Nervous system & trauma
Somatic Therapy
Most nervous systems recover from stress on their own: a hard day passes, and the body settles back into balance. But when a threat is too much, too fast, or has nowhere to go, the nervous system can get stuck mid-response. Some people stay wired for fight or flight, reactive and unable to properly rest, with the part of the brain responsible for calm, considered thinking pushed offline. Others shut down instead, a freeze response that can look like exhaustion, flatness, or chronic pain with no clear cause. Neither is a character flaw; both are a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, just stuck in the "on" position.
Talking about what happened rarely reaches this layer, because the nervous system doesn't store what it's been through as a story, it stores it as physiology: bracing, holding, a body still running an old program. Somatic therapy works directly with that physiology, tracking sensation rather than analysis, so the nervous system can settle and remember how to regulate on its own.
Approaches used
What this work addresses
Burnout and exhaustion
A collapse of the nervous system's regulatory capacity, a shift into dorsal vagal shutdown after prolonged sympathetic overactivation. Rest doesn't resolve it because the system has lost its ability to downregulate.
Anxiety and chronic activation
Sustained sympathetic activation: the amygdala chronically overrides the prefrontal cortex, holding the body in threat-readiness it cannot exit through reasoning alone.
PTSD and unresolved trauma
An incomplete defensive response the body has been holding, sometimes for decades. PNE works through vagal reflex points to access and discharge that stored activation.
Grief and loss
Grief with nowhere to go accumulates as physical holding: constriction in the chest, throat and diaphragm, a bracing against the full weight of what's been lost.
Depression and flatness
The dorsal vagal freeze state manifests as numbness and disconnection from aliveness. Because it is physiological rather than purely cognitive, it often responds when talk therapy has plateaued.
Pain with no clear cause
Trauma history is significantly elevated in chronic pain populations. When structural causes are ruled out, the nervous system's role in sustaining pain through central sensitisation becomes the target.
Feeling stuck or frozen
The freeze response is a physiological state, not a personal failing. It cannot resolve through insight or effort; it needs meeting at the level of sensation, where it originated.
Difficulty self-regulating
The capacity to return to calm is a skill of the autonomic nervous system, not a personality trait. This work builds it directly, creating pathways that persist beyond the session.
Persistent relational patterns
The nervous system encodes early relational experience as posture, muscle tone, breath and reactivity. These operate below awareness and are largely inaccessible to talk therapy.
Transitions and identity shifts
Major transitions require the nervous system to release old organisation and tolerate real disorientation before a new coherence emerges.
The need for something deeper
Some arrive having done years of therapy, having understood their patterns intellectually, and still sensing something essential hasn't shifted.
For some people this work moves beyond symptom relief. As the nervous system discharges what it has been holding, clients sometimes encounter something unexpected: a felt sense of reconnection, a quieting of internal noise that has run for years, a perspective that wasn't available before.
The PNE framework understands this not as something added, but as something uncovered.
$250 · 90 minutes
Sessions begin with a brief conversation: what's brought you here, a little history, and what you're hoping for. From there, we follow what the body is showing us.