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Adapted from Rhythms of Recovery: Integrative Medicine for PTSD and Complex Trauma. © 2023 Leslie Korn.
Touch is the curative language of the body and is uniquely suited for working with posttraumatic stress. From a somatic perspective, the body is not a passive container of experience but the primary site where trauma is encoded, expressed, and remembered.
Touch-based therapies can be understood as rituals that facilitate an expanded state of awareness known as somatic empathy. Through intentional bodywork, these approaches extend the therapeutic relationship beyond words, cultivating deep interpersonal attunement. When psychophysiological rhythms between practitioner and client become entrained, a shared state of regulation and presence emerges that supports healing. At the same time, professional attitudes toward touch are culturally and historically shaped and must be understood within contemporary taboos and resistances.
Somatic therapies are defined as therapeutic approaches that work through bodily awareness, interoception, and nervous system regulation—sometimes including therapeutic touch—to process trauma from the “bottom-up,” prioritizing safety, titration, and self-regulation rather than verbal narrative alone. Within this framework, the body becomes a primary pathway for trauma integration.
Touch itself is the oldest form of healing, with roots in prehistoric cultures and organized medical traditions in Egypt, India, China, and ancient Greece. In trauma treatment, the body is the locus of lived experience: pain becomes embodied memory, requiring a responsive and attuned witness. For this reason, somatic and touch-based therapies can support individuals with PTSD and complex trauma across all stages of recovery.
Innovations in Somatic Therapies
Over the past several decades, there has been an exponential growth in both clinical methods and research supporting somatic therapies for the treatment of PTSD and complex trauma. This evolution reflects a deeper understanding of trauma as a psychophysiological process, shaped by disruptions in nervous system regulation, bodily awareness, and defensive responses. While many somatic approaches now inform trauma treatment, three advances stand out for their clinical clarity, applicability, and growing empirical support: Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Somatic Experiencing (SE).
These approaches are best understood not as entirely new interventions, but as increasingly refined and research-informed expressions of long-standing body-oriented principles, integrating insights from neuroscience, mindfulness, and trauma theory. Each emphasizes bottom-up processing and engages the body as a central pathway for trauma integration, particularly when verbal or cognitive approaches alone are insufficient.
Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT): Building Interoceptive Skills
Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy (MABT) combines manual body-based techniques, mindfulness practices, and psychoeducation to cultivate interoceptive awareness—the capacity to access and process sensory information arising from within the body. Developed by Cynthia Price through her clinical work as a bodyworker, MABT emerged from observing that many trauma survivors struggle with bodily disconnection and experiential avoidance.
By explicitly teaching interoceptive awareness alongside self-care skills, MABT provides alternative coping strategies for individuals with trauma histories, chronic physical or mental health conditions, and those recovering from substance use disorders. Interoceptive awareness supports self-regulation by helping individuals recognize and respond to internal cues related to stress, emotion, and physiological need. MABT is empirically validated (Price & Hooven, 2018) and has been studied for its effectiveness in addressing dissociation and self-regulation difficulties. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) is a 32-item self-report measure used in both clinical and research contexts to assess interoceptive body awareness (Mehling et al., 2012).
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Working with the Body’s Defensive Response
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, integrates sensorimotor processing with emotional and cognitive approaches to trauma treatment. This method is grounded in the understanding that traumatic symptoms are often maintained through unassimilated bodily responses, including chronic arousal, defensive activation, or immobilization.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy conceptualizes affect dysregulation as a primarily subcortical process and therefore directs interventions toward the body and nervous system rather than cognition alone. By using bodily sensations, posture, movement, and action tendencies as entry points, this approach directly addresses the physiological foundations of trauma-related dysregulation. It is particularly effective for individuals experiencing dissociation, emotional reactivity, flat affect, frozen states, or hyperarousal and can be integrated with traditional psychotherapeutic approaches (Fisher, 2011).
Somatic Experiencing (SE): Restoring Autonomic Regulation
Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine, is a trauma therapy that emphasizes guiding attention to interoceptive, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic experience. SE is based on the premise that symptoms of traumatic stress arise from incomplete discharge of biologically based defensive responses and persistent dysregulation of autonomic arousal.
Rather than directly or intensely evoking traumatic memories, SE employs a gradual and titrated approach that supports the generation of new, corrective embodied experiences. These experiences physically contradict states of overwhelm and helplessness, allowing for the completion of self-protective responses and the restoration of nervous system regulation. Proposed mechanisms include the reorganization of disrupted subcortical autonomic, limbic, motor, and arousal systems (Payne et al., 2015). A randomized controlled trial demonstrated SE’s effectiveness in treating PTSD (Brom et al., 2017), and a literature review identified positive outcomes across multiple types of clinical trials (Kuhfuß et al., 2021).
Conclusion
Somatic therapies remind us that trauma is not only processed through words, but through the body’s rhythms, sensations, and capacity for regulation. By working bottom-up with the nervous system, these approaches support recovery in ways that are often inaccessible through cognitive methods alone, especially in cases of PTSD and complex trauma.
Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Somatic Experiencing illustrate how body-based interventions have evolved into structured, evidence-informed clinical practices. Rather than forcing recollection, they emphasize safety, embodiment, and the gradual restoration of self-regulation and agency.
For clinicians and practitioners seeking to deepen their work with somatic therapies, my certification course on PTSD, Complex Trauma, and Traumatic Brain Injury provides comprehensive training in integrative approaches to trauma recovery, including somatic, nutritional, and mind–body interventions.
References
Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312. https:// doi.org/10.1002/jts.22189
Fisher, J. (2011). Sensorimotor approaches to trauma treatment. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 17(3), 171–177. doi:10.1192/apt.bp.109.007054
Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing— effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: A scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1929023. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1929023
Mehling, W. E., Price, C., Daubenmier, J. J., Acree, M., Bartmess, E., & Stewart, A. (2012). The multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness (MAIA). PloS One, 7(11), e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230
Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093
Price, C. J., & Hooven, C. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation: Theory and approach of mindful awareness in body-oriented therapy (MABT). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2018.00798
She served as a Fulbright scholar on traditional medicine, a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School, and a National Institutes of Health-funded research scientist in mind/body medicine.
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