06/08/2026
There was a time when working with the body in psychotherapy was considered niche - something a small group of practitioners found compelling, while much of the field kept its distance.
Trauma research has now fundamentally reshaped how we think about where experience lives - not just in narrative or cognition, but in the tissue of the body itself. Neuroscience has added weight to this, particularly work on threat response, implicit memory, and autonomic regulation. It's become increasingly difficult to maintain that therapy is essentially a cognitive undertaking that happens to take place in a body.
Alongside this, trauma-informed practice has moved from aspiration to expectation across most therapeutic settings. And meaningful trauma-informed work is, by its nature, body-aware. It encourages us to attend to regulation, to how safety is experienced rather than simply understood, to the ways threat registers before language catches up.
Somatic approaches have long histories - in body psychotherapy, in early analytic thinking, in relational and humanistic traditions. What's happened is that the broader therapeutic field has begun to recognise what body-oriented practitioners have understood for decades: the body isn't a passive context for psychological work. It's the ground from which change actually arises.
The Certificate in Somatic TA integrates somatic awareness with Transactional Analysis theory across three weekends in Edinburgh. The 2026/27 course begins in September. Book now to reserve your place. Link for more details in first comment.
