At Just Mind Counseling, we understand how past traumas can live on in your body, showing up as tension, anxiety, or even physical pain.
At Just Mind, our Austin therapists use body-based approaches — Somatic Experiencing (SE), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP), and the broader family of Somatic Therapy they belong to — to help you work through trauma and stress where they actually live.
We believe in the power of the body to heal itself, and our experienced therapists are here to help guide you.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by past experiences
Struggling with chronic stress, anxiety, or physical pain?
SE and SP share the same starting point: your body holds information your mind can’t always reach. They just get there by different paths, and one often fits better than the other depending on what you’re bringing.
Looking for a somatic experiencing therapist near you?
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is an umbrella term for psychotherapy that treats the body as a primary partner in healing — not just the mind. The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” Where traditional talk therapy works mostly with thoughts and language, somatic therapy works with the body’s signals: sensations, posture, breath, movement, and the way your nervous system responds to what’s happening around you and within you.
Somatic therapy isn’t a single method. It’s a family. Inside that family are several distinct, well-developed approaches. The two we focus on at Just Mind — and the two most commonly searched together — are Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Other approaches in the family include Hakomi, Bioenergetic Analysis, body-oriented psychotherapy, and somatically-informed forms of EMDR and Internal Family Systems (IFS).
What unites them is a shared premise, supported by decades of research on trauma and the autonomic nervous system: the body holds information the mind can’t always reach. When something overwhelming happens, the body’s response — the bracing, the freeze, the tension that didn’t get to discharge — often outlasts the event itself, sometimes by years or decades. Somatic therapy is the work of meeting the body where it is, gently, and helping it finish what it didn’t get to finish at the time.
"Some things don't live in words — they live in your shoulders, your stomach, your breath."
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Somatic Experiencing, often abbreviated as SE, was developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine, PhD — a medical biophysicist and psychologist who has spent more than fifty years studying how trauma lives in the body. His work began with a question: why do animals in the wild rarely seem to develop chronic trauma symptoms, even though they regularly face life-threatening danger?
What Levine observed is now a foundational image in somatic work. After a close call with a predator, a deer that escapes will tremble, shake, sometimes run for a stretch as if the chase were still on, and then quietly go back to grazing. The shake is not weakness — it’s how the body discharges the enormous amount of survival energy that mobilized to save its life. Once that energy moves through, the nervous system returns to baseline. Humans, with our larger and more complex cortex, often interrupt that natural process. We override the shake. We “pull ourselves together.” We get told to be brave. The activation stays in the body. The nervous system stays on high alert long after the danger has passed.
SE is the work of helping your body finish what it didn’t get to finish at the time. In a session, you won’t be asked to tell the story of what happened in detail — and for many people, that’s a relief. Instead, your therapist will guide your attention to small signals in your body: a flutter in your chest, a tightness in your throat, a warmth that spreads across your shoulders, a slight impulse to push or pull. You’ll work with these in small doses, a little at a time, so nothing becomes overwhelming. Practitioners call this approach titration — like opening a shaken soda bottle a crack at a time, letting pressure out slowly so nothing spills.
SE practitioners earn the credential SEP (Somatic Experiencing Practitioner) through a three-year training overseen by SE International, the nonprofit Dr. Levine founded. SE is most often associated with shock trauma — single-event experiences like accidents, medical procedures, falls, assaults, natural disasters, and acute losses — though it’s also used effectively for chronic stress, panic, and many anxiety presentations.
What SE is especially good for
- A specific event your body can’t quite shake — a crash, a surgery, an attack, a sudden loss.
- Panic, racing thoughts, or jumpiness that feel disproportionate to your current life.
- A sense that something happened, you “got through it,” and yet your body never quite came back.
- Wanting to do trauma work without having to talk through the details out loud.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) was developed by Dr. Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. SP grew out of Dr. Ogden’s clinical work in the 1970s and 80s, and it draws on body psychotherapy, attachment theory, neuroscience, and cognitive therapy. SP is sometimes confused with “posture and movement therapy,” but that framing badly undersells what the modality actually does.
SP is a holistic approach to trauma and attachment. It includes the body-level work SE is known for — helping the nervous system process shock, complete interrupted defensive responses, and move undigested experiences through. Where SP reaches further is into the part of you that tried to make sense of those experiences while they were happening.
When hard things happen — especially early in life, or over a long period of time — you don’t just carry them in your body. You quietly form beliefs about who you are, who other people are, and what the world is like. “I have to be small to be safe.” “People leave.” “If I need something, I’m too much.” Those beliefs live in your body — in how you hold yourself, how you brace, how you pull back — but they also shape your relationships, your habits, and the patterns you keep finding yourself in.
SP works with all of that at once: the somatic layer (what your body is doing), the emotional layer (what you’re feeling), and the cognitive layer (what you’ve come to believe). That’s what makes it especially well-suited to developmental trauma and attachment wounds — situations where what happened didn’t just hurt you, it shaped what you came to believe about yourself, other people, and the world. Those beliefs aren’t fixed. A lot of SP’s work is about loosening them so new experiences become possible.
SP clinicians complete a multi-year certification through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, earning the CP-SP credential (Certified Practitioner, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy). Some hold additional credentials in IFS, EMDR, or other modalities they integrate.
What SP is especially good for
- What’s hard for you goes back a long way — early childhood, long-term relationships, persistent patterns.
- You keep finding yourself in the same kind of relationship, situation, or loop and can’t quite see why.
- You’ve done insight-based therapy and “know” what’s wrong but feel like nothing changes.
- Something inside you keeps telling you that you’re “too much,” “not enough,” or “fundamentally something” — and you’d like to loosen those beliefs.
SE vs. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: at a glance
Both are evidence-informed body-based approaches. Both are practiced by certified clinicians at Just Mind. Here’s the fastest way to tell them apart:
Somatic Experiencing
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Many of our therapists are trained in both and will draw from whichever fits in the moment. You don’t have to figure out which one is right — that’s our job.
Is Somatic Therapy Right For You?
Does any of this sound like you?
Check what fits. There’s no right number — even one is worth a conversation.
The Somatic Therapy Process
Four Rhythms of a Somatic Therapy Session
A session tends to move through four rhythms. The feel is a little different depending on whether you and your therapist are leaning into SE or SP, but the shape is the same.
Identify and ground your body
You start by getting settled — noticing your feet on the floor, your breath, where you’re holding tension. Before any deeper work can happen, your body needs to feel safe enough to pay attention.
Release trapped energy SE & SP
As you become more aware of what your body is doing, you’ll start to notice where old activation has been stored. With your therapist’s support, you’ll let it out gently — a tremor, a sigh, a wave of warmth — a little at a time so nothing overwhelms you. Both SE and SP work with this layer.
Restore balance and calm
The goal isn’t only release; it’s helping your nervous system remember how to find steady again. As the work continues, you’ll start to recognize the difference between “activated” and “settled” — and move between them with more ease.
Work with the patterns and beliefs that formed SP
This is where Sensorimotor Psychotherapy tends to lead. Alongside the body work, you and your therapist look at the habits, postures, and quiet beliefs that formed in response to what happened — especially when what happened goes back a long way. You might notice that your shoulders rise when you talk about a parent, or that you brace before asking for something you need. Together you explore what those patterns are trying to protect, and what might feel possible instead.
Benefits of Somatic Experiencing Therapy and Somatic Therapy
People commonly notice:
- Less baseline anxiety and reactivity
- Sleep that actually restores them
- A clearer sense of what they’re feeling and what they need
- Fewer physical symptoms (tension, pain, tightness)
- Calmer, steadier reactions to stressful moments
- A loosening of old beliefs and patterns that used to feel inescapable
- A sense that their body is a safer place to be
Therapy Success Stories
Find A Somatic Therapist Near You
The therapists below all specialize in Somatic Therapy. Click on one to learn more about them and their experience.
Not sure which Counselor to work with?
We can help!
FAQs About SE Therapy
Somatic Experiencing Therapy
Traditional talk therapy (top-down) focuses on the story and the ‘why.’ Somatic and Sensorimotor therapies (bottom-up) focus on the ‘how’—how your body is currently carrying that story. While SE focuses heavily on nervous system regulation (thawing the ‘freeze’ response), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy often integrates more cognitive processing alongside physical movement and posture work.
While EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and Somatic Experiencing both address trauma, they are different approaches. EMDR focuses on processing traumatic memories through bilateral stimulation, while Somatic Experiencing focuses on releasing physical tension and restoring bodily balance.
The duration of Somatic Experiencing therapy varies depending on individual needs and goals. Some clients may benefit from a few sessions, while others may require longer-term support. Your therapist will work with you to create a treatment plan that meets your specific needs.
No, you don’t have to go into detail about your trauma in Somatic Experiencing (SE) sessions. One of the main principles of SE, developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is that healing trauma doesn’t always require retelling or analyzing the traumatic story. Instead, SE focuses on:
Tracking sensations: You’ll be guided to notice what’s happening in your body (tension, breath changes, warmth, movement impulses) in a safe, manageable way.
Pendulation & titration: Instead of diving deep into trauma memories, your therapist helps you move gently between feelings of safety and activation, so your nervous system can regulate and release stress gradually.
Completing survival responses: The aim is to help your body finish fight/flight/freeze responses that were “stuck,” rather than revisiting the narrative.
That said, you can share parts of your story if you want to, but it’s not required for progress. Many SE practitioners intentionally limit narrative discussion to avoid overwhelming you.
Many therapists ultimately pull from different modalities depending on the needs of the needs of the individual.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) progress is often subtle because it focuses on calming your nervous system rather than retelling trauma. Early signs include deeper breathing, muscle release (like shaking or sighing), and a sense of calm after sessions. Over time, you may feel less triggered, more grounded, and better able to notice and manage stress in your body. Long-term, people often experience fewer trauma symptoms, improved sleep and digestion, and a stronger sense of safety and resilience.
Both are body-based approaches to working with trauma, but they work at somewhat different levels. SE (Peter Levine) focuses primarily on the body — helping your nervous system process and release activation that got stuck after something happened. It’s usually quieter, with less talking, and tends to fit best when there’s a specific event you can’t quite shake.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) (Pat Ogden) works at the body level the way SE does, and it also works with something more: the beliefs, habits, and relational patterns that form when hard things happen over a long time — especially early in life. If SE is about helping your body finish what it started, SP is about that, plus the work of noticing and loosening the stories you came to believe about yourself, other people, and the world because of what happened.
Many clients get a blend of both.
Where We’re Located
Our Just Mind Counseling has two physical locations in Austin, TX:
If you’re unable to attend sessions in person, we also offer Telehealth and Online Therapy appointments for Somatic Experiencing Therapy.
Learn More About Somatic Experiencing
Below are some resources about Somatic Experiencing you may find helpful.
By William Schroeder, MA, LPC All of us have been there. That moment were you feel so overwhelmed that you...
By William Schroeder, LPC Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a form of therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine to help individuals...
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