Body-Based Practices for Trauma Survivors: Healing Through Somatic Awareness
Jun 20, 2025
When trauma enters our lives, it doesn't just affect our thoughts and emotions—it fundamentally changes our relationship with our bodies. The body becomes both a repository of unresolved trauma and, paradoxically, a place that no longer feels safe to fully inhabit. Many trauma survivors describe feeling disconnected, numb, or perpetually unsafe in their physical form, creating a profound split between mind and body that compounds suffering and complicates healing.
This bodily dimension of trauma isn't incidental—it's central to how trauma affects us. As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk famously stated, "The body keeps the score." Traumatic experiences, particularly those involving narcissistic abuse and relational trauma, become encoded in our nervous system, muscle tension patterns, breath, and even posture. Long after the conscious mind has processed events, the body continues to react as if the danger were still present.
As a trauma-informed practitioner working with women healing from narcissistic relationships and complex trauma, I've witnessed how conventional talk therapy alone often falls short in addressing these embodied aspects of trauma. While cognitive understanding is valuable, true healing requires approaches that directly engage with how trauma lives in the body—practices that help survivors safely reconnect with their physical experience and restore the sense of safety, agency, and pleasure that trauma disrupted.
Understanding How Trauma Lives in the Body
Before exploring specific body-based practices, it's important to understand exactly how trauma affects our physical experience and why somatic approaches are so essential for comprehensive healing.
The Neurobiology of Embodied Trauma
Trauma fundamentally affects the nervous system, creating patterns that persist long after the traumatic event or relationship has ended:
Dysregulated Autonomic Nervous System: Trauma disrupts the balance between the sympathetic (activation) and parasympathetic (relaxation) branches of the autonomic nervous system. This can manifest as either chronic hyperarousal (anxiety, hypervigilance, sleep disturbance) or hypoarousal (numbness, dissociation, fatigue).
Incomplete Survival Responses: During traumatic experiences, natural survival responses like fight or flight are often thwarted, leaving the energy and impulse of these responses trapped in the body. This incomplete activation creates ongoing tension, reactivity, and somatic symptoms.
Altered Interoception: Trauma impairs interoception—our ability to sense and interpret internal bodily signals. This disruption can manifest as either hypersensitivity to bodily sensations or significant disconnection from physical experience.
Somatic Memory Storage: The body stores implicit memories of trauma that aren't accessible through verbal recall but are triggered by sensory experiences, postures, or movements that resemble aspects of the original trauma.
Disrupted Body Boundaries: Particularly in relational trauma, the sense of having secure boundaries—knowing where you end and others begin—becomes compromised, creating ongoing challenges in feeling safe in one's body around others.
The Specific Impact of Narcissistic Abuse on Embodiment
Narcissistic relationships create particular patterns of bodily disconnection and distress:
Chronic Vigilance: The unpredictable nature of narcissistic abuse creates a state of constant alertness, with the body always braced for the next criticism, manipulation, or emotional attack.
Suppressed Authentic Expression: Survivors learn to contain their natural emotional and physical responses to avoid triggering the narcissist's rage or manipulation, creating chronic tension patterns.
Distrust of Bodily Signals: Gaslighting causes survivors to question their own perceptions, including physical and emotional responses, leading to profound disconnection from the body's wisdom.
Shame Embodiment: The constant criticism and devaluation in narcissistic relationships often creates deep bodily shame—a sense that one's physical being is fundamentally flawed or unacceptable.
Pleasure Suppression: The chronic stress of narcissistic relationships often shuts down the body's capacity for pleasure, joy, and relaxation, as these vulnerable states feel unsafe.
Understanding these patterns helps explain why healing from trauma, particularly relational trauma, must include approaches that directly address the body's experience. Cognitive insights alone cannot resolve these deeply embodied patterns—they require practices that engage directly with physical sensation, movement, breath, and nervous system regulation.
Seven Body-Based Practices for Trauma Healing
The following somatic approaches offer pathways for safely reconnecting with your body after trauma. Each practice addresses different aspects of embodied trauma, providing multiple entry points for healing based on your unique needs and readiness.
1. Trauma-Sensitive Mindful Body Scanning
The Practice:
- Find a position where your body feels supported and relatively comfortable
- Begin with brief attention to your surroundings, noticing what you can see and hear
- Gently bring awareness to your breath without trying to change it
- Starting with an area that feels neutral or pleasant (often hands or feet), begin to notice sensations
- Slowly expand awareness to other body areas, always with permission to skip areas that feel too activating
- For each area, simply notice sensations: temperature, pressure, texture, movement
- If you encounter areas of discomfort or numbness, acknowledge them with compassion
- End by returning attention to your surroundings, noticing the space around you
Why It Works: This practice rebuilds interoception—the ability to sense and interpret bodily signals—which is often disrupted by trauma. By approaching bodily sensations with curiosity rather than judgment, you begin to restore a sense of your body as a source of information rather than threat.
The permission to skip areas that feel too activating is crucial, as it honors your autonomy and creates safety—elements often violated in traumatic experiences. As one client shared, "Just knowing I could choose which parts of my body to focus on made all the difference. For the first time, I was in charge of my bodily experience, not having it forced on me."
Frequency and Timing: Begin with brief 3-5 minute practices, gradually extending as comfort increases. Many survivors find this practice most accessible early in their healing journey, as it can be done with eyes open and requires minimal movement.
2. Resourcing Through Embodied Safety Anchors
The Practice:
- Identify physical sensations, postures, or movements that help you feel grounded and safe
- These might include:
- Feeling your feet firmly on the ground
- Placing a hand on your heart or belly
- Gently pressing your back against a supportive surface
- Wrapping your arms around yourself in a self-hug
- Feeling the weight of your body supported by a chair or floor
- Practice intentionally engaging these safety anchors throughout your day
- Notice how your nervous system responds to each resource
- Develop a collection of embodied resources for different situations and activation levels
- Practice these resources regularly when you're not triggered, building neural pathways for access during difficult moments
Why It Works: Trauma creates a profound sense of bodily unsafety. This practice helps you identify and strengthen experiences of physical safety and support, creating islands of resource in what might otherwise feel like an ocean of dysregulation.
These embodied resources work directly with the nervous system, activating the parasympathetic branch that supports rest, digestion, and social engagement. By practicing these resources regularly, you build neural pathways that make them more accessible during moments of distress or triggering.
Frequency and Timing: Brief practice multiple times daily, particularly during transitions or before potentially stressful situations. This approach is valuable throughout the healing journey but especially helpful in early stages when other practices might feel too vulnerable.
3. Titrated Movement Exploration
The Practice:
- Begin in a comfortable position where you feel supported
- Notice any impulses toward small movements in your body
- Allow a tiny expression of this impulse—perhaps just 10% of the full movement
- Notice how this small movement affects your breathing, tension levels, and emotional state
- If it feels supportive, gradually increase the movement, always staying within a comfortable range
- If you notice tension or activation increasing, return to a smaller version of the movement
- Complete the practice by finding a comfortable position of rest
- Reflect on what you discovered through the movement exploration
Why It Works: Trauma often involves thwarted action—things we wanted to do for our protection but couldn't. This practice allows the nervous system to complete these interrupted responses in small, manageable doses, releasing trapped energy and tension without overwhelming your capacity for regulation.
The emphasis on titration—moving in small, manageable increments—is crucial for trauma survivors, as it prevents the flooding that can occur with larger movements. This gradual approach helps expand your window of tolerance for physical sensation and emotional experience.
Frequency and Timing: Practice for 5-10 minutes several times weekly. This approach becomes most valuable after establishing some basic safety resources and body awareness, typically a few months into trauma healing work.
4. Breath as Nervous System Regulation
The Practice:
- Notice your current breathing pattern without immediate attempt to change it
- Observe where breath is moving in your body and where it isn't
- Experiment with slightly extending your exhale (e.g., inhale for 4, exhale for 6)
- Focus on the pause at the end of the exhale, allowing the next inhale to arise naturally
- If extending the exhale creates anxiety, return to natural breathing
- Practice diaphragmatic breathing, allowing your belly to expand on inhale
- Notice how different breathing patterns affect your nervous system state
- Develop a collection of breath practices for different needs (calming, energizing, focusing)
Why It Works: Breath is uniquely positioned as both automatic and under conscious control, making it a powerful bridge between voluntary and involuntary functions. Trauma typically disrupts breathing patterns, creating shallow chest breathing associated with chronic stress and anxiety.
Extended exhales specifically activate the parasympathetic nervous system, countering the sympathetic dominance common in trauma survivors. As psychiatrist Stephen Porges notes in Polyvagal Theory, certain breathing patterns directly signal safety to the nervous system, helping shift from states of defense to states of social engagement and rest.
Frequency and Timing: Brief practices (3-5 minutes) multiple times daily, particularly during transitions or when noticing activation. Breath practices can be accessible early in healing but should always be offered as invitations rather than prescriptions, as controlled breathing can be triggering for some survivors.
5. Boundaries Practice Through Movement and Space
The Practice:
- Stand in a comfortable, balanced position
- Imagine a circle around you that represents your personal space
- Notice how it feels to be within this boundary
- Experiment with making the circle larger or smaller
- Practice different gestures that express boundaries:
- Extending arms with palms facing outward
- Crossing arms over chest protectively
- Taking a step back
- Turning slightly away
- Notice the sensations that arise with each boundary expression
- Practice saying boundary statements while making these movements
- Reflect on which boundary expressions feel most authentic and empowering
Why It Works: Relational trauma, particularly narcissistic abuse, fundamentally violates boundaries. This practice helps you reclaim your right to physical and energetic space through embodied experience rather than just intellectual understanding.
By connecting physical movements with boundary setting, you create new neural pathways that make boundary enforcement more accessible in real-life situations. The body learns that creating separation and saying "no" are not just permissible but essential for wellbeing.
Frequency and Timing: Practice for 5-10 minutes several times weekly. This approach becomes particularly valuable once some basic regulation skills are established, typically a few months into trauma healing work.
6. Pendulation Between Activation and Resource
The Practice:
- Identify a mildly activating trauma trigger or memory
- Notice where and how this activation appears in your body
- Stay with this activation briefly (15-30 seconds)
- Intentionally shift attention to a resource state or neutral/pleasant body area
- Allow this resource state to develop fully
- Gently return attention to the activation, noticing if it has changed
- Continue moving between activation and resource several times
- End with extended attention to resource and grounding
Why It Works: Developed by Peter Levine in Somatic Experiencing, pendulation helps the nervous system learn that it can move between activation and regulation rather than becoming stuck in either. This builds nervous system resilience and flexibility—the capacity to respond appropriately to threats and return to baseline afterward.
This practice directly addresses one of the core features of trauma: the collapse of time, where past threats feel perpetually present. By moving between activation and resource, you help your system recognize that triggers are temporary and that regulation is always accessible.
Frequency and Timing: Practice for 10-15 minutes once or twice weekly. This approach requires more established regulation skills and is typically introduced after several months of foundational somatic work, often with professional guidance.
7. Pleasure and Joy as Nervous System Medicine
The Practice:
- Identify small, accessible experiences that bring genuine pleasure to your body
- These might include:
- The warmth of sunlight on your skin
- The taste of a favorite food
- The sensation of water in a shower or bath
- The texture of a soft fabric against your skin
- The sound of music that moves you
- Intentionally create time for these experiences daily
- When engaging with them, bring full attention to the sensory experience
- Notice where and how pleasure registers in your body
- If pleasure triggers anxiety or shame, return to safety resources
- Gradually expand your capacity for embodied pleasure
- Track how regular pleasure practice affects your overall regulation
Why It Works: Trauma, particularly ongoing relational trauma, often shuts down the body's capacity for pleasure and joy as a protective mechanism. Intentionally reintroducing small experiences of embodied pleasure helps rewire the nervous system, creating evidence that feeling good is both possible and safe.
This practice directly counters the trauma-based belief that hypervigilance is necessary for survival. By experiencing pleasure without negative consequences, your system gradually learns that it's safe to relax defences and fully inhabit positive experiences.
Frequency and Timing: Brief experiences multiple times daily, integrated into regular activities. This approach can begin early in healing with very small, manageable experiences of pleasure, gradually expanding as capacity increases.
Creating a Sustainable Somatic Practice After Trauma
While these individual practices offer powerful tools for healing, developing a sustainable somatic practice requires attention to several key principles:
Start Where You Are
Honour your current capacity for embodiment without judgment or comparison. Some survivors begin with just moments of body awareness, while others can engage with longer practices. What matters isn't the duration or intensity but the quality of attention and the respect for your current limits.
If disconnection from your body has been a primary survival strategy, reconnection needs to happen gradually and respectfully. As one client wisely noted, "My dissociation protected me for years. I needed to thank it for its service before asking it to step back a little."
Prioritize Safety and Choice
Every aspect of somatic practice should emphasize your agency and choice—elements often stripped away during traumatic experiences. This includes:
- Permission to modify or stop any practice that feels overwhelming
- Options for how to engage (eyes open or closed, sitting or lying down, etc.)
- Control over the pacing and intensity of exploration
- Choice about which body areas to focus on
- Freedom to adapt practices to your unique needs
This emphasis on choice isn't just about comfort—it's fundamental to rewiring the trauma response. Each time you exercise choice in relation to your body, you create a new experience that counters the helplessness of trauma.
Recognize and Honour Resistance
Resistance to body-based practices isn't failure or avoidance—it's often a protective response that deserves respect and curiosity. When resistance arises, consider:
- Is this practice moving too quickly for my current capacity?
- Is there a modification that would feel safer?
- What is this resistance protecting me from?
- What resource or support would help me engage with this practice?
Sometimes resistance points to exactly where healing needs to happen, but approaching it with force only reinforces trauma patterns. Gentle curiosity and respect for the protective function of resistance creates the conditions for organic unfolding.
Integrate Cognitive Understanding with Embodied Experience
While somatic practices focus on bodily experience, integrating cognitive understanding enhances their effectiveness. Consider:
- Learning about trauma's neurobiological effects
- Understanding how your specific trauma history might manifest in your body
- Recognizing common somatic patterns in trauma survivors
- Journaling about insights that emerge through body-based practices
This integration helps make sense of your experience and normalizes the bodily manifestations of trauma, reducing shame and isolation.
Create Supportive Conditions for Practice
The environment for somatic work significantly impacts its effectiveness. Consider:
- Creating a physical space that feels safe and private
- Ensuring you won't be interrupted during practice
- Having comfort items nearby (blanket, pillow, grounding objects)
- Practicing at times when you're not already stressed or tired
- Having support resources available if difficult emotions arise
These external conditions help create the internal safety necessary for meaningful somatic exploration.
Navigating Common Challenges in Somatic Healing
While body-based practices offer powerful healing pathways, they also present unique challenges for trauma survivors. Understanding these challenges can help you navigate them with greater compassion and effectiveness.
Challenge: Dissociation During Practice
Many trauma survivors experience dissociation—a sense of disconnection from physical or emotional experience—when attempting to focus on bodily sensations.
Supportive Approach:
- Begin with brief practices that include external awareness (what you can see and hear)
- Use grounding techniques before and during somatic practices
- Focus initially on parts of the body that feel safe and neutral
- Incorporate movement and sensory input (touch, temperature) to help maintain presence
- Practice with eyes open if closing them triggers dissociation
- Use verbal narration (internal or aloud) to help bridge cognitive and somatic experience
Challenge: Overwhelming Emotions or Sensations
Reconnecting with the body can sometimes release stored emotions or activate intense physical sensations that feel overwhelming.
Supportive Approach:
- Establish resource and grounding practices before exploring challenging areas
- Use titration—approaching difficult sensations in small, manageable doses
- Practice pendulation between activation and resource
- Set clear time boundaries for practice to create containment
- Have support resources (trusted person, therapist) available when exploring deeper material
- Remember you can pause or end a practice at any point
Challenge: Shame About Bodily Experience
Many trauma survivors, particularly those with histories of relational trauma, carry deep shame about their bodies and bodily responses.
Supportive Approach:
- Begin with practices that focus on function rather than feeling (e.g., noticing support from the floor)
- Use language of curiosity and observation rather than judgment
- Remember that trauma responses are normal adaptations, not personal failings
- Practice self-compassion statements specifically about the body
- Consider how cultural messages about bodies might compound trauma-related shame
- Work with a trauma-informed practitioner who can offer normalization and validation
Challenge: Impatience and Progress Expectations
In a culture that values quick fixes, the gradual nature of somatic healing can trigger frustration and self-judgment.
Supportive Approach:
- Recognize that nervous system patterns developed over years require time to shift
- Celebrate subtle changes and small victories
- Document your journey to make progress more visible
- Focus on process rather than outcome in each practice
- Remember that healing isn't linear—fluctuations are normal
- Find community with others on similar healing journeys who understand the pace of embodied change
Integrating Somatic Practices with Other Healing Modalities
Body-based approaches become even more powerful when integrated with other healing modalities. Consider how somatic practices might complement:
Trauma-Focused Therapy
Share your experiences with somatic practices with your therapist, who can help you process insights and emotions that emerge. Many therapists now incorporate somatic approaches directly into their work, creating a seamless integration of verbal and embodied healing.
Energy Healing
Modalities like Reiki complement somatic practices by addressing the energetic dimensions of trauma. Many clients find that energy work helps release blockages that allow for deeper embodiment and creates a sense of safety that supports more challenging somatic exploration.
Expressive Arts
Movement, drawing, writing, and other creative expressions offer powerful ways to externalize and process somatic experiences that might be difficult to articulate verbally. Consider journaling after somatic practices or expressing bodily sensations through color, shape, or movement.
Nature Connection
The natural world offers a supportive container for somatic healing. Many practices become more accessible when done outdoors, where the sensory richness of nature provides both grounding and expansion. The rhythms of the natural world also offer models for the organic, non-linear nature of healing.
The Wounded Healer's Perspective
There's a profound alchemy that happens when we reclaim our relationship with our bodies after trauma. Many survivors discover that this aspect of healing—learning to inhabit their physical experience with presence and compassion—becomes a source of wisdom and offering to others.
Your journey of embodied healing doesn't just free you from the physical patterns of trauma. It connects you to a deeper wisdom about the nature of presence, safety, and integration—wisdom that emerges not from intellectual understanding but from lived experience of moving from fragmentation toward wholeness.
This wisdom isn't about achieving some perfect state of embodiment or never experiencing dysregulation again. It's about developing a relationship with your body that allows you to meet whatever arises with greater presence, compassion, and resource.
As you continue exploring body-based practices as pathways for trauma healing, remember that each moment of embodied awareness is an act of reclamation. You are literally taking back your right to inhabit your physical experience—a right that trauma temporarily disrupted but could never truly take away.
In this reclamation, you discover that while trauma profoundly affected your relationship with your body, it never defined your body's inherent capacity for healing, wisdom, and wholeness. This capacity has always been within you, waiting patiently for the conditions that allow it to emerge and flourish.
If you're interested in exploring how somatic practices can support your healing from trauma, I invite you to learn more about our trauma-informed healing services at The Wounded Healer. Through gentle, embodied approaches tailored to your unique needs and history, we create a safe container for your journey from wounded to whole.
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