Recover and Heal Childhood Trauma Through Somatic Therapy
Your Body Doesn’t Have to Keep the Score:
Recover and Heal Childhood Trauma Through Somatic Therapy
Many of the emotional, mental, and behavioural patterns we experience in adulthood have their roots in childhood. However, some of us are affected by what happened in our childhood more than others regardless of whether we believe we experienced trauma or not.
For some, moving on comes naturally. But for others, no matter how much self-awareness they have or how much healing work they’ve done, the past still lingers, not just as a memory, but as a deep, felt experience in the body. This is because trauma isn’t just something we think about. It’s something our body and entire organism remember. Even if our mind has processed and accepted the past, our nervous system may still react as if the threat is ongoing.
Somatic therapy, especially approaches that incorporate developmental and attachment-based understanding, offers a way out of this cycle [1]. It is highly effective for reconnecting with your true self, strengthening resilience, and creating healthy relationships, while allowing your body to finally experience safety and ease.
If you’ve been on a healing journey for a while but still wondering why you struggle to leave your past behind and fully enjoy the present, this article may help you understand why, and how somatic therapy can support you in moving forward.
What Is Childhood Trauma?
Childhood trauma encompasses a range of experiences, from overtly distressing events to subtle, ongoing disruptions in safety and connection. In the 1990s, research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) shed light on how early adversity – whether in the form of abuse, neglect, or household challenges – can have profound effects on physical and mental health in adulthood. These findings were pivotal in raising awareness of trauma prevention in children and childhood trauma therapy for adults.
However, not all childhood trauma is the same.
Different Types of Childhood Trauma
Developmental Trauma
This form of trauma disrupts the natural unfolding of a child’s growth and well-being. Early developmental trauma can begin even before birth due to maternal stress, complications during delivery, or early medical interventions that can overwhelm a newborn’s nervous system.
Later, developmental trauma may result from a single event, like parental loss or childhood sexual abuse. More often, though, it stems from persistent distress – “too much or too little for too long.” It can be as intense as repeated exposure to family violence or as quiet as chronic misattunement or emotional neglect. When a child lacks the safety and connection they need, it affects their sense of self, belonging, and ability to form secure relationships in adulthood.
Attachment Trauma
Childhood attachment trauma occurs when the early bonds with the primary caregivers are disrupted. Our first experiences of relational safety are shaped by whether we feel wanted and welcomed as we are by our parents. While occasional misattunement is a normal part of caregiving, consistent neglect, rejection, or frightening behaviour can leave lasting wounds. When a child’s emotional needs are repeatedly unmet, they may develop insecure attachment patterns – difficulty trusting, fear of abandonment, or avoidance of closeness.
Complex Trauma
If developmental trauma often leads to attachment wounding, then complex trauma tends to involve both. It often begins in childhood as a deep, layered wound formed by repeated experiences of neglect and lack of protection over an extended period.
A striking metaphor for this type of trauma would be a car crash that happens again and again throughout months and years, leaving one with accumulated injuries that just don’t get a chance to heal. This type of trauma has significant and long-lasting repercussions on both physical and emotional health deeply impacting emotional regulation, identity, and the ability to feel safe in the world. However, with the right support, healing is possible, and the past does not have to define the future.
Why Somatic Therapy?
For years, traditional talk therapy has focused on processing trauma through thought and language. But many of the memories held from early childhood are implicit – expressed not through words, but through sensations, emotions, and bodily patterns.
Somatic therapy bridges this gap by including the body in the healing process. It is not about reliving trauma, but about safely renegotiating the way it lives inside you. After all, the best therapy for childhood trauma is an approach or a combination of approaches that address the complexity of our body and mind.
What is Somatic Therapy and How it Works
Somatic therapy isn’t one-size-fits-all. Different types of somatic trauma therapy, such as Somatic Experiencing, Bodynamic System, and NeuroAffective Touch, offer unique tools, but they share a common foundation:
- Body Awareness – Reconnecting with sensations as a way to accessing deeper experiences;
- Nervous System Regulation – Learning to shift out of survival states (fight, flight, freeze) and into connected presence;
- Relational Healing – Rebuilding trust in yourself and others through the supportive presence of a therapist.
Rather than simply analysing what happened in the past, somatic therapy allows you to connect to your internal state and experience it in the present moment.
In somatic work, it is believed that the body has a story to tell that can be quite different from the story of the mind. The goal is to help you integrate these stories. Over time, this leads to a powerful transformation of how you relate to yourself, your emotions, and the world around you.
How Does Somatic Therapy Help Heal Childhood Trauma?
Restoring the Mind-Body Connection
Trauma disrupts the mind-body connection, and childhood trauma interferes with its development from the start. When a child lacks nurturance, attunement, or safety during critical developmental stages, their nervous system starts to perceive the world as an ongoing threat, sometimes without ever knowing what true safety feels like. This prolonged stress generates survival energy in the body that has nowhere to go, often later manifesting as chronic discomfort, tension or pain. Somatic therapy, particularly Somatic Experiencing, is highly effective at gradually releasing this trapped energy.
But childhood trauma healing is not just about the release, it’s also about creating a felt sense of safety. In a supportive environment, experiences that were once overwhelming can finally be processed and integrated on a deeper body-mind level.
For someone disconnected from their body due to early trauma, slowly rebuilding awareness of sensations can help reconnect to their needs, emotions, and aliveness in ways that once felt impossible, promoting agency and lasting healing.
Healing Attachment and Developmental Wounds
The therapeutic relationship is one of the most important aspects of childhood trauma recovery, especially when attachment and developmental wounds are involved. Since these wounds often stem from relational ruptures, the supportive and reliable presence of a therapist helps rebuild trust and emotional security.
This is where co-regulation becomes a powerful tool. Many people with early childhood trauma struggle to manage and regulate their internal states because they have never had the experience of being soothed and comforted by their caregivers. In somatic trauma therapy, with the help of an attuned practitioner, they learn to self-regulate and discover what safety and connection feel like – not as a theory, but as a lived embodied experience.
The Long-Term Benefits of Somatic Therapy for Childhood Trauma Recovery
Creating Emotional Resilience
For someone with childhood trauma, emotions can feel too big to handle, keeping the nervous system stuck in cycles of Fight, Flight, Freeze, or shutdown. If you’ve felt powerless over your own reactions, somatic therapy can help you develop the ability to experience emotions without feeling consumed by them.
Through body-based practices like grounding, noticing the breath, and mindful movement, you can find new ways to soothe and support yourself. These tools help calm the overactive Amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, allowing emotions to be processed in smaller, more manageable doses. Over time, this builds emotional resilience, giving you a greater sense of control over your inner experience, rather than feeling at the mercy of it.
Building a New Relationship with Yourself
Childhood trauma recovery is not about erasing the past. It’s about creating more capacity in your nervous system to experience life in all its richness without being stuck in cycles of fear or avoidance.
Somatic therapy helps to build a deeper, more compassionate relationship with yourself akin to cultivating a wise adult presence to rely on in times of hardship. Over time, this inner foundation of safety becomes the bedrock for healthier relationships, greater self-trust, and an expanded sense of well-being.
How to Get Started with Somatic Therapy for Childhood Trauma
If you’re considering somatic therapy, finding the right practitioner is key. It’s important to work with someone who not only understands childhood trauma but also provides a space where you feel safe, seen, and respected.
how long does therapy take for childhood trauma?
Childhood trauma recovery is not a quick process. Somatic therapy works gradually, rewiring the nervous system at a pace that prevents overwhelm or re-traumatization. It is helpful to have realistic expectations, as it usually takes a very minimum of 3-6 months to see any significant improvement, while deeper transformation requires more time, patience and a strong commitment to healing. And while progress takes time, even small shifts can have a ripple effect on your well-being, relationships, and sense of self.
How we can Help
At Back To Your Body – Somatic Therapy, we specialise in attachment and developmental trauma and continuously refine our knowledge in this field. We are dedicated to providing ongoing guidance and compassionate support through the ups and downs of childhood trauma recovery, which is rarely linear or easy, but the lasting results are definitely worth it.
If you have tried other healing approaches but still feel disconnected from your body and held back by your past, we invite you to explore somatic therapy which could be a missing piece in your journey.
Reach out to us to discuss your needs or get an advice and, when you’re ready, book a session to experience this process firsthand. We are here to support you, wherever you are on your path.
I’m Elena Jacinta, a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and founder of Back To Your Body - Somatic Therapy, a virtual private practice offering a safe space to attend to your nervous system and trauma through the body. At Back To Your Body - Somatic Therapy we help individuals and couples with nervous system regulation, psychosomatic symptoms, shock trauma, developmental/ attachment trauma, systemic and generational trauma.