You can understand your patterns. You can name your trauma. You can read every book, recite every reason, and still feel stuck.

This is not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because healing doesn’t happen in the mind alone.

 

Healing happens in the body

 

The mind can understand, but the body remembers, and if the body doesn’t feel safe, no amount of insight will lead to lasting change.

 

The Limits of Cognitive Insight

 

For many, traditional therapy begins in the realm of language: talking about what happened, analysing emotions, identifying patterns. While this can be illuminating, it doesn’t always bring relief.

Why?

Because trauma isn’t just a story.

It’s a sensation, a pattern, a response wired into your nervous system.

You may say, “I know I’m safe now,”

but your body may still flinch, brace, freeze, or flee—because it hasn’t caught up.

The body holds the part of the story that words can’t reach.

 

What Happens When We Ignore the Body

 

When we stay in the head, healing stays theoretical. We can understand why we people-please, dissociate, over-function, or avoid—but these behaviours continue.

You might:

• Know your relationship is unhealthy but still feel unable to leave

• Understand your triggers but still spiral into shame or shutdown

• Recognise your boundaries are being crossed but feel frozen to speak

This isn’t a failure. It’s a nervous system doing its jo protecting you the way it always has. Until the body is part of the conversation, the survival responses will keep repeating.

 

What Somatic Therapy Offers

 

Somatic therapy brings the body back into the centre of the healing process.

It helps you:

• Learn your own nervous system’s patterns

• Track sensations, emotions, and impulses

• Rebuild safety and connection within the body

• Complete stress responses that were never allowed to finish

• Create new embodied experiences of calm, choice, and connection

In my sessions, this might look like:

• Slowing down a story to notice where you feel it in your body

• Using breath or grounding to co-regulate in real time

• Gently titrating between difficult memories and safety cues

• Noticing subtle movements, tears, or holding patterns and letting them speak

The goal is not to analyse.

The goal is to listen to the body’s language of sensation, rhythm, and intuition.

 

Why This Is Essential in Trauma Healing

 

Trauma disconnects us from the body. It teaches us that sensation is dangerous. That feeling is overwhelming. That stillness isn’t safe. But the body is also where healing happens. It is where we learn to feel again. To trust again. To choose again.

When we return to the body with compassion, we begin to rewrite our story from the inside out.

 

Simple Practices to Begin Listening to the Body

 

1. Body Scan with Curiosity

Each morning or evening, take a moment to notice your body from head to toe. Not to fix, just to witness.

2. Sensation Journaling

Instead of journaling thoughts, try writing: “I feel tightness in my chest. Warmth in my belly. A flutter behind my eyes.”

3. Breathing Into One Spot

Choose one area of tension. Breathe into it. Ask: “What are you holding?”

4. Movement As Expression

Put on music. Let your body move, not to perform, but to release. Let it guide you.

5. Hand on Heart, Hand on Belly

This simple gesture helps orient your system to safety and presence. Use it when emotions feel too much.

 

How I Work With the Body in Therapy

 

As an integrative and trauma-informed therapist, I don’t ask you to retell your story over and over. Instead, I help you be with your story in your body, in your breath, in your nervous system with gentleness and choice.

Through EMDR, somatic work, and intuitive practices, we build your capacity to feel without being flooded. To express without collapsing. To inhabit your life with more aliveness, safety, and truth.

Because you are not just a mind with memories.

You are a body with wisdom.

And that body is ready to be heard.

 

An Invitation

 

If your mind understands but your body still holds the pain, if you long to feel safe in yourself, not just about yourself, you are not alone.

This work meets you where you are, and gently supports you back to where you belong, in your body, in your power, in your presence.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you feel you need further guidance or support on your journey, I am available for one-on-one sessions. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

With love, Sahar Zadah