that you’re resistant to healing. It might simply mean you need an approach that includes your body in the process.
Somatic therapy offers this missing piece. It provides tools to work directly with nervous system dysregulation, to release what your tissues hold, to complete defensive responses that were interrupted during trauma.
Whether you’re in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, or anywhere in the world, somatic trauma work is increasingly accessible through both in-person and online sessions. The body-based approach translates effectively to virtual sessions—you’re still working with your own body’s experience, just with remote guidance.
The integration of talk and somatic approaches represents the cutting edge of trauma treatment. You don’t have to choose between understanding and embodiment. You can have both—and for deep trauma healing, you often need both.
About the Author
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited Integrative Holistic Therapist and Somatic Therapist specializing in trauma-informed, body-based healing approaches. With training in Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, and family constellation work, Abi helps clients release what traditional therapy cannot reach.
Based in Ireland, Abi works with clients in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, as well as offering online sessions worldwide. His approach integrates nervous system science, body awareness practices, and deep respect for the wisdom held in your tissues.
For somatic therapy sessions or to learn more about body-based trauma healing:
🌐 www.somatictherapyireland.com
🌐 www.blissfulevolution.com
📧 info@blissfulevolution.com
📱 +353 83 356 9588
