Barbara Holifield, M.S.W., SEP, training and supervising analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, explains the significance of somatic approaches in depth psychotherapy, emphasizing how bodily felt experiences are vital for understanding trauma and promoting healing
While somatic approaches are gaining prominence in present-day psychotherapy, many traditions of depth psychotherapy continue to prioritize language and symbolization as the pathway to psychological transformation. However, recent neuroscience and trauma research position bodily felt experience as a direct source of knowledge, affect, and relational memory, all of which are essential to working through trauma (Payne et al., 2015). This embodied approach has significant implications for trauma-informed care, clinical training, and mental health policy.
image: ©Barbara Holifield
Understanding Trauma Through the Body
Trauma is an experience that evokes feelings beyond what one can bear, arising from a person’s conscious or unconscious perception of a situation as threatening to their life or sense of self. While physical, sexual, and emotional abuse clearly exemplify such threats, experiences like physical and emotional neglect or abandonment can be equally impactful. When this occurs, neurological self-protective mechanisms to fight, flee, or freeze are activated. These mechanisms are both precognitive and pre-affective (Porges, 2001). A fight-or-flight response is activated when our organism assesses that this might resolve an internally felt lack of safety. When our organism perceives threat as inescapable, it may initiate a freeze response characterized by immobilization, numbing, and dissociation. Neurologically driven, these responses diminish access to reflective awareness, reparative dialogue, and memory. However, our bodies remember. The residues of these experiences are imprinted in the nervous and sensorimotor systems and remain primed for reactivation when a person encounters an event similar in felt nature to the original trauma.
Similarly, preverbal developmental wounds imprint in the body as unformulated affect: grief, anger, shock, terror, and the vulnerability inherent in intimacy and attachment. Left unprocessed, these wounds activate self-protective mechanisms that lead to traumatic beliefs and relentless internal dialogues, such as “Something is wrong with me,” “I don’t fit in.”
The Neuroscience of Interoception
Recent neuroscience research shows that our felt sense of being alive arises in our deep body, the interoceptive system. Interoception encompasses sensations such as heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and hormonal changes, giving us a felt sense of well-being or malaise and serving as our deepest source of feeling (Damasio, 2021).
This fundamental awareness evolves into a core sense of self, unfolding within an intersubjective matrix rooted in affect—whether supportive or neglectful (Stern, 1985). As affect emerges from sensorial experience, it intertwines with cortical processes within nanoseconds. Before and even after language develops, sensation is foundational to felt emotion. Emotions become a dance between sensory experience and cortical processing, reflecting the “circularity of the embodied mind” (Fuchs, 2021).
Somatically Informed Depth Psychotherapeutic Process
In clinical practice, as patients learn to sense and tolerate bodily-felt experiences previously outside awareness, dissociated bodily residues of traumatic shock unwind (Lanius et al., 2025), and unformulated experience stored in implicit memory can clarify into distinct emotions (D. Stern, 1997, 2010). As feelings and their sensory basis emerge and are tolerated, memories frequently surface, linking previously displaced affect that engenders felt understanding. As the somatic dimension awakens, dreams often arise, furthering what was previously unsayable while weaving a tapestry of personal meaning.
The subjectively experienced body exists beneath words, not separate from the psyche but as an intrinsic aspect of it.
From Dissociation to Psychological Splitting
Therapists regularly witness responses that seem disproportionate to the present moment. Rage erupts suddenly. Emotional withdrawal occurs instantly.
Relational engagement vanishes. These represent the fight, flight, and freeze processes operating below awareness, rooted in neurological responses expressed through the body’s sensory- motor systems. These processes are attempts to survive perceived threat by fragmenting awareness and severing the connection between parts of the self––or between the bodily-felt aspect of the self and other parts of the self.
The dissociative process that begins as a neurologically driven survival response can evolve into enduring patterns of psychological splitting. This splitting between different parts of the self, often manifesting as rigid polarizations of “good” and “bad,” is an attempt to protect the unbearably vulnerable feelings of the heart. Furthermore, these processes disrupt integrative brain updating, which allows one to affectively discriminate the relative emotional safety in current experience from the lack of emotional safety in past experiences (Lanius et al, 2025).
These polarizations operate primarily at an unconscious level yet powerfully shape perception and behavior. Aspects of oneself that carry shame and vulnerability become disowned and projected outward. This process of “othering” creates rigid categories: like me versus those different from me, those who belong versus those who threaten. Unconscious splitting drives behavior in ways the individual may not recognize—shaping who is trusted and feared, embraced and excluded. The nuanced humanity of others is flattened into simplified categories not by present reality but by unconscious need.
Implications for Individual Health and Democratic Society
Research consistently shows that traumatic childhood experiences result in lasting physical and mental health damage. The implications of trauma- based splitting––be it of developmental, transgenerational or adult origins–– extend beyond individual health to families and democratic society itself. Democracy depends on tolerating ambiguity, embracing multiple perspectives, and engaging with difference without dehumanization. When many operate from unresolved trauma and its psychological splits, these capacities become compromised. Political discourse polarizes into absolute categories. Complex policy questions collapse into battles between good and evil. Othering that begins in individual psychology scales to social and political life, fragmenting the shared reality necessary for democratic deliberation.
Understanding these dynamics through a trauma-informed perspective reveals that what appears as moral failure or willful divisiveness may actually stem from unresolved psychoneurological responses to overwhelming experiences, with profound implications for social healing and civic capacity.
Implications for Practice and Policy
Through embodied therapeutic process, we achieve not only symbolic understanding but also re-inhabitation of our bodies’ aliveness and authentic emotional expression. By skillfully attending to somatic experience, clinicians can help clients reintegrate split-off parts of the self, and, through navigating the therapeutic relationship, develop the capacity to tolerate complexity and ambiguity, both internally and relationally. As individuals reclaim embodied presence and integrated experience, the rigid polarizations that drive othering begin to soften, opening pathways toward personal healing and restoration of civic capacity.
References
- 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
- Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books.
- Fuchs, T. (2020). The circularity of the embodied mind. Frontiers in Psychology 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01707
- Porges, S. (2001). The polyvagal theory: Phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42(2), 123–146.
- Lanius, R., Harricharan, S., Kearney, B., Pandev-Girard, B. (2025). Sensory Pathways to Healing from Trauma: Harnessing the Brain’s Capacity for Change. New York, London: The Guilford Press.
- Stern, D. B. (1997). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
- (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment. New York, London: Routledge.
