How Therapists Can Start Incorporating Somatic & Holistic Approaches — Aligned With Their Own Healing Journey
By Emily Olsen Black, MA, LPC | Integrate Holistic Psychotherapy | Boulder, CO
If you're a therapist who has found yourself on your own healing journey — exploring somatic work, plant medicine, yoga, parts work, or spiritual practice of any sort — you've probably noticed something: the tools that are transforming your own life are starting to feel more alive in the room with your clients, too.
And maybe you're wondering how to bridge that gap. How do you bring more of this embodied, holistic way of working into your practice in a way that feels authentic, ethical, and genuinely skillful?
This is one of the questions I hold most closely in my own work — as a somatic therapist, a clinical supervisor, and someone who has been on my own deep healing path for far longer than I've been a clinician. Here's what I've learned.
Your Personal Healing Journey Is Clinical Data
Let's start here, because I think it's the most important thing: the work you're doing on yourself is not separate from your clinical development. It is your clinical development.
When you experience somatic work firsthand — when you feel what it's like to have a skillful therapist track your nervous system, or to process something through the body that years of talking couldn't reach — you develop a quality of understanding that no training alone can give you. You feel it. You know it from the inside.
This embodied knowing is one of the most valuable things you can bring to your clients. It shapes how you attune, how you pace, how you hold space. It makes your clinical presence richer and more grounded in ways that are hard to articulate but deeply felt by the people you work with.
So before anything else: keep doing your own work. Not as a prerequisite to becoming a better clinician — but because it matters for its own sake, and the clinical deepening will follow naturally.
Start With Presence, Not Technique (again for the folks in the back!!)
One of the most common mistakes therapists make when beginning to incorporate somatic approaches is jumping straight to techniques — the grounding exercises, the breathwork, the body scans — before establishing the foundation those techniques rest on.
That foundation is your own embodied presence in the room.
Somatic work isn't primarily a set of interventions. It's a way of being with another person — one that is regulated, attuned, and genuinely curious about what's happening in the body moment to moment. Your nervous system is in constant communication with your client's nervous system, whether you're attending to that or not. When you begin to track your own somatic experience in session — your breath, your muscle tone, what happens in your body when a client shares something painful or shuts down — you're already doing somatic work.
Some practical places to start:
Slow down. Somatic work requires more space than most of us are trained to hold. Practice letting silence land. Notice the impulse to fill it, and what happens when you don't.
Track your own body in session. What do you notice in yourself when your client disconnects? When they light up? When something important is just below the surface? Your somatic experience is information.
Begin to name what you notice. You don't need formal somatic training to gently reflect back what you observe — "I notice you took a breath just then" or "your shoulders seem to soften when you talk about that" are simple, powerful invitations that open up the body as a resource.
Deepen Your Understanding of the Nervous System
If there's one conceptual framework that will most transform how you work with clients, it's a solid understanding of the autonomic nervous system — specifically, how it governs our states of activation, shutdown, and connection.
Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges, and the somatic trauma frameworks of Peter Levine and Pat Ogden offer a map for understanding behavior, relational patterns, and emotional dysregulation that is both deeply humanizing and practically useful in session. When you understand that a client who goes flat and distant isn't being resistant — they're in a dorsal vagal shutdown state — it changes everything about how you respond.
Reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, and Trauma and the Body by Pat Ogden are all solid starting points. But more than reading about the nervous system, experience it. Take a yoga class with a trauma-informed teacher. Work with a somatic therapist yourself. Notice how your own system moves through activation and settling over the course of a day. See if you can trust your own system to navigate the path of learning that feels most resonant to you.
Align Your Clinical Approach With Your Values
One of the most common experiences I hear from therapists seeking consultation is a sense of misalignment — between the therapeutic model they were trained in and the kind of practitioner they actually want to be.
Maybe you were trained primarily in CBT or DBT, and you find yourself drawn to more relational, experiential, or body-based approaches. Maybe your own spiritual or contemplative practice has opened up a way of seeing human experience that your clinical training didn't quite have language for. Maybe you're working with clients healing from trauma and you can feel, intuitively, that going straight to cognitive restructuring isn't where the healing lives.
This misalignment is worth paying attention to. Not because your training wasn't valuable — it was — but because sustainable, joyful clinical work requires that your approach actually reflects who you are.
Incorporating somatic and holistic approaches doesn't have to mean abandoning your existing framework. Often it means enriching it — learning to hold the cognitive and the somatic together, to move fluidly between meaning-making and body-based processing depending on what the moment calls for.
Seek Training That Meets You Where You Are
When you're ready to formalize your somatic skills, there are many excellent training pathways depending on where you want to focus:
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SPI) — the approach I'm most deeply trained in, and one I return to again and again. SPI offers a comprehensive, well-researched framework for working with trauma, attachment, and developmental wounds through the body. Level I focuses on trauma themes; Level II on developmental and relational injury. Both are transformative.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) — developed by Peter Levine, SE focuses specifically on trauma resolution through the body's natural capacity to discharge and complete survival responses. A powerful complement to relational approaches.
EMDR — while not strictly somatic, EMDR has strong body-based elements and pairs well with somatic approaches for trauma processing.
Trauma-informed yoga teacher training — even if you never bring yoga directly into sessions, this training deepens your understanding of the body-breath connection and nervous system regulation in ways that will enrich your clinical work.
A word of caution: formal training is important, but don't wait until you've completed a full certification before beginning to incorporate somatic awareness into your work.
Embodied presence, nervous system tracking, and following the body's signals are things you can start cultivating right now — today, in your next session.
Consider Working With a Somatic Supervisor or Consultant
One of the most powerful accelerants for this kind of clinical development is working with a supervisor or consultant who is doing the same work themselves — someone who can model embodied presence, help you track your own somatic countertransference, and support you in integrating your personal healing with your clinical growth.
This is different from traditional supervision, which tends to focus primarily on case conceptualization and risk management. Somatic and holistic supervision holds the whole therapist — your nervous system, your relational patterns, your growing edges, your gifts.
If you're in this season of development — curious, searching, feeling the pull toward a more embodied way of working — I'd love to connect. I offer professional consultation and clinical supervision specifically for therapists drawn to somatic and holistic approaches, both in Boulder and virtually across Colorado.
Learn more about consultation and supervision →
A Final Note
The therapists who do the most transformative work with their clients are almost always the ones who are doing the most courageous work on themselves. Your healing journey isn't a distraction from your clinical development — it's the very thing that makes you the kind of therapist your clients need.
Trust that. Keep going.
Emily Olsen Black, MA, LPC, CYT is the founder of Integrate Holistic Psychotherapy in Boulder, CO. She specializes in somatic therapy, trauma healing, attachment work, and psychedelic integration. She offers clinical supervision and professional consultation for therapists seeking to deepen their somatic and holistic skills — in person in Boulder and virtually across Colorado.
