#3: The difference between somatic coaching and traditional therapy (and when you need each)
You've been in therapy for years. You have a therapist you trust, insights you've worked hard to develop, and a solid understanding of your patterns. The work has been genuinely helpful. You're more self-aware than most people you know.
And yet, when someone mentions somatic coaching, you feel a flicker of curiosity. Maybe even relief. Like there's a piece you've been missing, and someone just named it.
So what's the actual difference between somatic coaching and traditional therapy? When does each approach serve you best? And why might you need body-based work even if therapy has been genuinely helpful?
Let me break it down in a way that actually makes sense, without the wellness industry jargon.
What traditional therapy does brilliantly
Therapy is excellent at what it was designed to do: help you understand yourself better through conversation, insight, and cognitive exploration.
A skilled therapist helps you identify patterns, trace them back to their origins, and develop new frameworks for understanding your experiences. You learn about your attachment style, your defense mechanisms, your triggers. You gain language for things that used to feel confusing or overwhelming. You process past experiences and develop healthier thought patterns.
This work is deep and beautiful. Understanding why you react in certain ways, recognizing your patterns, and developing insight into your behavior creates a foundation for change. Therapy helps you see the map of your inner landscape.
For many issues, this is exactly what you need. Depression often responds well to cognitive approaches. Anxiety can shift when you learn to identify and challenge distorted thinking. Relationship patterns become clearer when you understand your attachment history. Grief needs space to be witnessed and processed through language.
Therapy also provides a consistent relationship where you can be fully seen and heard without judgment. That relational container itself can be deeply healing, especially if you didn't have that growing up.
Where traditional therapy hits its limits
After years of excellent therapy, I understood my anxiety intellectually, but my body still held it physiologically. I could articulate why I had trouble setting boundaries, but I couldn't actually feel where my yes and no lived in my body. I knew my patterns inside and out, but knowing them didn't automatically rewire my nervous system.
Traditional talk therapy works primarily through your prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain. You analyze, reflect, gain insight, develop new cognitive strategies. This is helpful yet limited.
Most of what shapes your emotional and behavioral patterns lives below the level of conscious thought. Your nervous system developed its responses before you had language. Your body stored experiences as sensation and implicit memory. Trauma, chronic stress, and early relational patterns get encoded in your tissues, your breathing, your muscular holding patterns, your autonomic nervous system.
You can talk about these patterns endlessly without actually shifting them at the physiological level where they live.
Think about it this way: if someone has a phobia of dogs because they were bitten as a child, they can understand intellectually that most dogs are safe. They can trace the origin of their fear. They can develop cognitive strategies for managing their reaction. And their body will still flood with panic when a dog approaches.
The fear lives in their nervous system. And their nervous system doesn't care about their insights.
This is where somatic work comes in.
What somatic coaching actually is
Somatic coaching works directly with your body and nervous system to access and shift patterns that talk therapy can't reach through conversation alone.
Instead of primarily talking about your experiences, you work with the felt sense of them. You learn to track sensations in your body. You notice where you hold tension, where you collapse, where you disconnect. You work with breath, movement, and body awareness to complete cycles that got interrupted and release what's been stored.
A somatic coach helps you develop interoception (the ability to sense what's going on inside your body) and use that awareness to shift your physiological state. This might look like noticing the tightness in your chest when you think about a difficult conversation, then using breath and movement to release it. Or tracking the numbness that shows up when certain emotions arise, and gently bringing sensation back online.
The work takes place in the present moment, in your body, through direct experience rather than analysis. You're not just talking about your patterns. You're feeling them, tracking them, working with them somatically.
This doesn't mean somatic coaching ignores your thoughts or your story. Your mind and body are interconnected. But the primary access point is through sensation, movement, and nervous system regulation rather than cognitive insight.
Why your nervous system needs direct intervention
Your nervous system developed its patterns as adaptations to your early environment. Maybe you learned to go numb when things got overwhelming. Maybe you developed hypervigilance because your environment was genuinely unsafe. Maybe you learned to override your needs because expressing them wasn't welcome.
These weren't conscious choices. They were survival strategies that got wired into your autonomic nervous system.
Now, years later, your nervous system is still running these patterns automatically. You go into freeze when conflict arises, even when the person is safe. You override your exhaustion and keep pushing. You can't access pleasure because your nervous system is stuck in vigilance mode.
Understanding these patterns through therapy helps you see them clearly. Somatic work gives you tools to actually shift the patterns at the level where they operate.
When you work somatically, you're retraining your nervous system through direct experience. You practice feeling safe in your body even when activation arises. You complete the defensive responses that got interrupted. You learn to regulate yourself through breath, movement, and body awareness.
Over time, your nervous system develops new pathways. You build capacity to stay present with intensity. You learn to trust your body's signals. You develop resilience that comes from your physiology, not just your thinking.
When each approach serves you best
Traditional therapy is often the right fit when you need to process experiences through language, develop insight into your patterns, work through grief or loss, address depression or anxiety through cognitive approaches, or heal relational wounds in a therapeutic relationship.
Somatic coaching is the right choice when you've done the mental work but still feel stuck in your body, when you're disconnected from physical sensation or emotions, when you have trauma stored in your nervous system that talking doesn't touch, or when cognitive strategies aren't creating the embodied shifts you're seeking.
These approaches aren't in competition. They serve different aspects of your healing and growth. I did years of excellent therapy that helped me understand myself deeply. And I needed somatic work to actually shift the patterns my therapy had helped me identify.
The insight gave me the map. The somatic work let me traverse the terrain.
What somatic coaching looks like in practice
In a somatic coaching session, you might start by talking about what's alive for you, just like in therapy. But instead of staying in conversation, your coach will guide you to notice what's occurring in your body as you speak.
Where do you feel that anxiety? What's the quality of the sensation? Does it have a temperature? Can you breathe with it instead of trying to make it go away?
You might work with conscious breathing to regulate your nervous system, tracking sensation to develop interoception, movement to complete interrupted defensive responses, or grounding practices to help you feel safe in your body.
The work is highly experiential. You're not just talking about your relationship with your body. You're actively developing that relationship through practice.
The integration that changes everything
The most powerful healing often comes from integrating both approaches. Your therapist helps you understand your patterns and process your experiences through insight and relationship. Your somatic coach helps you shift those patterns at the physiological level and develop embodied capacity.
Understanding why you struggle with boundaries is helpful. Feeling where your yes and no live in your body and practicing honoring them is transformative.
Knowing your anxiety stems from early experiences is the first, deep, important step. Learning to regulate your nervous system so anxiety doesn't run your life completes the healing process.
Recognizing your patterns of disconnection gives you awareness. Developing the capacity to actually stay present in your body creates new possibilities.
You deserve both. The insight and the embodiment. The understanding and the felt shift. The map and the journey.
What this means for your path forward
If you're someone who's done a lot of therapy and still feels like there's a missing piece, somatic work might be exactly that. Your body has been waiting for direct attention, and no amount of insight will substitute for actually dropping in and listening.
Find practitioners who respect both approaches and can help you integrate them in ways that serve your specific needs. A skilled therapist won't feel threatened by somatic work. A skilled somatic coach won't dismiss the power of therapy.
Your healing doesn't have to choose between mind and body, insight and sensation, understanding and experiencing.
When you bring these together, you move from understanding yourself intellectually to inhabiting yourself fully. From knowing about your patterns to shifting them at the deepest level. From insight to embodiment.
That's where the real transformation lives.
