Types of Somatic Therapy: 14 Body-Based Approaches
Point 7 of 10 · Through the body
Enters at the triangle’s base — where feelings and actions live in muscle
Through the body
Some experiences don’t live in words — they live in a clenched jaw, a held breath, a startle that fires before thought. These therapies work with the nervous system directly: sensation, movement, breath, and the body’s own timing for letting go of what it’s been holding.
This point might fit if you can explain your feelings perfectly and still not feel better — the insight is there, but the body hasn’t gotten the memo.
View the full map →Somatic experiencing
Peter Levine’s approach to trauma held in the nervous system: track body sensation in small, tolerable doses (“titration”) and let interrupted survival responses finally complete.
Sensorimotor psychotherapy
Pat Ogden’s integration of body awareness with talk therapy — posture, gesture, and impulse as entry points to traumatic and attachment patterns.
Hakomi
Mindfulness-based, gentle, and experimental: small studies of experience in the present moment reveal the core beliefs organizing a life.
NARM
The NeuroAffective Relational Model, built for developmental (rather than shock) trauma — working with identity and connection in the present, not by revisiting the past.
Bioenergetic analysis
Lowen’s body psychotherapy: chronic muscular tension as “character armor,” and expressive physical work to release what’s held.
Body psychotherapy
The umbrella tradition treating body and mind as one system — breath, movement, touch (with consent), and sensation as legitimate therapeutic channels.
Somatic IFS
Brings the body fully into parts work: sensing where protectors and exiles live physically and working with them through breath and movement.
Integrative body psychotherapy
Combines breath, boundaries, and body awareness with psychodynamic understanding in one coherent method.
Dance / movement therapy
Uses movement as the language of therapy — expression, regulation, and connection for people whose experience outruns their words.
Trauma-sensitive yoga
Yoga adapted for trauma survivors: invitational language, choice in every posture, and interoception — feeling the body safely from the inside — as the goal.
Yoga therapy
The clinical application of yoga practices to specific mental and physical health goals, tailored to the individual rather than the class.
Polyvagal-informed therapy
Applies Porges’s map of the autonomic nervous system — safety, mobilization, shutdown — so clients learn to read and shift their own states.
Breathwork approaches
Uses deliberate breathing patterns to regulate the nervous system directly — from gentle coherence breathing to more intensive facilitated styles.
TRE
Tension and trauma releasing exercises: a sequence that invokes the body’s natural tremor mechanism to discharge deep muscular holding.
Start at the map
The Triangle Therapist Guide to Types of Therapy
See where this family sits among all ten points — two hundred therapies, one map. Find your place in the Triangle.
Explore the mapReading about it is a beginning. Talking about it is a next step.
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