7 Steps to Healing Trauma: A Somatic Approach to Recovery
As Bessel van der Kolk describes in The Body Keeps Score, trauma is more than just a memory — it often lives in our bodies, shaping how we move, feel, sense safety, and relate to the world. Healing trauma is not a linear process or checklist; it’s an unfolding relationship between your nervous system, your inner experience, and the support you allow. But it does help to have a framework to guide you. Below is a somatic, trauma-informed roadmap of 7 essential steps on the path toward healing.
Somatic healing begins with grounding and safety—coming home to your body in the present moment.
1. Cultivate Safety & Stabilization
Before going deep into processing trauma, your nervous system needs a container of safety. This means building internal and external resources that help you feel grounded, cared for, and regulated.
Somatic practices: gentle grounding (feeling feet on the ground, bodyweight awareness), orienting to space, slow diaphragmatic breathing, scanning the body for tension or edges.
Create a “safe place” resource (imagined or real) you can anchor into when overwhelm arises.
Establish routines, boundaries, and self-care that support regulation (sleep, nourishing food, movement, rest).
This stabilization is crucial to prevent re-traumatization or flooding your system with overwhelming affect.
Understanding your body’s stress responses through Polyvagal Theory and the nervous system can help you learn why safety must come before processing trauma.
2. Develop Somatic Awareness & Tuned Sensing
The body holds many traces of trauma that words alone may not access. This step invites you to settle into the felt sense of your body — noticing sensations, impulses, tensions, textures, and edges — without forcing anything to happen.
Practice body scans, noticing subtle shifts (warmth, tingling, tightness) in different regions.
Cultivate curiosity: “What does this feel like?” “Is there movement beneath the surface?”
Track co-occurring internal states: emotion, thought, images, energy.
Use titration and pendulation (moving gently between presence and rest) to avoid overwhelm.
By deepening your somatic awareness, you begin to distinguish “traumatic charge” (the energy, constriction, or holding) from your essential, grounded self.
3. Resourcing & Anchoring to Comfort
Resourcing means building and reinforcing connections to experiences, people, parts of self, or practices that carry comfort, grounding, and safety. These serve as stabilizers when the trauma content surfaces.
External resources: trusted supportive people, nature, creative outlets, music, safe places, pets, community.
Internal resources: parts of yourself that are wise, protective, or nurturing; imagery or memories of strength or ease.
Use anchoring practices: for instance, when you notice a somatic shift, bring to mind a resource (e.g. a safe place, a voice of wisdom) to orient your system back toward support.
Layer resources so you have multiple anchors to return to when activation arises.
4. Tracking & Resourcing Boundaries
Trauma often distorts or dissolves boundaries — between inside and outside, self and other, “too much” and “not enough.” Healing requires re-establishing somatic boundaries.
Notice where your felt sense fades, blurs, or becomes reactive in relation to environment or others.
Practice small boundary experiments (e.g. shifting posture, turning to face away, modulating voice or proximity).
Use “yes / no / maybe” checking in with your body before engaging in relationships, demands, or tasks.
Reinforce internal permission: your body, your pace, your limits matter.
5. Processing (Re-Negotiation) of Trauma in the Body
This is the heart of somatic healing: gradually, with stabilization and support in place, you can begin to renegotiate traumatic experiences through the body, not by reliving them cognitively, but by completing interrupted survival responses and discharging stuck energy.
Somatic modalities like Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, or Trauma-Sensitive Yoga can gently guide you through this process.
Use titration — approach a small piece of the traumatic material, sense into it just a little, then return to a safe state — rather than diving in all at once.
Pendulation: oscillate between activation and rest, between charged areas of sensation and resourced calm.
Invite micro-movements, release, vocalization, or shaking as the body expresses and discharges held energy (within your capacity).
Stay in your window of tolerance — if overwhelm happens, pause and re-resource before continuing.
6. Integration & Embodiment
Healing is not just about processing the past; it’s about weaving new capacities into your body, mind, and identity — reclaiming your presence, creativity, agency, and connection.
Practice integration rituals: gentle movement, dance, breathwork, embodied practices (Qi Gong, somatic yoga, walking meditation).
Learn more about how to bring in mindfulness practices if you struggle to sit still.
Notice how your posture, gesture, tone shift over time. Celebrate incremental changes.
Return regularly to body awareness and resource work — healing is iterative.
Let new relational patterns, boundaries, and emotional flexibility gradually embed into your life.
7. Consider Seeking Professional, Somatically-Informed Support
Healing extends beyond what you can do on your own. Trauma can resist linear progress, create blocks or stuckness, and sometimes invite retraumatization if attempted in isolation. That’s why step 7 is purposeful professional support.
A therapist trained in somatic, trauma-informed modalities can guide you safely, titrate exposure, and co-regulate when overwhelm arises.
If you’d like, you can explore my somatic therapy services — I offer trauma-informed, body-centered work to support your journey.
In professional settings, techniques like Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR with somatic tracking, Polyvagal-informed therapy, or attachment-based somatic work can be integrated to support deeper transformation.
Trauma often fragments our sense of self—somatic therapy helps re-integrate what was once disconnected.
Tips for Staying with the Process & Avoiding Overwhelm
Go at your pace. Healing is not a race.
Adopt a beginners’ mind — check assumptions, surrender expectations, allow surprise.
Keep returning to your resources and stabilization; these are not optional, they’re essential.
Stay in community or safe relational connection (support groups, friends, somatic circles).
Monitor for signs of overwhelm (dissociation, hyperarousal, shutdown) and pause or downshift when needed.
Be gentle with yourself — trauma is tough work, and you deserve compassion and patience.
Ready to Begin Your Healing Journey?
It’s important to think of this as a living, flexible map — not a rigid path. The body has wisdom, and when we learn to listen to it, to resource it, and to gradually integrate what’s been disowned or injured, healing becomes not just possible, but deeply generative.
If you feel drawn to deeper support, consider exploring my somatic therapy services as a compassionate, embodied way to walk this path together.
