Listening with the body.
Somatic & dance/movement therapy · 50 min · Boulder, Colorado and online
Our mind can block painful memories. But the body stores all our background, and may speak to us through tension, pain, allergies, or automatic reactions to stress.
Somatic therapy
Sōma comes from Greek — the body, alive and felt from inside. Somatic therapy is psychotherapy that treats the body as a primary place where psychological experience lives, not the container for it.
Most therapy traditions assume change happens through thinking: insight produces shift. Somatic traditions assume change happens through experience: a body that has had a new sensory reality is different than one that has only been told about a different reality.
In practice, this means working with what your body is doing in the present moment — breath, posture, tension patterns, what your shoulders are saying, where you go when you go away. We slow down. We notice. We give the body a chance to update what it knows about safety.
Somatic therapy is particularly effective for trauma — both the loud kind (single events) and the quiet kind (chronic developmental or relational conditions) — because trauma is encoded in the body before it is understood narratively.
Dance/movement therapy
Dance/movement therapy (DMT) is the clinical use of movement as psychotherapeutic intervention. The American Dance Therapy Association defines it as “the psychotherapeutic use of movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration.”
DMT shares somatic therapy’s foundation — body-first — but adds expressive movement as a primary mode of working. This matters because some experiences are stored not just in body sensation but in body motion: the way you held still, the way you moved away, the way you couldn’t move at all.
“Dance” in DMT is not formal dance. It is any movement — small or large, internal or external — that lets the body speak. No experience required. No performance. No audience but the therapist, holding the field.
DMT is particularly effective for: pre-verbal experiences (they happened before language), trauma where the body learned to not move (freeze response), creative or kinesthetic people whose primary processing channel is body-based, and clients who have plateaued in talk-only therapy.
Why I work with both
Somatic therapy gives me the framework for what to do when — when to titrate, when to deepen, when to pause and let the nervous system settle. Dance/movement therapy gives me the toolkit for how to access — when language has run out, when stillness has become brittle, when the body is asking for permission to move what’s stuck.
Most of my sessions blend the two. We talk. We notice the body. Sometimes we move. The movement varies — sometimes the size of a breath, sometimes a full standing exploration. What is consistent is that the body has a voice in the conversation, and that voice is taken seriously.
I draw on Sensorimotor-informed work when a client is chronically dissociated or chronically braced — the Sensorimotor approach meets those situations with particular care. I draw on pre- and perinatal work for clients in the perinatal window or working with pre-verbal material.
When this approach fits
This approach fits well if you:
- Have done some talk therapy and are ready for a different doorway
- Notice tension or shut-down patterns you cannot think your way through
- Have pre-verbal material surfacing (especially during perinatal time)
- Are kinesthetic — process by moving, walking, dancing, making things
- Are comfortable with slow pacing
- Are willing to be a beginner at noticing your body
This approach might be less ideal if:
- You need acute crisis stabilization (please call or text 988 — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 24/7; includes Colorado as of July 2025)
- You need psychiatric medication management (I am not a prescriber and I refer)
- You are looking primarily for advice or a roadmap rather than relational, body-based depth work
- You need a primarily cognitive-behavioral approach
In crisis right now?
If you need acute crisis stabilization, please call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7 and serving Colorado as of July 2025.
Where this happens
Somatic and dance/movement work isn’t booked separately — it runs through individual sessions and couples work. It is the ground those stand on rather than a third thing to choose. Session length, fees, and the cancellation window belong to them — see Schedule.
Some of the research
Somatic and body-based therapies have a growing evidence base for trauma, anxiety, and depression. Notable references: Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy research, the American Dance Therapy Association’s clinical research on dance/movement therapy outcomes, and Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory framework. For peer-reviewed literature, see the ADTA research page.
Anna Samsonova, MA, LPC — Naropa Somatic Counseling Psychology · LPC (Colorado) · 19 years working as a psychotherapist · Boulder, Colorado