Trauma-Informed Somatic Therapy and Somatic Trauma Therapy
Whether you are specifically looking for somatic therapy for trauma, or you are interested in exploring certain issues while suspecting that trauma might be a part of the bigger picture, this guide on trauma-informed somatic therapy and somatic trauma therapy will help you understand what we offer and how we could help.
Trauma-informed vs. trauma therapy: what is the difference?
If you are confused about these terms, you are not alone.
Trauma-informed
Being trauma-informed in therapy means realising that trauma can deeply affect individuals and their nervous system, impacting their perception, behaviour, and quality of life. It also means being able to recognise the signs and symptoms of trauma, respond by integrating this knowledge into practice and aim to actively resist re-traumatisation (the 4 Rs of trauma-informed approach defined by SAMHSA). Trauma-informed spaces, not just therapy, aim to support greater safety, transparency, collaboration and choice with the understanding that these would be perceived differently by individuals based on their unique experience, gender, and historical and cultural background.
Trauma therapy
Trauma therapy or trauma-focused therapy (the terms I’ll be using interchangeably) implies working directly with the effects of trauma. To offer this work, being trauma-informed is not enough. A practitioner also needs to be trauma-trained and trauma-attuned.
Trauma-trained
Trauma-trained refers to being educated on how to address or work with trauma. Not every trauma-informed practitioner is necessarily trauma-trained. Equally, there’s a range of trauma trainings that teach how to work with different aspects or categories of trauma or how to address them through a specific lens.
Trauma-attuned
Trauma-attuned or trauma-sensitive describes the quality of attention a practitioner brings when holding space for the other person’s experience. It includes not only awareness, knowledge, and tools, but also sensitivity and embodied presence that allow the practitioner to respond in the moment to what the other person’s system needs, rather than treating a person as a collection of symptoms.
Somatic Tao presents trauma-informed, trauma-trained, trauma-attuned and trauma work as four complementary and interconnected dimensions of working effectively with trauma. In particular, it emphasises the importance of attunement to a person’s behaviour, experience and nervous system.
What it means in our practice
In our online somatic therapy practice, being trauma-informed is the foundation of how we work with clients. As trauma-trained somatic practitioners with a background in Somatic Experiencing and other body-based trauma healing methods, we work with trauma at the body-mind and nervous system level. We strive to be trauma-attuned, and through our own trauma work, professional development and practice, we constantly refine and deepen our ability to attune accurately. Our somatic therapy often includes trauma-focused work based on the client’s needs and the practitioner’s expertise.
What we don’t offer is clinical trauma treatment for trauma-related mental health disorders, as they may require an assessment and treatment planning by a qualified clinical mental health professional.
Types of trauma we work with
Our specialised background equips us to work somatically with the effects of shock trauma and attachment and developmental trauma.
Shock Trauma
Shock trauma generally includes single overwhelming events like surgeries, car accidents, natural disasters or physical abuse. These are experiences that can leave the nervous system in a state of shock or hypervigilance long after the events have passed.
Childhood Attachment and Developmental Trauma
This type of trauma refers to recurring wounds from childhood. They can be as intense as repeated exposure to family violence or as quiet as chronic misattunement or emotional neglect. These experiences often include early emotional and relational ruptures that impact the sense of self, belonging, worthiness and ability to form secure relationships in adulthood.
It is common in our somatic practice to encounter a combination of these types of trauma in our clients, while each practitioner brings their own focus and approach when working with their impact. You can visit our somatic practitioner page to learn more about our professional background and specialities.
How trauma-informed and trauma-focused work come together
Trauma-informed somatic therapy in practice
These are some examples of how trauma-informed principles are reflected in our somatic work.
Safety
One of the principles of a trauma-informed approach is ensuring relative safety for the client. Some of the ways it could be facilitated are through careful pacing, by not rushing the process. This includes taking the time to get to know the client and their nervous system through simple body-oriented exercises and tailoring further interventions based on their system’s needs.
Transparency
Safety may also be ensured through transparent and clear-enough communication. It may include explaining how we could approach their symptoms, what we may do in our session and why, and inviting the client to ask questions if something isn’t clear or is confusing.
It is important to note, though, that absolute safety or absolute clarity may not always be possible, even with the best of intentions. However, we can always strive for a safe-enough and transparent-enough space.
Collaboration
A collaborative and non-hierarchical approach is essential for trauma healing work. We, as practitioners, hold knowledge about trauma, how it can be expressed in the body and how to address it; however, our clients are the experts of their own experience. We aim to work together towards their desired goals.
Choice
Another principle is encouraging the client’s choice and agency. We may ask if it’s ok to stay with the emotion or sensation a little longer and whether it’s tolerable. We may also offer several options or directions when appropriate, so that the client can choose what feels right for them or decline our invitation if they choose to.
Of course, there are situations when the practitioner needs to get more directive and would take a more active role in leading the process. In those cases, we may refer back to transparency about why it may be needed, for instance, to slow down and interrupt the pattern or to make sure the client doesn’t get overwhelmed or retraumatised.
Somatic trauma therapy in practice
Our somatic therapy for trauma builds on the trauma-informed foundation, while getting more specific and more nuanced when addressing trauma. Some possibilities may include:
Working with the nervous system and completing the defensive responses
This includes building the capacity to regulate and stay present with bodily experiences and emotions, while gradually working with activation in the autonomic nervous system and protective responses such as fight, flight, freeze and shutdown. The aim is to help our clients develop a greater capacity to experience and move through the cycles of activation without becoming overwhelmed or disconnected, and to support the completion of defensive responses.
Working with the nervous system and bodily experiences is not exclusive to trauma-focused therapy and is also part of our broader somatic approach. This work becomes particularly important when addressing trauma-related dysregulation.
Working with memory and renegotiating past experiences
Somatic trauma therapy may also involve revisiting past experiences and working with the sensations, emotions, behavioural responses and meanings associated with them. Through approaches such as active visualisation, we support clients in gradually renegotiating aspects of these experiences, allowing new experiences to emerge.
You can read more on how somatic work helps build nervous system capacity for regulation and how Somatic Experiencing works with the physiology of trauma.
Addressing embodied relational patterns
When working with attachment and developmental trauma, we explore how early relational experiences shaped patterns of connection and disconnection, what may have been missing at the time, and what is needed to support their gradual repatterning towards a greater sense of security.
Read more about somatic attachment healing and what it entails.
Experiences that contradict trauma
The intention of somatic trauma therapy, as well as trauma-informed somatic therapy is to create conditions that contradict trauma, whether or not it’s part of the client’s known history. Trauma is often caused by experiences that are “too much, too fast”, or “too much or too little for too long”. They can overwhelm the nervous system’s capacity to regulate, leaving a person stuck in a state of unsafety and helplessness.
Trauma-informed somatic therapy aims to offer the opposite experience, while somatic trauma therapy further focuses on helping the clients gradually come out of the fixed or overwhelming protective state.
Questions about trauma-informed somatic therapy and somatic trauma therapy
Can trauma-informed somatic therapy become too protective?
There might be an impression that trauma-informed implies being extremely careful about activation, safety and pacing to the point where it risks limiting the client’s growth and capacity. It’s a valid concern. However, being trauma-informed doesn’t mean eliminating all possible discomfort.
In our somatic practice, trauma-informed principles guide our work, and when we work specifically and directly with trauma, these principles become even more important. In order to effectively address traumatic distress and adaptations, after having established enough stability in the client’s system and the therapeutic relationship, later in the process, we may need to gently challenge fixed patterns around what feels safe and what doesn’t and to work directly with activation, which often can be quite uncomfortable.
Trauma healing is rarely linear or easy, and trauma-informed principles of safety, transparency, collaboration and choice are intended to support the client in this process rather than impede it.
How much should the therapist know about the client's trauma history?
This would depend on the concerns they bring to therapy, complexity of their presentation, what they know about their past and what they feel comfortable sharing.
When a detailed trauma history is not necessary:
Neither trauma-focused nor trauma-informed somatic therapy necessarily requires a detailed account of what happened to the client. A lot of the time, when working with the present moment experience in the body, a somatic practitioner doesn’t need to know the exact origin of the bodily sensations, emotions or protective patterns that may show up in a session.
For example, a client may experience hypervigilance along with freezing and disconnecting from their body and emotions in stressful situations. Initially, the work may focus on helping the client stabilise, finding safety in the present moment, and supporting reconnection with their body, so that the client can recognise early cues of activation and learn to respond appropriately when it starts to surface.
In this case, the work is trauma-informed as the practitioner remains attentive to the possibility of trauma when approaching the client’s experience. Trauma itself doesn’t need to be the explicit focus of the sessions.
When knowing trauma history can be useful:
There are also situations when learning about the client’s trauma history can help the practitioner better understand the difficulties the client is facing and work through different layers and types of trauma that require more specific interventions.
For example, the same client could have had a combination of early attachment trauma, as well as a history of multiple injuries and hospitalisations later in life. Knowing the context helps a trauma-trained somatic practitioner consider whether the work would benefit from addressing developmental and relational experiences, the effects of shocking or overwhelming events, or a combination of those.
Additionally, knowing more about the client’s history can inform the decisions about the suitability of interventions and pacing. This includes assessing whether the issues are within the somatic practitioner’s scope of practice, or whether they require assessment or support of another professional.
What do we do with trauma that the client doesn't remember?
If a client doesn’t remember, know or think that they’ve had trauma, in our somatic practice, we can still work with implicit patterns, fragmented memories, early developmental experiences, or a felt sense without forcing the trauma narrative or calling it trauma. Not every experience that affects our daily life is related to past trauma.
A trauma-informed angle allows us to address the body-mind patterns with care and sensitivity. As trauma-trained somatic practitioners, we can also work more directly with traumatic adaptations that may be present without having a complete narrative of what happened.
I'm Elena Jacinta, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), somatic therapist for women and the founder of Back To Your Body.
At Back To Your Body, we offer online somatic therapy for adults worldwide, grounded in Somatic Experiencing®, to support nervous system, trauma and attachment healing.
If you would like to explore somatic therapy with us, whether you are looking for a trauma-informed somatic approach or would like to address your past experiences through somatic trauma therapy, please complete our New Client Application Form below. Once we review it and it looks like we are a good fit, we’ll be in touch with details on booking your first short session.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to check our FAQ section or get in touch.
