The tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The brace when someone raises their voice. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to fix. Some things stay in the body long after the moment is over.
At Just Mind in Austin, our therapists work with that directly using Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) to help you work through trauma and stress where they actually live.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by past experiences?
Struggling with chronic stress, anxiety, or physical pain you can’t think your way out of?
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.
We see clients across Austin — North Austin, Westlake, downtown — and online across Texas. Most new clients are in within a week.
Looking for a somatic experiencing therapist near you?
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is therapy that includes the body, not just the mind.
When something overwhelming happens, your body holds onto it — the bracing, the tightness, the way you can’t quite let your shoulders down even after the event is long over. That can outlast the original moment by years.
Somatic therapy is the work of meeting the body where it is and helping it finish what it didn’t get to finish at the time.
It’s not a single method — it’s a family. The two we practice at Just Mind are Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP). Below we’ll walk through what each is, how they’re different, and how to know which (if any) might fit what you’re carrying.
Somatic Therapy helps you move emotional energy that gets stuck in the body. Working through the nervous system (bottom-up rather than top-down) allows for deeper, longer lasting healing.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
SE is for the body that’s still bracing for something that already happened.
A car accident. A surgery. An assault. A loss. The event is over, but your body never quite came back to baseline.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) was developed by Dr. Peter Levine after watching something animals do in the wild. A deer that escapes a predator will shake, run a bit further, then quietly go back to grazing. The shake is how the body finishes what the chase started. Humans usually interrupt that, we “pull ourselves together,” we get told to be brave and the activation stays put.
SE is the work of helping your body finish.
In a session, you won’t be asked to tell the story of what happened. Your therapist will guide your attention to small signals in your body, a flutter in your chest, a tightness in your throat, a slight impulse to push or pull, and you’ll work with those in tiny doses. Practitioners call this titration: opening a shaken soda bottle a crack at a time so nothing spills.
Somatic therapies help people process emotions and sensations arising from their lived experiences so that they can be metabolized and integrated within their bodies.
SE practitioners earn the SEP credential through a three-year training overseen by SE International, the nonprofit Levine founded. SE is most often associated with shock trauma — accidents, surgery, falls, assaults, loss — but it’s also used for chronic stress, panic, and anxiety.
What SE is especially good for
- A specific event your body can’t shake — a crash, a surgery, an attack, a sudden loss.
- Panic or jumpiness that feels disproportionate to your current life.
- “I got through it, but my body never came back.”
- Doing trauma work without talking through the details out loud.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)
SP is for the body that’s been holding the same shape for a long time.
When something hard happens once, your body braces. When it happens over and over, or early in life, that bracing becomes who you are. You don’t just carry it in your shoulders. You carry it in what you’ve come to believe.
“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 pull back, how you brace before you even know what you’re bracing against. They also shape your relationships, your habits, and the patterns you keep finding yourself in.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) was developed by Dr. Pat Ogden, founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. It does the body-level work SE is known for and it works with the beliefs and patterns that formed around what happened.
In SP, you and your therapist work three layers at once: the body, the emotion, and the belief. That’s what makes it well-suited to developmental and attachment wounds, when what happened didn’t just hurt you, it shaped what you came to believe.
Those beliefs aren’t fixed. A lot of SP’s work is about loosening them so something new becomes possible.
SP clinicians earn the CP-SP credential (Certified Practitioner, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy) through a multi-year certification with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
What SP is especially good for
- What’s hard for you goes back a long way: childhood, long relationships, persistent patterns.
- You keep finding yourself in the same 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 saying you’re “too much,” “not enough,” or “fundamentally something” and you’d like to loosen those beliefs.
Trauma lives in the body; therefore, that is also where it needs to be addressed.
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 & Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy helps your body finish what stress and trauma started — so you can come back to yourself. People who do this work 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.
By working through the nervous system — bottom-up rather than top-down — somatic approaches allow for deeper, longer-lasting healing than insight alone.
Curious if Somatic Experiencing or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is right for you? Reach out for a free 15-minute matching call and we’ll help you find the therapist and approach that fits what you’re carrying.
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!
Where To Find A Therapist In Austin, TX
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.
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.
Learn More About Somatic Experiencing
Below are some resources about Somatic Experiencing you may find helpful.
By William Schroeder, MA, LPC Clinically Reviewed and approved by Teri Schroeder, LCSW All of us have been there. That...
By William Schroeder, LPC Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a form of therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine to help individuals...
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