My Search and Journey Towards Somatic Therapy

My journey as a psychotherapist has, in many ways, been a journey of searching. Not necessarily for ‘the right way’ to do therapy, but for an approach that made sense of what I was feeling and witnessing in the therapy room.

My training gave me a strong foundation in counselling psychology. Over the years, I found myself drawn to different ways of understanding people and their experiences; person-centered work, CBT, Narrative Therapy, and eventually approaches that invited me to look beyond the stories people told about themselves.

Perhaps the search had begun much earlier.

Even before I encountered somatic approaches professionally, I had always experienced emotions as something that could be articulated through the body. Not necessarily as identifiable sensations, but as felt experiences. My peers and family often described me as expressive; not only in the words I used, but in my face, my gestures, my entire way of inhabiting what I was feeling.

I remember someone once saying to me, “When you describe how you feel, I can almost sense you live the experience.” That sentence stayed with me.

At the time, I didn’t have a framework for understanding why those words resonated so deeply. But looking back, it feels like a portal opened, a doorway into a curiosity about emotions that went beyond the intellect. What does it mean to live an emotion? How does an emotional experience move through us? And what happens when we pay attention to that experience rather than only trying to understand it?

Years later, these questions began appearing in my therapy space. There were moments when a client could understand their patterns intellectually, tell their story with remarkable clarity, and even know what they wanted to do differently and still feel unable to move. I became increasingly curious about everything that happened beyond the words.

This curiosity eventually led me towards Somatic Therapy, and more specifically, my training in Integral Somatic Psychology.

And then something clicked.

It wasn’t that everything I had learned before became irrelevant. Instead, the pieces began to connect. Thoughts, emotions, narratives and relationships could coexist with another important question: What is happening in the body as this experience unfolds? That was it. I felt like I had found a psychotherapeutic orientation that fit like Cinderella’s shoe.

I suddenly had language and form to something I had been intuitively curious about for years. Somatic work didn’t feel like arriving somewhere completely new. It felt like recognising something I had been searching for all along.