The who, what, why, and how of a complex concept.
“My client has a really hard time getting in their body and I don’t know how to help.”
“When I try to help my client connect to their body, they really don’t like it.”
“My client intellectualizes a lot and it’s really hard to find ways to work with them.”
Do any of these sound familiar? Many therapists are eager to help their clients feel more connected to their bodies, which is fantastic. However, if you find yourself discouraged because it seems hard or you don’t know where to begin, you’re not alone. Over and over, I hear therapists asking some version of, “How do I get my client in their body?”
“How do I get my client in their body?” can lead to frustration because this question is premature. How is not one size fits all and it depends on many factors. It needs to emerge from who your client is, what “being in their body” means for them and why they might benefit from it.
Let’s start by reflecting on who your client is. What is their existing relationship to their body? Are they interested in working on connecting to their body? Do they have the readiness and capacity to move through unfamiliar experience that might range from mildly awkward to extremely uncomfortable.
Working with the body is powerful. It elicits subconscious material and challenges the patterns that make us feel safe and comfortable. Even clients who come into therapy expressing a desire to do somatic therapy may find that it is more intimidating, scary or different than anticipated. Before we ask a client to experiment with ways to be more “in their body”, we want to know that they have the resources to help them regulate if they become triggered, anxious or move out of their window of tolerance.
When have a sense of who our client is, we can begin to look at what it could mean for this particular client to “get in their body”.
Does “being in their body” mean that a client has more body awareness? Or that they have a better sense of how their emotions show up physically? Does it mean that they can pay more attention to their body cues? Or that they feel more present? We can get more and more curious about the nuances.
When we start to understand what it means to help our client to be “in their body”, we get more clarity on why this might help them.
Would your client benefit from being more aware of their physical sensations because it would help them to eat or sleep or have sex differently? Or would it help them feel more comfortable taking up space? Would it help them develop clear boundaries?
When we consider our client’s concerns and reasons for therapy, we can begin to shape interventions that support their own goals and desires. We can move from a generic idea to a meaningful goal. For example, instead of trying to “get a client in their body”, you can help a client who is struggling with overwhelm learn to tune into body cues of being tired or frustrated so that they can recognize when they need to take a break, rest or get support.
The how becomes an entirely different question when it is grounded in the who, what and the why. It is not simply an intervention offered by the therapist, but an ongoing process between therapist and client.
There are endless possibilities for how to help clients become more embodied, and they will be different for each of our clients. Some people will be eager and ready to dive into somatic approaches and experiment with building a new relationship to their body. For many, the intensity or pace needs to be scaled back. And others will need to approach this work in exceedingly small careful steps.
Let’s look at some examples using a client who has anxiety.
For an anxious client who is very uncomfortable in their body, it might help them to learn to notice body cues of anxiety (the what) so they can begin to develop resources to reduce and manage their symptoms (the why). We might start with just the therapist noticing how anxiety shows up in the client’s body without even asking the client to pay attention. Then we might gently offer some psychoeducation and tie it in with what we’ve noticed. We could say, “sometimes anxiety creates a lot of tension in the jaw.” If the client nods or agrees we might offer, “seems like that’s true for you”.
For one client, we might suggest seeing what it’s like to loosen the jaw or introduce a practice like progressive relaxation. For another client, we might simply say how great it is that they are learning about their own anxiety. For yet a different person, we might have them try making the tension tighter to see what happens.
When a client has more capacity to tolerate the discomfort of paying attention to their own anxiety, we can offer more in-depth options. We might ask them to track their own anxiety cues, and we might be more active and explicit in this work. We could ask them to do a body scan, looking for areas of tension, relaxation or neutrality. We might ask them to draw their tension on a diagram of a body. We might explore their somatic cues creatively. What color is the tension? Does it move? Does is have words? We might invite them to notice how they feel in their body as they move through different intensities of anxiety. They might be open to mindfulness or different breathing techniques or movement practices.
We may also choose not to offer any direct intervention to our client at all. Instead, we can intentionally work with our own body to cultivate a more relaxed presence. This can model a non-anxious state as well as help us be curious about what our client needs. Over time, we may be able to introduce bite-sized options for our client to begin working more directly with their body.
These examples of how to help clients connect with their embodied experience are just the tip of the iceberg. I hope they illustrate the ways that the how in “how do I get my client in their body?” is only one element in the complex landscape of the who, what, why and how of somatic interventions.
© 2025 Annabelle Coote