INDIVIDUAL Therapy
Somatic Psychotherapy
Heal trauma, regulate your nervous system, reclaim your life, and live as your fullest and truest self.
Therapy that works with your whole self, not just your thoughts.
Do you ever find yourself…
- Struggling to switch your mind off
- Replaying thoughts, events, or moments from the past, even when you don’t want to
- Agreeing with others when you really don’t want to
- Getting irrationally angry at things you know aren’t a big deal, but they feel like it anyway
- Feeling overwhelmed, or like you’re constantly running on empty
- Struggling to be present in the moment
- Needing TV or social media just to wind down
- Setting goals but finding something always gets in the way (maybe you call it self-sabotage)
- Feeling numb, disconnected, or like you’re going through the motions
- Feeling tired all the time, or unable to enjoy things you used to love
You're not alone. And you're not broken.
As different as these experiences seem, they can share a common thread: a nervous system that has become stuck in time, still defending against a threat that passed long ago. If our bodies don’t have enough time, space, or resources to fully process a stressful event, they can continue sending signals of danger, even when the danger is gone.
Many of us learn to tuck these experiences away. We might even forget about them on a conscious level.
But the body remembers.
When the nervous system gets caught in old patterns, it tends to go one of two ways (or swing between them).
Stuck on ON looks like anxiety, hypervigilance, difficulty focusing, always being on the go, reactivity, and feeling overwhelmed. Stuck on OFF looks like low energy, disconnection, numbness, feeling like things aren’t worth it, and struggling to feel things the way you used to.
You might even find you do both at the same time.
Getting through life is absolutely possible in either state. But trying to manage the everyday demands of work, relationships, and everything else, while your nervous system is silently screaming danger in the background, is exhausting.
Over time, it takes a toll. Disrupted sleep, ongoing muscle pain, gut disturbances, skin conditions, inflammation… these are often the body’s way of showing us it’s under strain.
Why Changing Your Thoughts Isn't Always Enough
Traditional therapy often focuses on shifting unhelpful thought patterns. And it can help, for a while.
But here’s the thing: your thoughts aren’t actually the source of the problem. They’re your mind’s way of making sense of the signals your body is sending.
If your body is stuck in a danger pattern, it will keep communicating danger. Your mind will pick up those signals in the physical sensations, the emotions you experience, and weave them into a story.
So the stories aren’t the problem. They’re just signposts to something happening at a deeper, body level.
We can try to rewrite the stories. But until we address what’s happening in the body itself, things don’t really shift. And trying to think your way out of a body-based pattern is, frankly, exhausting.
And it doesn’t have to be.
What Somatic Psychotherapy Offers
Just as your nervous system learned these patterns, it can learn new ones. With the right support, you can teach your body to find safety, presence, and regulation from within; completing those old danger responses and stepping into something new.
When your nervous system state changes, your story changes. And you have the power to write something incredible.
Somatic psychotherapy is a body-informed approach to healing that works with the whole of you. Rather than focusing on thoughts and feelings alone, somatic work invites you to notice and engage with the physical sensations, patterns, and responses that hold your lived experience, including the parts that words alone can’t always reach.
At Soma, our somatic psychotherapists hold Masters-level qualifications and bring both clinical depth and genuine warmth to this work. No referral is required.
It’s a slow but incredible process of coming home to yourself.
With gentle but powerful, collaborative experiences that reconnect you to your vital force, expands your capacity for resilience, and brings you home to your body.
About Somatic Therapy…
What is a Somatic Psychotherapist?
In somatic therapy, we begin by first supporting your body to find and re-find safety and stability, which we call regulation. As we build regulation together, we learn the unique language of your nervous system. Only then is it safe to work small pieces of ‘activation’ or tricky past moments.
This approach ensures you can come back into safety and stability with each ‘activation’. This is a key component to ensuring you are not re-traumatised, and that we don’t overwork the system.
Rather than focussing only on the story, processing traumas is done through sensations, images, movements, behaviours, emotions, and meaning, allowing your body to respond to the perceived danger in a way it wasn’t able to at the time.
This allows the ‘driving’ force behind your symptoms to be resolved, and many people experience a sense of peace, a connection with their vitality, and a sense of being more themselves.
What does “somatic” mean?
Somatic simply means “of the body.” Somatic psychotherapy is therapy that works with both mind and body, recognising that our physical sensations and nervous system responses are central to how we process and heal from life’s difficulties.
Is somatic therapy evidence-based?
Yes. Somatic approaches are grounded in decades of research into the nervous system, trauma, and how the body stores and processes experience. Approaches like Somatic Experiencing and sensorimotor psychotherapy are well-supported in the clinical literature.
How does it work?
In somatic therapy, we begin by first supporting your body to find and re-find safety and stability, which we call regulation. As we build regulation together, we learn the unique language of your nervous system. Only then is it safe to work small pieces of ‘activation’ or tricky past moments.
This approach ensures you can come back into safety and stability with each ‘activation’. This is a key component to ensuring you are not re-traumatised, and that we don’t overwork the system.
Rather than focussing only on the story, processing traumas is done through sensations, images, movements, behaviours, emotions, and meaning, allowing your body to respond to the perceived danger in a way it wasn’t able to at the time.
This allows the ‘driving’ force behind your symptoms to be resolved, and many people experience a sense of peace, a connection with their vitality, and a sense of being more themselves.
How is it different to traditional therapy?
Counselling and psychology work primarily through language, exploring thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviours. Somatic psychotherapy adds the body’s experience to that conversation. It can be especially useful when talk therapy alone feels like it’s not quite getting to the root of something, or when patterns feel stuck despite insight and understanding.
What can Somatic Psychotherapy help with?
Somatic approaches can be particularly powerful for experiences that feel hard to access through talk therapy alone, including trauma and PTSD, chronic stress and nervous system dysregulation, anxiety held in the body, grief and loss, relational and attachment wounds, depression and emotional numbness, and burnout.
It’s also deeply valuable for people who feel like they understand their patterns intellectually but can’t quite shift them. Sometimes the body needs to be part of the conversation.
Is somatic psychotherapy good for trauma?
It’s often particularly well-suited to trauma work. Trauma is frequently held in the body – in nervous system patterns, physical tension, hypervigilance, or shutdown – and somatic approaches are specifically designed to work with these responses gently and safely.
I’ve tried talk therapy before and it didn’t really help. Could somatic psychotherapy be different?
It might be. If you’ve found that understanding your patterns intellectually hasn’t been enough to shift them, somatic work offers a different entry point, through the body rather than purely through the mind. Many people find it reaches places that words alone couldn’t.
I’ve heard Anna’s sessions sometimes involve physical contact?
They can, and for many clients, touch-based work is where the deepest healing happens. Somatic psychotherapy is unique in that it can incorporate therapeutic touch as part of trauma processing, working directly with the body’s held patterns in a way that talk therapy simply can’t access.
This work is always clothed, can be seated or lying, and involves the use of stationary contact on key parts of the body involved in trauma responses. The purpose of therapeutic touchwork is to deepen somatic awareness, support resolution of trauma responses, and offer containment.
That said, touch is never assumed or required. Some clients do profound work through body awareness and sensation alone. It’s always your choice, always discussed openly, and always at your pace. Your comfort and sense of safety come firs, and that includes the freedom to change your mind at any point.
Do I need to do anything physical or unusual in sessions?
No. Somatic psychotherapy is not exercise, massage, or bodywork. Sessions take place in a standard therapy setting, you’re usually seated, clothed, and in conversation with your therapist. The “body” element refers to bringing awareness to physical sensations as part of the therapeutic process, not actual bodywork.
Do I need a referral for somatic therapy?
No referral is needed to book a somatic psychotherapy session at Soma.
How much does it cost?
For Anna: Initial sessions (80 mins) are $450. We take your history, learn about the approach, and make a treatment plan together. Subsequent sessions are $300.
For Arielle: Sessions are $180.
If you are experiencing financial hardship, please reach out. Sliding scale is available for a proportion of clients.
Can I get rebates for somatic psychotherapy?
Private health rebates may apply depending on your fund and level of cover. Once you check with your health fund, feel free to get in touch and we can help clarify what might apply to you.