Movement: a language the nervous system understands

Trauma is not only remembered through stories or thoughts, it is lived and stored in the body. Muscles tighten, breath patterns shift, posture adapts, and nervous system responses organise around survival. A somatic, embodied, trauma-informed approach to emotional processing recognises that healing must involve the body, not as something to be fixed, but as an intelligent system that has learned how to protect.

Movement, within this context, is not exercise, performance, or emotional catharsis. It is a language the nervous system already understands. When movement is woven gently and intentionally into emotional processing, it can help clients regulate, build capacity, and renegotiate patterns shaped by trauma, often more effectively than words alone.

The Body, Emotion, and Posture

Emotions and posture continuously shape one another. Fear often draws the body inward, collapsing the chest and pulling the head forward. Grief may soften the spine and weigh the body downward. Anger can create rigidity, clenched fists, or a forward lean. Shame frequently organises the body to shrink, fold, or disappear.

Over time, especially with chronic stress or developmental trauma, these emotional states can become habitual postural patterns. A client may no longer feel consciously afraid or ashamed, yet their body remains braced or collapsed as if the emotion is still present. From a somatic perspective, these patterns are not problems, they are adaptations.

In session, posture is approached with curiosity rather than correction. Small movements such as lifting the head slightly, allowing the shoulders to drop, feeling the feet press into the ground can evoke emotional shifts. Importantly, posture does not only reflect emotion, it also influences it. Exploring posture with choice and attunement can open access to emotions, beliefs, and resources that have long been held outside awareness.

Safety, Consent, and the Nervous System

Before movement is introduced, safety and choice are paramount. Trauma-informed work emphasises transparency, predictability, and consent. Clients are reminded that movement is optional and that stillness is always welcome.

The practitioner tracks signs of nervous system overwhelm, dissociation, agitation, shallow breathing, emotional flooding, and adjusts accordingly. Movement is used to support regulation, not to push clients beyond their window of tolerance.

Within this foundation, movement can be woven into specific somatic techniques in subtle, powerful ways.

Weaving Movement Into Key Somatic Techniques

The Dimmer Switch: Modulating Intensity Through Movement

The 'dimmer switch' metaphor helps clients recognise that emotional and physiological intensity exists on a spectrum. Rather than emotions being either 'on' or 'off', they can consciously be turned up or down.

Movement supports this by allowing clients to experiment with intensity physically. For example, a client might gently increase pressure through their feet, then soften it. They may slowly lift their chest a few centimetres, then return to neutral. These small shifts teach the nervous system that it has choice.

By pairing movement with awareness, "Notice what happens when you turn the intensity down just one notch",  clients learn that regulation is possible without shutting emotions off completely.

Pendulation: Moving Between Activation and Ease

Pendulation involves gently moving between states of discomfort and comfort, activation and regulation. Movement makes this process tangible.

A client might notice tension in their shoulders (activation), then slowly shift attention and movement toward a grounded sensation in their legs or breath (ease). Physically rocking, swaying, or shifting posture can support this oscillation.

Pendulating in movement helps prevent overwhelm while building capacity. The nervous system learns that it can touch difficult sensations and return to safety, rather than getting stuck in one state.

Cohabitation: Allowing Multiple States to Exist

Cohabitation refers to the ability to hold more than one sensation or emotional state at the same time, such as fear and safety, grief and support.

Movement can help embody this dual awareness. For example, a client might place one hand on their chest where sadness is felt, while simultaneously pressing their feet into the floor. The body physically experiences both vulnerability and support at once.

This teaches the nervous system that difficult emotions do not have to take over completely. Safety can coexist with pain, and regulation can exist alongside activation.

Rhythmic Breathing: Movement as Regulation

Breath is one of the most accessible bridges between the body and nervous system. Rhythmic breathing becomes even more regulating when paired with gentle movement.

This might look like rocking slightly with the breath, swaying side to side, or allowing the spine to subtly expand and soften with each inhale and exhale. These rhythmic movements can support vagal tone and signal safety to the nervous system.

Importantly, breathing is invitational rather than prescriptive. The goal is not to control the breath, but to allow rhythm and ease to emerge naturally.

Merging and Distancing: Movement and Relational Boundaries

Trauma can disrupt a person’s ability to regulate closeness and distance, both internally and relationally. Some clients merge too easily with emotional experiences (overwhelm/catharsis/re-traumatising), while others distance or disconnect (shutdown/dissociation).

Movement can help explore this dynamically. A client might lean slightly toward a sensation or emotion, then physically lean back or turn away, noticing how each feels. Even subtle shifts in posture or gaze can represent merging and distancing.

This embodied exploration helps clients develop choice and flexibility, rather than relying on habitual patterns of overwhelm or avoidance.

Core Beliefs: How Movement Reveals Meaning

Core beliefs are often held somatically before they are articulated cognitively. Beliefs such as 'I am unsafe', ' am too much', or 'I don’t matter', frequently show up as collapsed posture, bracing, or constriction.

Inviting small postural experiments, such as gently lengthening the spine or allowing the chest to open, can bring these beliefs into awareness. A client may notice discomfort or resistance and realise, 'This feels unsafe' or 'This doesn’t feel allowed'.

Rather than challenging beliefs cognitively, movement allows clients to experience how beliefs live in the body and how new experiences can slowly reshape them.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn: Completing Survival Responses

Survival responses organise the body for action. When these responses are interrupted or chronically suppressed, the body may remain stuck in patterns of tension, collapse, or appeasement.

Movement allows these responses to be expressed in small, contained ways. Pressing hands into a surface can support fight energy. Gentle stepping or leaning forward may access flight. Curling inward with support can honour freeze. Exploring upright posture and boundary-setting gestures can address fawn responses.

These movements are never forced or dramatic. They are guided by the client’s impulses and capacity, allowing the nervous system to complete what was once interrupted.

The Practitioner’s Role

The practitioner’s role is to facilitate awareness, not direct outcomes. Movement is accompanied by curiosity, silence, and reflection. “What do you notice now?” or “What feels supportive in your body?”

The practitioner’s own embodied presence matters. A grounded, regulated therapist supports co-regulation and creates a felt sense of safety that words alone cannot provide.

Ethical and Cultural Considerations

Movement must always be responsive to individual bodies, cultures, abilities, and histories. There is no correct way to move. Accessibility, consent, and respect for boundaries are central to ethical somatic work.

Bringing it all together

Movement in a somatic, embodied, trauma-informed emotional processing session is not about doing more, it is about listening more deeply. By working with posture, breath, and subtle movement, clients are invited to reconnect with their bodies as allies rather than obstacles, and as vessels of healing, truth and Self-realisation.

When movement is woven thoughtfully into techniques such as pendulation, the dimmer switch, cohabitation, and survival response work, it supports regulation, meaning-making, and healing at a nervous system level. The body already knows the way forward. Somatic movement simply gives it permission to speak.