Rethinking Somatic Therapy: Resilience Over Repair

By: Adam Carney, Co-Founder Institute For Integrative Trauma

In the last decade, “somatic” has become a therapy buzzword, promising deep healing and freedom from the burdens of past traumas. For those with deep and complex trauma, it can be transformative, releasing them from endless cycles of inner turmoil.

Somatic therapy uses awareness of bodily sensations as part of healing emotional wounds. It’s predicated on the idea that the body “remembers” trauma and that without addressing this, any work done through traditional cognitive therapies won’t quite get at the roots.

But does somatic therapy really address the fundamental shortcomings of the modern therapeutic paradigm?

In her book Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier raises concerns about the rise of therapeutic culture seeping into the mainstream encouraging a relentless focus on trauma excavation. Shrier warns that the “therapeutic worldview” can distort what we consider normal, encouraging us to see even ordinary struggles as crises that need professional intervention. That human experience, with all its emotional ups and downs, can and should be managed or even cured. Therapeutic culture suggests we should expect to feel safe and untroubled most or all of the time.

There will always be individuals with deep, severe, ‘Big T’ trauma. And those people are who therapy was truly intended for and who benefit from it. But when does a system trying to eliminate discomfort inadvertently create a culture that sees every discomfort as pathology, every life challenge as an injury to be “processed”? Where’s the line between healing and pathologizing?

There’s a word for this, it’s called iatrogenesis. The word comes from the Greek iatros, which means "physician" or "healer" and genesis, which means originating. Iatrogenesis is any unintended or harmful consequence of a medical intervention, such as a diagnosis, treatment, or error.

While the therapeutic worldview is a refreshing alternative to bottling up our feelings, it can trick us into comparing reality to an ideal that has never, and likely will never exist. If history and the present are an indication of what we should expect and prepare ourselves for, we should expect lives full of challenges, stressors, and discomforts that cannot and perhaps should not be soothed away.

A Different Approach To Somatics

Instead of pathologizing the natural spectrum of experience, could we use somatic practices as a way to develop resilience proactively? A form of “preventative medicine” for the nervous system.

This is the power of yoga. You don’t wait until you get sick and have trauma to practice yoga. A good yogi commits to yoga, rain or shine, to prepare for the inevitable challenges of life. Instead of seeing trauma work as only a means of processing and purging, resilience practices focus on preparing our nervous system, so that when we do face life’s inevitable challenges, it doesn’t feel quite so burdensome.

The Promise and Peril of Somatic Therapy

The challenge with somatic therapy is that, in emphasizing the role of the body in trauma, it can begin to over-identify the body as a reservoir of suffering. When every ache or flutter is interpreted as a signal of stored trauma, it’s easy to believe we are endlessly in need of release, repeatedly finding evidence of damage that may or may not have anything to do with the past.

Consider the alternative: not every sensation is a cry for help from a wounded past. Discomfort has many less benign and more solvable physical issues like fascial tightness, nutrient deficiencies, or digestive issues. I did yoga for 12 years to try to soothe a persistent discomfort in my body until finally, I realized it was just a nutrient deficiency and minor IBS.

If we interpret every discomfort or stressor as unprocessed trauma, somatic therapy can lead to a level of hyper-awareness that is itself ungrounding. This pathologizing tendency, as Shrier suggests, can lead to a sense of fragility rather than resilience— that our bodies are traps, holding onto wounds that will forever need excavating.

Resilience Over Repair: Preventative Medicine for the Nervous System

Somatic resilience takes a different view. Imagine if, instead of continually seeking to release trauma, we saw our bodies as resilient and adaptive systems capable of integrating all sorts of experiences. The focus here is on resilience-building as a regular life practice, like preventative medicine for the nervous system.

This, of course, does not deny that trauma exists or that the body holds onto experiences, but it shifts the focus. The question shifts from ‘how do I purge my trauma?’ to ‘How can we build our capacity to handle life’s inevitable stressors?’ Resilience training is about building up, not just working through. It’s about tuning the nervous system to handle stress, process it quickly, and recover swiftly.

Despite the astounding growth in awareness and practice of therapy, this new awareness is not even making a dent in our psychological issues, or the persistent sensation that something ‘feels off.’ I believe that the shift the mental health world needs to take is the same as the shift our healthcare world needs to take: moving away from diagnosis and allopathy to encouraging proactivity.

How To Build Resilience Through Somatics

Think of this resilience like a muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it becomes. Somatic resilience encourages people to use practices that strengthen their capacity to meet life with more equanimity, to face stress, and to bounce back, rather than becoming victims.

Resilience-building practices present a different path. By emphasizing somatic resilience over trauma focus, we cultivate the capacity to see ourselves as inherently capable of handling stress, inherently strong, and inherently whole. This is not a matter of denying the impact of trauma; rather, it is a matter of redefining our relationship with it. Trauma becomes something we learn from, something that builds us, rather than something that continually depletes us.

The Practical Shift: Tools for Building Somatic Resilience

What do somatic resilience look like in practice? At the Institute for Integrative Trauma, we train our students with a number of resilience-focused practices.

1. Grounding practices: Activities like breathwork, specifically physical exercise, or time spent in nature can ground us, keeping us present rather than caught up in what we imagine our bodies may be holding onto.

2. Adaptability exercises: This could involve controlled exposure to stress in a safe environment, building the nervous system’s ability to handle intensity and come back to a resting state.

3. Self-regulation techniques: Learning to bring oneself from a heightened state back to calm teaches the body that it can recover from stress and even learn to meet it with more composure over time.

4. Building a community of resilience: One of the most overlooked aspects of resilience is the role of social connection. Rather than processing alone or in a purely therapeutic setting, resilience-building is reinforced in community.

By practicing resilience, we are not suppressing the body’s memories or ignoring trauma. We are simply putting it into context, teaching our bodies that stress is manageable and that, ultimately, we are capable of facing life’s challenges without being derailed by them.

As we turn toward building resilience, we honor our capacity to adapt and grow. We are not fragile beings waiting to be fixed; we are resilient beings, fully equipped to face whatever life brings us.