“Somatic” merely means “of, relating to, or affecting the body” — but lately it is appended to everything: somatic psychotherapy, somatic yoga, somatic dance, viral “trauma-release” workouts. Faith Hill’s survey of the boom is a fair-minded tour of a wellness industry that promises to finish the job talk therapy started. The pitch is bottom-up rather than top-down: instead of reworking your thinking, you tune into your chest, your throat, your hips, and let the body release what the mind has been circling for years.
The opening case is persuasive. Sybil Ottenstein, a somatic psychotherapist, describes clients who arrive as veterans of talk therapy — detectives, she says, “with all the dots connected on their corkboard of evidence.” Intellectually, they’ve cracked the case. “The problem is that they don’t feel any better.” Demand is real: applicants to one major somatic-therapy training program more than doubled from 2020 to 2023, and “#somatic” carries hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts. Hill is wry about the commercial layer — the “Workout Witch” with nearly two million followers promising “trauma can be released from your hips,” the $65 body gloss in the studio gift shop — but she takes the underlying need seriously. People who spend their days in front of laptops and nights scrolling phones are tired of ruminating in anxious circles. The old existential quest was to escape the body; the new one, she writes, is to reinhabit it.
The lineage is older than the trend. Wilhelm Reich theorized “muscular armor” a century ago; in the 1970s the philosopher Thomas Hanna coined somatics as the study of “the body as perceived from within,” and Peter Levine built “somatic experiencing” on the idea that humans hold pent-up “survival energy” after trauma and need to physically shake it off — his evidence was videos of impalas quaking after escaping a cheetah. The mainstreaming came through Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, a 2014 book that hit No. 1 on the paperback-nonfiction bestseller list in 2021 and stayed there for years. Its timing helps explain the cultural moment: pandemic-era readers, safe at home but detached from the sensory world, recognized the feeling of estrangement from their own bodies.
Hill is clear about what somatics gets right. Many bodily sensations are at root psychological. Interoception — awareness of your own physical signals — is genuinely tied to well-being, and the evidence for mindfulness, yoga, and breathing practices is real. What deserves skepticism is the packaging: the promise of a clear path from physical signal to psychic cause to release. “If the nervous system overactivates, surely you can just reset it. If the body holds trauma, surely the body can relinquish it.” Those are metaphors, and imperfect ones: the amygdala has no reboot button, and there is no viscous gunk of emotional pain to flush out. The Body Keeps the Score has been substantially challenged — critics argue van der Kolk misdescribed or invented studies, and trauma researchers reject his blanket dismissal of talk therapy, which the evidence strongly supports for PTSD.
The piece earns its ending through reporting rather than argument. Hill takes the class herself: squats, jumping jacks, crunches, some yoga, prompts like “What are you being invited into? And I don’t mean the burpee.” She leaves baffled but with the endorphin glow, her phone shut in a locker, noticing the sun on her cheek and the ground under her feet. “This was silly,” she thinks. “And also: Maybe I’ll come back.” That is the sane takeaway: movement is good, breathing is good, screens-off is good — and none of it required the pseudo-scientific story about trapped energy to work. The story is what sold the class; the squats are what helped.