Somatics Is Having a Moment. Is It Worth the Hype?

A response to Faith Hill's Atlantic essay on the somatic trend — what it gets right, what marketing can't promise, and what somatic trauma actually looks like in practice.

Somatics is having a moment. Maybe more than a moment. Somatic therapy. Somatic yoga. Somatic workouts. Somatic trauma. Nervous-system regulation. Trauma release. Spend enough time online and someone will tell you that you can reset your nervous system, release an emotion from your hips, or shake your way into a new life.

As a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, I should probably find some of this annoying. Sometimes I do. But mostly, I get it.

Faith Hill's recent Atlantic piece, "How 'Somatics' Became the Solution to Modern Life," asks a fair question: how did this niche corner of body-oriented practice become the answer to seemingly everything? I agreed with more of it than I expected to. Then she got to the Workout Witch.

I Actually Love the Workout Witch

I found her on the same platform she's still on now, well before she hit a million views. She'd left a life of abuse and built something out of it. She's clearly good at marketing — I found her, after all — but that's not the part people give her enough credit for. She's good at what she does, first. The following came out of that.

Some of what she taught didn't make much sense to me when I first found her. It does now. Seasoned in my own field, I understand it, and I feel more confident referring her work today than I did back then, not less.

Her early videos weren't polished. She filmed them in her apartment. Her dog wandered through frame. I trusted her instantly. I was trying to figure out how to put my own work into the world at the time, and watching her build an audience on substance instead of production quality taught me something: if the content is honest, the production barely matters.

That doesn't contradict the marketing point, either. Her skill built the following. The following is what turned her particular language — reset, release, stuck — into everyone else's default vocabulary. That's probably exactly why Hill calls her out by name: not despite the talent, but because of how far it travels.

Now she's huge. Everything's polished. She has an app. Some part of me trusted her more when it was just her, the apartment, and the dog. I still recommend her work constantly, and I understand exactly why Hill uses her as an example — trauma released from the hips, movements assigned to specific emotions, energy that's "stuck," nervous systems that need a reset. I share some of that skepticism. I also understand why the work can feel powerful anyway.

The first time I did one of her programs, I had almost no body awareness. Nothing mind-altering happened. I didn't heal everything. I did not lose 30 pounds. What I remember, years later, is simpler: it nourished my body. I craved those small, almost baby-sized movements, and I couldn't have told you why. I didn't have the language yet for sensation, or impulse, or settling. I just knew my body wanted more. Something in me came a little more online.

It tells me more about what somatics actually is than most of the dramatic claims made in its name.

Sometimes What Changes Is How We Pay Attention

Hill tried a somatic workout herself and found that most of it looked like exercise, because it was. Afterward, she noticed she was more aware of the ground under her feet, more tuned into the sensory world around her. Her conclusion isn't that somatics is a miracle cure. It's closer to: moving, breathing, stepping away from a screen, and remembering you're an embodied creature might have value on its own, without needing an extraordinary claim stapled to it.

Here's my best guess at what's happening — not a proven mechanism, just what I've noticed: paying attention to how you felt before a workout and how you felt after. Those small before-and-after shifts — some people call them glimmers — seem to be what build the capacity to pay attention at all. Deeply meaningful somatic work grows out of those micro-moments, not out of one transformative session.

She's right about that. And good marketing takes advantage of exactly that kind of shift in attention. We find a word that resonates and suddenly everything gets sold through it. There was a stretch where everything went gluten-free. Now everything has protein added. The product underneath doesn't always change. What we notice, and how it gets advertised, does. Somatics is having its version of that moment, and I'm not entirely against it. Good marketing helps a buyer name what they're actually looking for. I know, because I've done it.

Naming What People Already Feel

At one point I named my own practice Somatic Anxiety Coaching, because "somatics" alone didn't tell anyone anything. Anxiety did. People already knew they had it. They already wanted help with it. Giving the work language they recognized is what got them to reach out.

I remember a conversation in Madison Square Park not long after I changed my title to Somatic Anxiety Coach. For the first time, someone actually understood what I did on the first try, instead of watching me fumble through an explanation of somatic coaching. It's not even a stretch — anxiety is somatic. We all know exactly how it feels in our chest. It's a lived, felt experience in the body before it's anything else. So yes, I changed my website to Somatic Anxiety Coaching, and my practice grew.

There's a cost to that kind of language economy, though. We reach for words people can hold onto, and once something works, everyone reaches for it too. TikTok and Reels have trained us to want something as layered as the nervous system delivered in fifteen seconds, which is exactly how it keeps getting flattened down to "reset."

Marketing has limits. It can help someone find the door. It cannot describe what happens once they walk through it.

The Somatic Pie Is Very Big

I've written before that the somatic pie is very big. The Workout Witch and I both exist somewhere under this enormous umbrella. We are not doing the same thing. Somatic Experiencing®, somatic psychotherapy, EMDR, bodywork, movement practice, yoga, dance, breathwork, and everything currently living under #somatic have different theories, different training standards, different ways of working. Calling something "somatic" tells you the body matters here. It doesn't tell you what's actually being done. That's where a lot of our current confusion starts.

So What Is Somatic Trauma?

I want to be careful here, because phrases like somatic trauma are everywhere now. Trauma isn't a substance sitting in your body, waiting for the right exercise to release it. Your nervous system doesn't have a reset button.

What actually happens is that we respond to threat and overwhelm physically, not just mentally and emotionally. We orient. We brace. We mobilize. We reach. We pull away. We fight, freeze, collapse, protect. And sometimes those protective patterns keep running long after the situation that caused them is over.

I've seen this play out in training demonstrations: people years after a car accident whose vision has never quite settled since, who feel fuzzy most of the time and can't say why. People who lose their train of thought every single time they try to say something that actually matters to them. Someone who wants to speak in public and feels terror move through their body and collapses, every time, right before they try. Someone whose whole body pulls away the instant they're touched. None of that is a character flaw. None of it responds well to being talked out of. In the way I was trained to see it, those are survival states that never got to complete themselves in the body.

Somatic Experiencing® is one way of working with that. Instead of assuming we need to retell everything that happened, we get curious about what's happening right now: a change in breath, tightness through the shoulders, heat in the chest, an impulse to push away or turn toward something, an image, a sudden settling. The talking doesn't disappear. The body just becomes part of the conversation.

This is where Hill's critique landed hardest for me: the idea that talk therapy handles the mind while somatics handles the body just recreates the mind-body split we're supposedly trying to move past. I don't want your mind to leave the room when we work together. I want more of you in it.

Paying Attention Is a Skill

One thing the current nervous-system conversation gets wrong is the idea that regulation should be fast. Find the right exercise. Take the right breath. Shake for the right number of seconds. Reset. Real somatic work usually looks a lot less impressive than that. Your breath changes. Your shoulders drop half an inch. Your hand wants to move. Warmth returns somewhere that had gone numb. Something tightens when you mention a certain person, or loosens when you realize you don't have to keep explaining it. We notice it. We name it. We get curious about it. Over time, the ability to notice just becomes more available.

Those tiny shifts matter more than they sound like they should. For someone who's spent years paying attention to their body, they're easy to catch. For someone else, asking "what do you notice in your body?" can feel like being handed a language they've never heard spoken. The clients I worry most about losing are the ones who've spent much of their lives almost forgetting they have a body. For them, dropping in doesn't feel like coming home. It feels like trying to get into a fortress. No three-minute nervous-system exercise fixes that. So, like every modality worth practicing, we start with the actual person in front of us.

The Frustrating — and Beautiful — Thing About Somatic Experiencing®

A lot of Somatic Experiencing® Practitioners have a love-hate relationship with the fact that this modality isn't protocol-based. I certainly do. There are days I would love someone to just hand me the steps: this happened to your client, so do this. Instead, SE keeps asking me to stay curious about the whole person. In consultation, I've talked through a client's birth history, an illness, an injury, a relationship, a movement that keeps reappearing in session, some detail that seemed unrelated until it wasn't. Not to find the trauma and fix it. To understand the organism sitting across from me.

On day one of my Advanced 1 training with Dave Berger — one of Peter Levine's senior SE trainers — the very first slide on the wall was this line from Levine himself: "SE is not about helping a person resolve their trauma. It is about helping them open to their goodness and humanity, receive the milk and honey of humankindness, find their vitality, their vital force, and their aliveness." That's why I love this work. Wholeness over eradication.

None of that guarantees a specific outcome, though.

A Profound Outcome Is Not a Universal Promise

I have a client whose chronic pain softens most weeks we work together, sometimes completely. I know enough about this work to know that kind of change happens. I also know enough not to put on my website that one somatic session will make chronic pain disappear, because I don't know that it will.

People who experience shifts like that tend to have spent years already paying close attention to their own bodies before they ever found me. Their systems seem unusually ready for it. The next person who sits across from me with the same level of pain might have a completely different experience. A profound outcome is not the same thing as a universal promise. I don't make guarantees about what someone's body will do.

That said, I've practiced long enough to have watched things I'd call extraordinary. My clients joke about "the Alicia magic." I don't think it's magic. But I've watched bodies change. Pain shift. Protective patterns soften. Sensation return where there had been almost none. Movement and boundaries and grief and anger and pleasure and connection come back online. Refusing to promise a result doesn't mean pretending I haven't seen what I've seen. I hold both of those at once. I don't think I'm supposed to resolve that. I just try to be honest about it.

Maybe Somatics Doesn't Need to Solve Modern Life

This is where I land next to Hill rather than against her. Somatics is trendy. Some of its marketing is ridiculous. Some of the scientific-sounding language around it outruns what we actually know. And a lot of what's being sold as revolutionary is really just movement, breath, attention, relationship, and the fairly radical act of putting your phone down long enough to notice you have a body.

There's a joke in our field that we're half neurobiologist, half woo-woo, because there are things I witness in this work that I don't yet know how to fully explain. It's a big part of why I love it. It carries the same complexity and mystery that a human being does. There's no one-size-fits-all here. There's a real mystery running through this work, and some people would call it spiritual. We're talking, after all, about helping someone move toward coherence, wholeness, aliveness, the most deeply human parts of what makes them who they are. And if you've survived trauma, you already know this without anyone explaining it to you: your physiology shapes your faith, your relationships, the way you move through the world.

Fine. Maybe that's enough. Because we're also living in a genuinely fractured world. Our attention is fractured. Our relationships can feel fractured. Work follows us everywhere, and we've gotten remarkably skilled at leaving our own immediate experience while drowning in information about it. I don't think somatics resonates right now because it found the magic fix. I think we're just hungry to feel whole. It asks us to notice the places that brace and retreat, the parts that have gone quiet, the sensations we'd rather not feel and the pleasure we've forgotten how to feel, without demanding we immediately fix any of it. Sometimes we just notice. We witness. We stay. Little by little, something becomes more available.

I got a tiny taste of that years ago, on the floor of my apartment, following the Workout Witch through movements so small they almost felt silly. Nothing miraculous happened. My body just felt nourished, and it wanted more, and something in me came online.

Somatics doesn't need to reset us, optimize us, or become the solution to modern life. Maybe the invitation is smaller than that, and more useful: pay attention, and see what becomes possible when more of you is actually here.

Maybe that’s the invitation of somatic work: to come home to ourselves.