Therapy that listens to the body.

“Somatic” comes from the Greek soma, the body. In our work, that means we treat what is happening in your body as data, not as something to push past on the way to the “real” conversation. The talking mind is one source of information. The body is another, and it often knows things the words have not caught up to yet.

Trauma research suggests that chronic stress and trauma leave residue in the nervous system, not only in memory. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Scoremade this idea accessible to general readers. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory offers a way of understanding why the body shifts into mobilization, shutdown, or social connection, often before the thinking mind has a vote.

So when we say we work somatically, we mean we pay attention to the body’s signals while we talk. Breath that tightens. A shoulder that lifts. A heart rate that climbs. A throat that closes on a sentence it does not want to finish. These are not problems to fix. They are the nervous system telling us where the live material is.

This is not bodywork, not massage, not energy healing, and not anything that asks you to believe in chakras, auras, or fields. It is psychotherapy that happens to include the body in the room. Everything stays consented, paced, and verbal.

If you have done talk therapy before, a somatic-informed session will feel familiar in most ways and quietly different in a few important ones. We still talk. You still bring what is on your mind. We still work toward goals you name.

What changes is the pacing. We pause more. We notice what is happening in the body as you tell a story: the breath getting shallow, the voice tightening, a hand moving to the chest, a small shift of weight in the chair. Those signals are not interruptions to the conversation. They are part of it.

We sometimes pause talking on purpose and just do regulation work. Slow breath, orienting to the room, grounding through the feet, lengthening the exhale. Not because the conversation was wrong, but because the body needs a moment before the next thing.

You will occasionally hear the question, “what does your body want to do right now?” Sometimes the answer is words. Sometimes it is move, stretch, push, curl, hold still. The body is invited, not required. And we end every session with regulation, not raw activation. You should leave more settled than you arrived, not less.

A lot of somatic work at Anchor & Bloom is shaped by polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges and translated into clinical practice by Deb Dana inThe Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. The short version: your autonomic nervous system has more than two settings, and chronic stress and trauma are often stories about getting stuck in one of them.

• Ventral vagal. The state of social engagement and safety. You can think, feel, and relate to other people at the same time. You can be moved without being swept away. This is the state we are slowly building capacity for.
• Sympathetic. Mobilization. Fight or flight. Heart racing, mind speeding, urgency in the chest, a pull to do something now. Useful in real danger; exhausting when it never turns off.
• Dorsal vagal. Shutdown. Numbness, flatness, fog, the sense of being very far away from yourself. This is the body’s last-resort protection when mobilization has not worked or is not available.

Polyvagal-informed work means we track which state you are in as we talk (both of us) and we pace the session to that state. If you arrive in heavy sympathetic activation, the first job is downshift, not analysis. If you arrive in dorsal shutdown, the first job is gentle re-engagement, not a hard conversation.

This is what people mean by “nervous-system regulation.” It is not a trick or a technique. It is the slow rebuilding of your system’s ability to move flexibly between states: to mobilize when something matters, to rest when it is over, and to return to ventral connection when the alarm is genuinely off. State-tracking sounds abstract until you feel the difference between a body that can come back and a body that cannot.

Dan Siegel’s concept of the Window of Tolerance is the other frame we lean on. Inside the window, you can think, feel, and reflect at the same time. You can be in contact with hard material without going offline. Outside the window, in either direction, those capacities collapse. The work stops being therapeutic and starts being re-activating.

Above the window is hyper-arousal: panic, racing thoughts, anger that floods, a body that cannot sit still. Below the window is hypo-arousal: numbness, dissociation, the room going gray, the sense of nothing landing. Both pull you out of the room, just in opposite directions.

A lot of what we do in session is monitor where the edge of the window is for you today, and titrate the work accordingly. Sometimes the goal is to gently widen the window. To build capacity to stay present with a little more activation, a little more grief, a little more sensation. Sometimes the goal is to step back from the edge, regulate, and come back to the hard material in a future session. Both are real work. Pushing past the window in the name of progress is not.

This often fits

• Trauma that has not fully responded to talk therapy alone.
• Chronic anxiety with a strong body signature.
• Burnout, exhaustion, and depletion that needs system-level repair.
• Postpartum body alienation and birth-related distress.
• Grief and loss that has settled into the body.
• Disconnection, numbness, or a sense of being far away from yourself.
• Clients who want a slower, more paced therapy than they have had before.

This is not the right fit for

• Acute crisis. If you are in immediate risk to yourself or someone else, please contact a crisis line first. In Canada, call or text 988. We are not a crisis service and cannot respond between sessions.
• Clients not ready to engage with body sensation at all. We can build toward it slowly, but the work has to be wanted. If the body feels entirely off-limits right now, a different starting point may serve you better and we can talk that through in consultation.
• Primary medical conditions. For conditions that require physician care (including chronic pain, sleep disorders, and many postpartum complications) we collaborate with your medical team. We do not replace medical care.

The honest answer is yes, with some adaptation. Most somatic-informed work translates well to online sessions. We work with what we can see on camera (your face, your shoulders, your breath, the way you settle into or away from the chair) and with what you can report from inside. For nervous-system tracking, regulation work, parts work, and most state-mapping, video is more than sufficient.

What shifts is the shared physical space. Some embodied work that benefits from in-room cues, like very fine tracking of micro-movements, or work that uses the room itself as a regulating environment, loses a little resolution online. In exchange, you get to do the work in your actual life: your couch, your room, your body in the place it lives. Many clients find that easier and more sustainable than commuting to an office weekly. We name the trade-off honestly so you can decide whether the format fits.