When trauma enters your life, it doesn’t just live in your memories. It takes up residence in your body — tightening your muscles, shortening your breath, disrupting your sleep, and hijacking your nervous system.
That’s why talking about it isn’t always enough.
In Soul Reclaimed: Transforming Trauma into Triumph, Dr. Neal Ritter paints a powerful picture of survivors wrestling with unseen wounds that live beneath the surface. From Julie’s paralyzing anxiety to Rick and Linda’s slow emotional unraveling, the characters remind us that trauma changes your entire relationship with your body. But healing? That starts by listening to it.
This is where somatic therapy for trauma recovery comes in — not as a replacement for talk therapy, but as a path to deeper, more embodied healing. It’s one of the many ways the body and mind begin working together again, showing how mental and emotional health shapes behavior after trauma.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
“Somatic” comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.” Somatic therapy recognizes that the body holds onto trauma just as much as — if not more than — the mind.
While traditional therapy emphasizes thoughts and beliefs, somatic therapy for trauma recovery focuses on:
- Physical sensations
- Body awareness
- Nervous system regulation
- Releasing stored tension and trauma
Rather than re-telling painful stories, somatic therapy invites you to reconnect with your body’s intelligence. It helps you feel what was once too overwhelming to process and teaches you how to release what’s been held inside for too long — especially for those struggling with recovered memories of psychological trauma, which often resurface through the body before the mind fully understands them.
Why Trauma Lives in the Body
Dr. Ritter’s work consistently highlights a crucial truth: trauma isn’t just what happens to you — it’s what happens inside you as a result.
When Julie is assaulted in Soul Reclaimed, her world doesn’t just fracture emotionally. Her body becomes a battlefield. She experiences flashbacks, panic attacks, and chronic tension. These aren’t random symptoms. They’re her body’s way of screaming for help.
Trauma changes your nervous system. It can trap you in a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze — even when you’re physically safe. Somatic therapy for trauma recovery targets this imbalance at its root by teaching the body how to feel safe again.
Key Components of Somatic Therapy
Every somatic practitioner may approach things a little differently, but the foundations are the same: safety, awareness, and regulation.
Here’s what somatic therapy for trauma recovery often includes:
1. Grounding and Body Awareness
You’ll be guided to focus on what’s happening in your body — heartbeat, muscle tightness, breath, posture. This teaches you to notice where stress and trauma are held physically.
In Soul Reclaimed, Linda learns to ground herself before client sessions by tuning into her body’s reactions. This small ritual gives her the clarity to hold space for others — and herself.
2. Pendulation
This technique involves gently moving between a state of safety and a state of emotional discomfort. It helps your nervous system learn that it can visit pain without getting stuck there.
Julie, for instance, oscillates between numbness and terror. Somatic work could help her learn how to touch those emotions safely — and come back to calm.
3. Titration
Rather than diving into traumatic memories all at once, somatic therapy breaks them into manageable pieces. It’s like dipping your toe into cold water instead of jumping straight in — your body gets to process gradually.
This mirrors how Rick slowly peels back layers of anxiety in the book — not by forcing himself to “move on,” but by sitting with discomfort in tolerable doses.
4. Movement and Touch
Sometimes, the body needs more than stillness. Gentle movement, stretching, or even therapeutic touch (in appropriate contexts) can help discharge stuck energy.
Somatic therapists may use movement to unlock trauma stored in places like the jaw, hips, or chest — areas where people often hold fear and grief.
What Makes Somatic Therapy Effective?
Unlike cognitive approaches that try to “fix” the mind, somatic therapy for trauma recovery accepts that healing must include the body. That’s why it works — it meets trauma on its own terms.
You don’t have to retell your trauma. You don’t even have to understand it completely. Instead, you let your body guide the way.
For many survivors, this shift is liberating.
It says:
“You’re not broken. You’re reacting exactly as a body would after threat. Let’s show your nervous system what safety feels like again.”
That is the philosophy embedded throughout Soul Reclaimed. Healing is not about being strong or pushing through. It’s about surrendering to the body’s wisdom and learning how to feel again — without fear.
What a Somatic Therapy Session Looks Like
Not sure what to expect? Here’s what a typical session might involve:
- You won’t be rushed. The therapist will check in about your comfort level. Consent and safety are paramount.
- You’ll stay in your body. Instead of diving into a traumatic narrative, you might be asked, “Where do you feel that in your body?”
- You’ll pause often. These pauses help your nervous system digest sensations slowly — preventing overwhelm.
- You might move. Your therapist might guide you to stretch, sway, shake, or change positions to support emotional release.
- You’ll build tools. Sessions often include skills you can use outside of therapy, like grounding, breathwork, or somatic journaling — all of which are helpful when emotional healing makes you tired.
Like Dr. Ritter’s therapeutic work with Linda and Rick, these sessions are deeply individualized. No formulas. Just presence and careful attunement.
Who Is Somatic Therapy For?
Somatic therapy for trauma recovery is especially helpful if you:
- Struggle with anxiety or panic attacks
- Feel emotionally numb or disconnected from your body
- Have trauma that feels “stuck” no matter how much you talk about it
- Get easily overwhelmed or dissociate
- Experience chronic tension, fatigue, or digestive issues
- Want to heal without having to relive every detail
Whether your trauma is from childhood abuse, sexual violence, war, loss, or a life-altering event, somatic therapy offers a path to healing that honors your body’s truth.
Real Healing Requires Whole-Person Care
Throughout Soul Reclaimed, we’re reminded that trauma recovery isn’t a linear journey. It’s a spiral. There are breakthroughs and setbacks, peace and pain, surrender and strength.
That’s what makes somatic therapy for trauma recovery so valuable. It doesn’t push you to get over it. It invites you to get into it — safely, gently, and at your own pace.
It teaches you to reclaim agency over your nervous system. To build trust with your body. To know when to pause, when to cry, when to move, and when to breathe.
It’s not about “getting back to normal.” It’s about finding a new normal that includes your past — without being controlled by it.
Reclaim Your Body, Reclaim Your Soul
Trauma often makes you feel like a stranger in your own skin. Somatic therapy offers a way home.
And as Soul Reclaimed so powerfully shows, healing isn’t about erasing pain — it’s about transforming it. Through presence. Through courage. Through connection with your body, breath, and truth.
If you’ve tried to think your way through trauma and it hasn’t worked, maybe it’s time to feel your way through it — safely, with support, and with somatic practices that truly meet you where you are.
Your body remembers the pain. But it also remembers how to heal.
