By Susan Van Note
“Clients need to become competent somatic partners in their own healing.”
—Kathy Kain, PhD, trauma-informed somatic educator, creator of Trauma Touch Skills Training for Trauma Therapists® and Trauma Coupling Dynamics® (from her professional teachings)
Two Fields, One Goal
For decades, psychotherapists and Feldenkrais practitioners have shared a common goal: to help people develop greater resilience, freedom, and well-being. Yet despite these shared observations and goals, our professions often work in separate worlds, with limited understanding of how each discipline can support the other.
While insight remains an important part of psychotherapy, trauma-informed approaches increasingly recognize that trauma affects not only thoughts and emotions, but also physiology—the nervous system, movement, sensation, and the capacity to experience safety. Approaches such as EMDR, Somatic Experiencing®, and Internal Family Systems all reflect this shift toward embodied healing.
In my private practice as a trauma-informed Feldenkrais practitioner, Craniosacral therapist and Somatic Experiencing practitioner (SEP) in San Diego, I frequently work with clients who have spent years in psychotherapy. Many describe meaningful insight and progress, yet continue to experience chronic muscle tension, anxiety, overwhelm, sleep disturbances, and difficulty regulating emotional states. Their histories are understood, but their nervous systems remain organized around protection.
This raises an important question: what skills does a person need to develop in order to feel safe enough and supported enough to engage in deeper therapeutic work?
Where Psychotherapy Often Reaches a Limit
Many trauma therapists encounter a similar clinical pattern: clients understand their experiences intellectually but struggle to remain connected to themselves while engaging difficult material.
Even with insight, clients may:
- Become overwhelmed by internal sensations
- Disconnect from their bodies as activation increases
- Struggle to recognize emotional states as they develop
- Cycle between anxiety, collapse, or numbness
From a trauma-informed perspective, these are not signs of resistance or lack of motivation. They reflect the organization of a nervous system that adapted under chronic or developmental stress.
Kathy Kain, PhD, co-author with Stephen Terrell, PsyD, of Nurturing Resilience and developer of the Trauma Touch Skills® training program, often teaches that trauma therapy places significant demands on clients. They are being asked to revisit experiences formed under overwhelming stress, yet many have never developed the somatic skills needed to do so without becoming dysregulated.
She compares this to undertaking a major re-modeling project without the necessary tools. Before clients can engage in deeper trauma processing, they first need a “tool belt” of somatic skills they can draw upon throughout therapy.
One of the most important of these skills is interoception—the ability for someone to sense their internal bodily experience.
Without interoception, clients may struggle to recognize early signs of activation, differentiate emotional states, access self-regulation strategies, or experience a felt sense of safety or support.
Therapist Perspective
Grace West, LCSW, a trauma-focused psychotherapist in San Diego, describes the importance of developing somatic awareness in trauma therapy:
“Increasing somatic awareness is an essential component of trauma-focused psychotherapy because it expands a client’s capacity to notice, differentiate, and respond to internal experience. As clients become better able to recognize sensations associated with different emotional states, they can intervene earlier with regulation strategies, rather than feeling surprised or overwhelmed by their emotional responses.”
One of the most common comments I hear from my clients who have experienced EMDR is that, when their therapist asks, “Where do you notice that in your body?” they respond, “What body?”
For many trauma survivors, that response makes perfect sense. Disconnection from bodily sensation is often an adaptive response to overwhelming experiences. Before the body can become a resource in therapy, clients may first need opportunities to develop interoception, sensory discrimination, and the ability to notice internal experience in small, manageable steps that don’t overwhelm the person.
How the Feldenkrais Method Builds Somatic Skills
The Feldenkrais Method offers a structured way of developing these foundational capacities through movement and attention.
In Awareness Through Movement® (ATM®) and Functional Integration® (FI®), students are invited to observe themselves with curiosity rather than correction. The emphasis is not on performance, but on noticing differences: effort and ease, stability and instability, comfort and discomfort, general and specific.
West describes the clinical importance of interoception:
“Clients whose interoceptive awareness has been affected by trauma often have difficulty recognizing the bodily cues that accompany emotional states. Without that awareness, it becomes much harder to recognize early signs of activation and access strategies that support regulation.”
Over time, ATM students become more skilled at noticing subtle changes in themselves. They learn to differentiate sensation, recognize change as it occurs, and observe experience without immediately reacting to it. What appears to be a simple movement lesson is actually cultivating sophisticated somatic skills.
ATM lessons also naturally embody the principle of titration—working with small, manageable amounts of experience that the nervous system can integrate without becoming overwhelmed.
Attention is directed briefly, then released. Movement is exploratory rather than forceful. Frequent pauses and comparisons allow students to recognize differences before and after movement, from one side to the other, and between more and less effort. This pacing supports learning while respecting the nervous system’s capacity.
As students experience greater support and choice, moments of curiosity often emerge. Rather than responding from habitual protective patterns, they begin exploring new possibilities.
In this way, Feldenkrais lessons provide repeated practice in many of the same capacities that trauma therapists seek to cultivate.
Regulation, Neuroception, and Felt Safety
Many trauma therapies emphasize nervous system regulation. Regulation, however, is often misunderstood as simply becoming calm or relaxed.
A regulated nervous system is not one that remains perpetually tranquil. Rather, it is dynamic — one that can move flexibly between activation and settling, while maintaining connection, responsiveness, and choice.
For trauma survivors, this flexibility is often compromised. The nervous system may become organized around vigilance, protection, or chronic stress. Muscular tension becomes habitual. Sleep may be disrupted. Minor stressors can trigger disproportionate physiological responses.
Somatic awareness is not only the ability to recognize when something feels difficult or overwhelming. It also includes the ability to recognize moments of settling, ease, and regulation.
West describes this process:
“When increasing somatic awareness, clients also become more aware of moments of settling, ease, safety, and regulation. Recognizing these shifts helps clients learn what regulation actually feels like in their own bodies and reinforces their growing capacity to access those states. This process often strengthens self-efficacy, self-trust, and confidence in their ability to navigate difficult experiences, all capacities that are frequently disrupted by trauma.”
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory introduced the concept of neuroception—the nervous system’s automatic, unconscious process of detecting cues of safety, danger, or life threat. From this perspective, safety is not simply an intellectual belief but a physiological experience.
Many Feldenkrais lessons create opportunities for students to experience support directly. Contact with the floor or table provides consistent sensory information about weight, pressure, and orientation. As students discover how their skeleton can transmit support through the spine, pelvis, or feet with less unnecessary muscular effort, they often develop a greater felt sense of stability. For some, these experiences may contribute to a neuroception of greater safety, creating conditions that support curiosity, exploration, and learning.
Survival Physiology and Movement Organization
From a trauma-informed perspective, many persistent physical and emotional patterns can be understood as survival adaptations rather than dysfunction.
Chronic tension, restricted breathing, bracing, and reduced mobility are often intelligent responses to earlier conditions of threat or overwhelm.
Feldenkrais work aligns closely with this perspective. Rather than correcting problems, we explore how movement is organized and what additional options may become available.
Students often discover that what once felt fixed is actually adaptive—and adaptable. As new movement possibilities emerge, so does a greater sense of choice.
Why This Matters for Psychotherapists
Kat Grasetti, LCSW, SEP, is the Clinical Director at Monima Wellness Center, a women’s mental health treatment and recovery center that offers outpatient programs and a wide array of evidence-based treatment options that are tailored to the needs of each individual client in San Diego, CA. She says, “the integration of somatic techniques and modalities like the Feldenkrais Method, has been one of the key pieces of all Monima clients’ healing.”
When clients develop greater somatic capacity, the nature of therapeutic work changes and they become better able to:
- Recognize activation earlier
- Distinguish sensations from thoughts and emotions
- Remain present while working with difficult material
- Recover more easily after emotionally challenging sessions
This is especially relevant in EMDR, where clients benefit from being able to remain connected to their body and present-moment experience while engaging with difficult memories.
Feldenkrais lessons offer a unique advantage: they build these foundational capacities outside the emotional intensity of trauma processing itself. The nervous system learns through safe, exploratory experiences rather than direct exposure to traumatic content.
Grasetti says, “…through the Feldenkrais Method, clients develop and establish a rooted sense of internal safety by noticing small somatic changes that often preface larger emotional experiences. By developing internal awareness, clients are able to utilize learned therapeutic strategies early in the dysregulation process. The ability to notice somatic shifts and preventatively enact emotional regulation strategies provides a pathway into self-established safety.”
The Bridge Between Fields
Healing trauma requires more than insight. It requires the development of somatic capacities that allow experience to be noticed, tolerated, and integrated within the body.
The Feldenkrais Method offers a subtle but powerful way to cultivate these capacities. Through movement, attention, and sensory learning, clients develop the internal conditions necessary for deeper therapeutic work.
As psychotherapy continues to embrace embodied approaches, Feldenkrais practitioners have an important role to play. Many of the skills now considered essential for trauma recovery are already being developed in ATM classes and FI lessons.
However, these connections are not always visible to the psychotherapeutic world.
If we want psychotherapists, EMDR clinicians, and trauma specialists to understand how Feldenkrais can support their work, we must learn to communicate in language that is meaningful within their fields. This requires understanding the concepts of contemporary trauma theory and translating how our work develops the capacities they are already seeking to cultivate.
The bridge between our professions will not build itself.
Many Feldenkrais practitioners use terms such as self-organization, self-image, and self-awareness to describe important aspects of the Method. These concepts are central to our understanding of the work, but they do not communicate their clinical relevance to therapists or the broader public.
Our task is to build a shared understanding: to articulate how the principles underlying Feldenkrais relate to concepts such as interoception, nervous system regulation, sensory awareness, and embodied learning.
By becoming more fluent in this shared language, we not only strengthen our own field—we expand opportunities for collaboration and help more people develop the somatic foundations that support deeper therapeutic work.
Susan Van Note is a trauma-informed somatic practitioner specializing in chronic pain and the physical manifestations of stress, anxiety, and trauma. Her work is informed by Somatic Experiencing®, the Feldenkrais Method®, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and developmental trauma and therapeutic touch skills taught by Kathy Kain, PhD.
Susan’s approach emphasizes nervous system regulation through gentle, non-invasive, body-based methods that help clients develop greater self-awareness, resilience, and embodied capacity.
She is particularly passionate about bridging the communication gap between psychotherapy and hands-on somatic practice, fostering greater collaboration between the two disciplines so they can work together more effectively in supporting clients. She believes that when psychotherapists and somatic practitioners understand one another’s unique contributions, clients receive more integrated and effective care.
Susan’s Website: restorewithawareness.com