Somatics and somatic healing
Everything you wanted to know, but using the lab-coats’ lens in conjunction with my own experiences.
The Body Keeps Better Notes Than The Brain
Hi. Somatic work is real. The body does keep the score. Don’t listen to this guy, much as he means well (and for the record, I have enjoyed some of his other videos).
I can prove this, and have proven this time and time again with myself and with clients, literally helping folks to transform conditions like having being unable to bend a hand for 6 months without pharmaceutical or medical intervention.
The difficulty in bringing this to mainstream science is the struggle to class emotional information in a measurable context.
Most measurement attempts lean on the binary states that are somewhat easy to agree on - a person feels ‘negative’ or they feel ‘positive’. Happy versus sad, relaxed versus ‘stressed’ and so on. And these are state descriptions with much richer nuance.
I’d wager this approach is a mirror of how the wellness industry has trained people to rank their progress; an approach to capture the highest communicated need (inner relief from discomfort), the lowest common denominator (people who don’t want to put the time in), and remove any complexity or depth that could confuse a sale (equanimity being a real goal).
Nuance and subjectivity is more real than objectivity and blunt instruments
It’s not the worst approach if you have yet to gain understanding of the mechanical aspects of emotion and the nuance that defines its edges, which until the early 2000s has been most of us in society.
Emotions are, by their very nature, a shared construct of the human experience, but one that is subjective to the individual and objective only in concept.
For example, we all know betrayal, but we all have nuanced differences in how we feel it based on our life experiences with it. Or anxiety, which we seem to agree on but the nuance is in what aggregate of emotions are in that zip file of an emotional experience.
It’s worth noting that many of us experience the physical form of betrayal as a pain of pressure or “soreness” living between our scapulas - aside from the obvious anxiety and panic that can come with the initial recognition of betrayal.
So while objective in that aspect, the nuance in the description of the emotional aspect is certainly subjective.
Our sensations are messengers - basically text messages from our body’s emotional digestive system
What the research actually says about somatic work, and what it doesn't
There is a version of this conversation where I tell you the body is an incredible, deeply complex and elegant meat-machine, ancient traditions knew everything, and science is finally, slowly, stubbornly - and FINALLY - catching up.
That version is too easy to write and a cop-out for me.
Here's the version bridging the lab, the jungle, and the old books
I went and pulled the science papers, because I was curious what the well-paid boffins have actually been able to measure up to now, in August of 2026.
I read the abstracts, checked the effect sizes and dug deep. Some of what I believed held up better than I expected. Some of it came with an asterisk.
I share what I perceive that they found, what they didn't prove, and what parts of the studies actually matter.
My personal agenda was to see what actually fit my Somatic system, as my work is largely developed through personal experience and a few teachers.
In this exercise, I gained much self back-patting validation and also further wisdom on where science still has work to do, and what I need to do to make things more clear and sensory. Ultimately, I was surprised in what they could measure, and what they chose to pursue.
Let us begin…
1. Reading your own body is a trainable skill, and it moves the needle on anxiety
Reading the body is easier than this, once you know it’s code
Yep. I’m happy to see this as it’s at the heart of exactly what I teach.
Researchers at Sussex took 121 autistic adults - a group that famously struggles to read internal signals - and spent six sessions teaching the autistic adults one thing : feel your own heartbeat more accurately.
Spoiler alert - it feels creepy the first time you do it.
No talking about feelings, no reframing of thoughts - just tune the dial on conscious and active body perceiving - the same, ‘witness and acknowledge’ concept I highlight in Somatic Mechanics.
Three months later, anxiety remained measurably lower than the control group.
31% hit the trial's recovery criteria versus 16% in the control.
Important note : The researchers set themselves a high bar for what counted as clinically meaningful, though across the whole group they didn't clear it. Thankfully, the effect was statistically solid and it lasted.
It wasn't the landslide they'd hoped for, and they used an active control - a group that uses another effective tool - meaning the comparison group got a helpful shift too.
Quadt L, Garfinkel SN, Mulcahy JS, et al. (2021). Interoceptive training to target anxiety in autistic adults (ADIE): a single-center, superiority randomized controlled trial. eClinicalMedicine 39:101042. Estimated mean difference 3.23 (95% CI 1.13 to 5.29), d = 0.30, p = 0.005. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537021003229
2. Talking it out is not the door society thinks it is, and for some people it's the wrong one
Many folks in Western society use talk therapies for trauma work, and the stats reveal that a big chunk of people quit before ‘finishing’. I know I did. And the real truth is how many of us actually ‘finish’ therapy? There’s always another stone to turn up.
Reliving the worst day of your life out loud, on schedule, week after week, is brutal. Plenty of people eventually bow out as relief doesn’t seem to come, and I don’t blame them.
I find talk therapy valuable for reflection but I can do that with friends and it certainly doesn’t get you free of the suffering even if it does lighten the load.
Bessel van der Kolk ran a different experiment; 64 women with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. Not fresh cases, but women who'd already tried things and were still carrying it. Ten weeks, one hour a week, of “trauma-informed”, yoga.
At the end, 16 of 31 in the yoga group no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
52%. In the control group it was 21%.
But what truly interests me, and simultaneously serves my confirmation bias, is the shape of the curve. Both groups improved in the first half. Then the control group relapsed and the yoga group held strong.
To summarize the result : Insight doesn’t hold, and therapeutic work that goes through the body tends to stay.
Bessel van der Kolk BA, Stone L, West J, et al. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6):e559-565. 52% vs 21% loss of diagnosis, χ² = 6.17, p = .013; within-group CAPS d = 1.07 (yoga) vs 0.66 (control). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25004196/ Full text: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/uploads/docs/Yoga-F-J-Clin-Psychiat-1.pdf
3. Body awareness training shows up in the numbers
And it’s new-ish.
This one landed in November 2025, and I’ve not seen it get snagged by the masses of social media me-too copycats. However, it’s a good one:
A pre-registered meta-analysis pooled 29 randomized trials, 2,191 participants, and asked a narrow question, “Does this kind of training actually change how people experience their own bodies?”
The answer : Yes. And even without this study, I’ve seen this be the case across 1000+ hours of 1-to-1 work.
The results were a small-to-medium effect consistent across studies, and no evidence of publication bias. Body-focused programs showed the strongest effects. And the improvements in body awareness tracked with improvements in psychological distress.
And shameless plug - my Somatic Mechanics course teaches a great way to do this, so get your arse in there.
People did get better at noticing, and with a lasting effect, the training produced a measurable, real shift in how they perceived their own bodies further down the line.
Treves IN, Chen YY, Wilson CL, et al. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effects of mindfulness meditation training on self-reported interoception. Scientific Reports 15:38889. g = 0.31 (95% CI 0.21 to 0.42), p < 0.001; mindfulness-based programs g = 0.41. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-22661-4
Some lass meditating
4. Somatic movement is not exercise, and it holds up in the numbers
There's a category error worth clearing up before we get into the evidence: somatic movement is not a classic exercise, but in my anecdotal experience, it certainly shows up as a solid tool for healing injury-biased areas and areas of imbalance / weakness in the body.
While exercise is generally about output - burning calories, building strength, hitting a target - somatic movement is about attention and embodiment - moving slowly and consciously, tracking what the body is actually doing while it does it.
A form of listening to the deepest signals of self, and responding to them.
The point isn't the movement. The point is what you notice while moving. Two studies worth knowing about here. Both hold up :
A. The first: Feldenkrais under proper scrutiny.
Feldenkrais is a somatic movement practice built on slow, deliberate exploration of how the body moves - small, unfamiliar sequences done with close attention, not repetition for burn. It's been dismissed as niche for decades.
Then in 2022, a team pulled together 16 randomized controlled trials of the method and ran the numbers properly. Across the studies, people improved in pain, balance, everyday function, quality of life - and, the part that matters most for what I teach - their interoceptive awareness got measurably sharper. They increased their ability to feel themselves from the inside - a crucial skill.
The balance finding was the strongest and cleanest - a large effect in older adults on a standard mobility test. The pain and body-awareness results came from the chronic back pain studies and were solid too. Don’t assume this is a fringe practice with fringe evidence; it's a body-based intervention that survives contact with the highest standard of medical evidence.
This research lives mostly in the physical therapy world - pain, balance, mobility - because that's where the funding and the measuring tools are.
If you want to see something that’s more intimate and effective in the realm of somatic movement, I highly recommend Sah D Simone’s somatic dance workshops. The man is intimately experienced and wise in this realm of work.
For the realm of study, the body-awareness and emotional side is real in the data but less heavily studied. This is currently the gap which somatic work in general sits in and the structure - and maybe tools - to measure the interesting stuff aren't built yet.
Berland R, Marques-Sule E, Marín-Mateo JL, et al. (2022). Effects of the Feldenkrais Method as a Physiotherapy Tool: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(21):13734. 16 RCTs; balance (Timed-Up-and-Go) Cohen's d = -1.14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9657136/
B. The second: somatic movement matching gold-standard talk therapy for trauma
This one is the striking result.
Cognitive Processing Therapy is considered a top-tier, evidence-heavy talk therapy for PTSD - one of the treatments the VA points to first. It works, and it works well. So when someone runs a proper trial pitting a body-based practice head-to-head against it, that's the real test.
Zaccari, Kelly and colleagues did exactly that in 2023. A multisite randomized controlled trial across two VA hospitals, 131 women veterans with PTSD from military sexual trauma - a population that is notoriously hard to treat. Ten weeks of trauma-sensitive yoga versus twelve weeks of CPT. Blinded clinician assessment.
The result : no significant difference between them. Yoga was statistically equivalent to one of the most rigorously tested talk therapies available. And - the part that shouldn't be glossed over - 65% of the yoga group completed the program versus 46% of the CPT group. People stuck with the body-based practice more.
Which loops back to the point in section 2. Talk therapy is the common door, but not the only door, and for a lot of people it's the wrong one.
Here's a serious trial confirming that a slow, breath-anchored, body-first practice can hold its ground against the best talk-based treatment in the field, in one of the hardest populations to reach. In JAMA Network Open, one of the highest bars a study of this kind clears.
The limits worth naming: female veterans specifically, one condition specifically (military-sexual-trauma-related PTSD), and it's an equivalence finding rather than yoga beating CPT.
Nobody's claiming somatic movement replaces trauma therapy. What the study establishes is narrower and important: it works, at that level, for the people it was tested on.
Zaccari B, Higgins M, Haywood TN, et al., Kelly UA (2023). Yoga vs Cognitive Processing Therapy for Military Sexual Trauma-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Network Open 6(12):e2344862. N = 131 women veterans; TCTSY completion 65.3% vs CPT 45.8%, p = .03. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2813096
Pokey pokey.
5. This ancient body-based practice often marked as ‘psuedo’ science gets a well-deserved win
Acupuncture is not traditionally seen as somatic work, but it is certainly a part of it; you’re using a needle to stimulate energy in a specific part of the body in order to move energy through your energetic system.
Recent discoveries point to a ‘hidden liquid based organ’ called the ‘interstitium’ which is suspected as the physical form of the meridian map as well.
To me, acupuncture is physical intervention on your energetic circuits and therefore an influential aspect on moving stagnant emotions, as the circuits and emotional energies naturally intersect.
When I see someone in person, I get to watch their energetic systems move through the circuit and see where things are flowing or not.
To me, there’s no doubt acupuncture and the meridian map is real, especially with the experiences I’ve benefited from as a recipient and observer. Plus, millions of people attributing benefit through it.
Lab-coat culture has loved to dunk on acupuncture. Placebo / pseudo-science theater, they say. Thankfully, someone pooled raw patient-level data from the highest-quality trials and ran the numbers properly to place their money where their mouth is.
39 trials and nearly 21,000 people.
Acupuncture beat both fake acupuncture and no acupuncture for chronic back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, and headache. In layman’s terms, this means that the evidence showed that acupuncture is a very real treatment beyond any reasonable doubt.
And this was consistent across 21,000-ish humans, which is a bigger evidence base than most things get to be validated with.
Some of the cynical lab-coats who doubted acupuncture enjoyed a delicious, extra seasoned sh*t sandwich the morning this study came out. Probably with extra salt and vinegar.
Vickers AJ, Cronin AM, Maschino AC, et al. (2012). Acupuncture for chronic pain: individual patient data meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine 172(19):1444-1453. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1357513
2018 update (39 trials, n = 20,827): The Journal of Pain 19(5):455-474. https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(17)30780-0/fulltext
6. The monks’ freeze-death-defying miracles were real and accessible
Our bodies are able to do many things comics and movies have considered beyond human natural ability.
In truth, I would urge that natural ability is far broader and more incredible than science and the medical industry would have us all believe.
For centuries Tibetan practitioners claimed and demonstrated the ability to raise body heat and steer their own nervous system on command using Tummo. And of course, the establishment turned its nose up, probably calling it fake or pseudo-science.
At least that was the case until Wim Hof showed up; a master of helping people to cultivate their own inner fire and an apparently genuinely lovely human according to friends who’ve met him.
A Radboud team trained 12 people in the Wim Hof Method - a modern practice that's considered Tummo-like, producing comparable results to the ancient ‘inner fire’ work - then injected them with a bacterial toxin that reliably makes people feel like they have the flu.
The trained group released more adrenaline, produced fewer inflammatory markers, and had noticeably milder symptoms than the untrained control group, in a peer-reviewed paper - PNAS (immature giggle) - link below.
Additional things to know : There were 24 people total, all young men, and the technique is believed to carry genuine cardiovascular risk - so the trained control group were trained to a competent and reliable level.
As a demonstration of what the body can do, it's another solid point towards our ability to influence and heal our own bodies when we know where the button and switches live.
Kox M, van Eijk LT, Zwaag J, et al. (2014). Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans. PNAS 111(20):7379-7384. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1322174111
(In my experience as facilitator and ‘patient’) Holding on to an incendiary incomplete emotion is a lot like holding a burning coal. Instead of burning your flesh off, it can result in inflaming a part of your body, physically from within. Worse, any protective adaptation or cope to avoid feeling something, can eventually mutate into autoimmune conditions, or worse.
7. Holding it in hurts the body over time
In my experience, direct and observed, when we hold incomplete emotional experiences, they rest in our body as a static, inflammation-causing energetic charge that can’t complete its movement.
Eventually, physical conditions emerge as a result, some as minor as digestive inflammation, and some major, like cancer cells, auto-immune diseases or heart attacks.
Society helps feed this damaging pattern by encouraging that people to, “keep it together”, when having emotional moments.
‘Professionalism’ brainwashing is the biggest culprit of ill health in communication cultures; instead of promoting compassion-forward, humane contact in conflict, hierarchal narcissistic, suppressive and submissive communication is encouraged.
We can see how this benefits the comfort of a top-down ‘leader’, but everyone else and likely the company’s best potential, suffers, by slowly stripping a sense of agency, autonomy and inner authority - resulting in dulled fire and weakened intuition.
Turns out, this “keeping it together," whereby a person represses their emotional process, has shown up in mortality data. In Somatic Mechanics, this is covered by the Emotional Digestive System concept.
One study showed up as helpful in this space, but it’s middling in quality. Not a strong study, but worth mentioning as a step in the direction of my held bias, and what is presented by numerous cases in metaphysics / mystical healing work, which holds anecdotal repeat success.
Researchers tracked 729 people across 12 years using a nationally representative US sample.
Comparing high suppressors to low suppressors, the high group had roughly a 35% greater chance of dying from any cause in that window, and a notably elevated rate of cancer death.
Two things make this study shaky; first, the finding barely squeaked past the line researchers use to call something, “a real effect" rather than chance.
Second, when you measure an effect like this, you don't get one exact number, you get a range of what the true figure might be. Here that range runs from “35% higher risk of death", all the way down to “no extra risk at all."
So the data contains results consistent with a meaningful effect, and also consistent with no effect. So the data ‘proves’ two ends of an argument, meaning no one winner.
On top of that, this study’s results only shows that suppression and earlier death travel together - not that one causes the other. Something else could be driving both and the authors say as much themselves: more work is needed to understand what's actually going on.
This study was an honest attempt, but the design itself couldn't settle the question - correlational studies never can, and the effect size sat right at the edge of significance.
I'm still keeping it in this list as my experience has shown this concept to be a real and consistent one in sessions. The limits here point to the design, not the direction of the finding. I hope those who study this idea further use a better structure, and deeper prep to test the same idea.
Chapman BP, Fiscella K, Kawachi I, Duberstein P, Muennig P (2013). Emotion suppression and mortality risk over a 12-year follow-up. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 75(4):381-385. All-cause HR 1.35 (95% CI 1.00 to 1.82, p = .049). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24119947/
8. Mindfulness is not somatic work, but It is central to some somatic healing techniques, including my own
Bullsh*t “pop” mindfulness tends to lean on avoiding the discomfort and promising good feels, which is what trips up studies like the ones in this section.
Feeling good is not what meditation is specifically designed for - though you can of course do guided journeys that are built to take people to places of lightness and relief.
When we can be mindfully present with emotional discomfort, we tend to activate healing. So in my eyes, mindfulness is first about presence, and feeling good is a product of that eventually.
The pop meditation industry was built on ‘wellness’ meaning ‘feeling good’ and now people wonder why meditation ‘fails’ them.
Somatic work, with an eye on long term presence, resilience, self-acceptance and, “self-love”, is very much aligned with this version of what we call mindfulness.
Somatic work will give you relief, but it will also allow you to sit in immense discomfort and stretch your emotional capacity. Life expands in a more grand manner down that road and feeling more alive becomes the reward.
Below are examples of the scientific establishment mis-firing and creating what would seed some substantial misinformation.
A. “Meditation is only moderately effective" (JAMA, 2014)
Johns Hopkins combined 47 trials covering 3,515 people and found the benefits were modest across the board - small-to-moderate improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain, nothing dramatic; anxiety around 0.38 at eight weeks, depression around 0.30, pain around 0.33. Their sharpest line was that meditation programs weren't better than other active treatments.
For the sake of clarity, the effect sizes can be translated thus: 0.2 is small, 0.5 is moderate, 0.8 is large. So 0.30-0.38 is small and creeping up to moderate, meaning it wasn't anything to get excited about at all.
But here's the sloppiness - and this is where it becomes bad science. They took a practice that was built to develop presence and dismantle self-identification, and they measured it with mood scales.
‘Anxiety inventories’. Depression questionnaires. Absolutely the wrong measuring tool for this job.
Practicing meditation allows you to be present in difficult and triggering moments. The result is higher capacity for feeling intensity with low reactivity. Clearly these guys didn’t understand that.
In short : rigorous number-crunching applied to the wrong question is bad science, because the design decision at the top - what to measure against what - was a poorly researched, misunderstood and sloppy direction.
B. Another lame study, done by people who also don’t know what meditation is (MYRIAD, 2022)
85 schools. 8,376 kids. Universal mindfulness lessons versus normal teaching. Behold this quarter-arsed clusterf*ck:
Ten classroom lessons of psycho-education - ‘How the mind and stress work according to science’ + a sitting practice. Not the best source for this work.
Classes were delivered to the whole group - No individualist tuning someone to the teachings. This means that everyone paced with everyone else even if they struggled.
The meditations teachers were just the current school teachers, after being trained in a 4-day workshop - NOT experts in the material at all; newbs themselves.
No screening - Nobody checked in advance which kids were already struggling or vulnerable, so no one knew who might react badly, or already have some mental health challenges.
No individual pacing - Everyone moved at the same speed, with no slowing down for a kid who found it hard or distressing.
No body-based safety work - None of the grounding techniques that help someone settle if a practice stirs up something uncomfortable.
The authors' own conclusion was less about crapping on body awareness, and more about the importance of individual tailoring during teaching.
Consider this study to be a checklist of everything you can do that is dumb and crap in a study about the validity of these types of technique.
The main trial reported no intervention-related adverse events, and the subgroup differences were described by the authors as small and not clinically relevant.
Kuyken W, Ball S, Crane C, et al. (2022). Evidence-Based Mental Health 25(3):99-109. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9340028/
Montero-Marin J, Allwood M, Ball S, et al. (2022). School-based mindfulness training in early adolescence: what works, for whom and how in the MYRIAD trial? Evidence-Based Mental Health 25:117-124. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9340034/
C. Britton 2021 - “Meditation can harm people” as a wrong-headed claim
Most studies of meditation only look for benefits. A team at Brown University did the opposite - they built a proper tool for spotting the harms, the first of its kind, then used it on 96 people who'd completed a standard eight-week mindfulness program.
Again - not comprehending that ‘mindfulness’ is about experiencing and presencing all, as a way of developing emotional and nerve system capacity.
83% reported at least one side effect. 58% had something genuinely unpleasant. And 37% found it interfered with their daily life for a while - work, sleep, relationships, that kind of thing, which makes perfect sense when you’re activating something and being present with it (and it eventually passes).
Two things are true at once here:
The first : Sitting quietly with your mind often stirs up more than expected - especially for newcomers - and it can be destabilizing - especially when there’s no individuation of guidance.
The second : Those rates aren't actually unusual. By Brown's own summary, they're about the same as the side-effect rates for other psychological treatments. Talk therapy has ‘side effects’ too. Honestly, it’s just the effect of presence touching a tender emotion that’s been previously shamed, denied, stuffed down or similar.
So the finding isn't, “meditation is dangerous." It's, “we’re dumb and don’t know what mindfulness actually means”.
And the fix Britton's lab recommends is the telling part: practice that's anchored in the body, slowed down, safety-first, with people properly told what they're getting into beforehand.
Britton WB, Lindahl JR, Cooper DJ, Canby NK, Palitsky R (2021). Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects in mindfulness-based programs. Clinical Psychological Science 9(6):1185-1204. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35174010/
Being mindful, just means bring present, a bit like a tree.
9. Self talk with the right mechanisms is a powerful healing tool
Affirmation has a mixed reputation, likely because the ‘intentional' aspect of the mechanism is rarely if ever shared. Invocation however, works well and often, and I teach it in every course because of its versatility and use.
There's a 2022 study by Grzybowski and Brinthaupt that dug into this exact territory. They wanted to show that the register of the inner voice is measurable - and that not all, “talking to yourself", does the same thing. 342 young adults, sorting self-talk into types and checking each type against self-compassion.
Before I get to what they found, credit where it's due on their method. They also tracked ‘mindfulness' as a metric, and they did a solid job of it.
Instead of leaving the term as a fuzzy catch-all, they used a standard questionnaire called the Five Facet Mindfulness that breaks the over-used term into five separate habits, each scored by how strongly someone agrees with sample statements. The five:
Observing : Noticing sensory detail = “I notice the smells and aromas of things."
Describing : Being able to put inner experience into words = “I'm good at finding words to describe my feelings."
Acting with awareness : Not running on autopilot. Reverse-scored: agreeing with, “I do things without paying attention," lowers someone's score for example.
Non-judging : Not labelling one's own thoughts and feelings as bad; essentially a hack on low-level equanimity. Reverse-scored also, so agreeing with, “I think some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I shouldn't feel them," lowers someone's score.
Non-reactivity : Being able to notice a feeling without being swept into acting on it = “I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them."
So low mindfulness meant someone scored poorly across those, and high mindfulness meant a positive score in those areas.
Now to what they found.
The key result that stood out: two voices that can be considered similar on the surface pulled in opposing directions.
The warm, reinforcing voice - the one that marks a win, that says that went well - tracked with higher self-compassion (r = 0.33).
The managing voice - the busy, figuring-out-what-to-do-next voice - tracked the other way (r = -0.21). The authors' own read was that, for this group, the managing voice landed as, “more corrective and strict than reaffirming."
A ‘fixing’ voice, however, “well-intentioned”, can read as pressure rather than care. Remember the phrase that advice is often just criticism in another costume? Criticism is judgment with better marketing.
That's the useful bit, because it cuts against the obvious assumption. You'd think a practical, ‘sort-it-out’ inner voice would be on the side of kindness. It wasn't. The problem-solving tone and the compassionate tone are different instruments, and the body seems to know the difference even when the intent is good.
The intention underneath - the subconscious drive was the key factor in my opinion, and why I often give people tools to manage that. When folks are instructed to send energy, “as a gift”, in magick work for example, it counters the attachment to inciting change to occur, meaning judgment is hacked at least while the energy is being transmit.
The limits of this study’s results : this is correlational, so it shows these voices travel with different states, not that they cause them, and it's a single survey of mostly young, white undergraduates, so the pool of variant subjects is shallow.
It also measures the mind talking to the general self and not specific body parts. In my work the conversation is routed deliberately through direct locations of the body, which is central to how I healed the traumatic impact of knee injuries, arthritic symptoms and heart issues.
My key takeaway from this study : how you address yourself is not incidental. The managing voice and the kind voice do different work - and when the material is difficult, the difference decides whether the moment becomes repair or just more pressure.
The underlying intent, the subconscious desire beneath the spoken words is the critical piece here, and again, something core in Somatic Mechanics. It’s the difference between a “fixing voice” landing as critiquing pressure rather than care.
Grzybowski J, Brinthaupt TM (2022). Behavioral Sciences 12(9):300. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9495966/
Important detail alert! It Turns out that Pronouns matter in self-talk
There's a companion study worth knowing about, and it goes one step further than Grzybowski’s. Where that study shows that different inner voices travel with different states, this one shows that changing how you address yourself actually causes a measurable shift.
Ethan Kross and colleagues ran seven experiments, 585 people total, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The setup: before a stressful task - meeting a stranger, giving a public speech, thinking through a future worry - participants were told to reflect on their feelings in one of two ways. Half used “I" and “my." The other half used their own name or “you."
That's the key; A pronoun swap.
The results were consistent across five separate outcome studies:
People who used their own name performed better on the actual task, as rated by independent judges who didn't know which group anyone was in. They experienced less shame and less negative affect afterward. They appraised the upcoming stressor as more of a challenge and less of a threat - meaning their read was, “I can handle this" rather than, “this is going to crush me."
They ruminated less in the aftermath. Less replaying, less picking it apart. And this held equally well for people who scored high on social anxiety as for those who didn't - which matters, because it suggests the tool works for the people who need it most.
The mechanism, per the authors : using your own name creates a small psychological distance from the immediate emotional storm. Enough distance to see the situation, not enough to disconnect from it. They frame it as linguistic self-distancing.
Why this matters for what I teach: in a session, when someone is deep in it and I ask them to describe what's happening, the shift from, “I feel trapped" to, "you feel trapped" or, “[their name] feels trapped" is a meaningful mechanism.
It's a documented, causal move that changes stress physiology, performance, and how the mind appraises what it's up against. The body-directed version of this in my work - addressing specific locations in the body with faith the system knows what to do with - the study doesn't test that part, as it’s too in the nuances. However, the study does prove the more general point that the form of self-address is not neutral and it does real work.
Something to consider… every test in this study was about social stress - job interviews, public speaking, meeting new people. There was nothing tracked in the somatic aspects, aka physical pain or the deeper body-held material my work is aimed at.
This is also a lab study of college students and online workers, not clinical populations, so there may be some unseen sloppiness in the data hygiene.
Kross E, Bruehlman-Senecal E, Park J, Burson A, Dougherty A, Shablack H, Bremner R, Moser J, Ayduk O (2014). Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106(2):304-324. Seven studies, N = 585. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24467424/
So what did we learn?
The science establishment still has a ways to go in measuring more nuanced dynamics. However, it’s clear to me anecdotally that science will catch up.
There are people in the field who do care about finding out if this stuff is true, and some of them were clearly present within a few of these studies.
So here’s a few things worth pointing to, since this piece has covered a ton.
Interoception - the ability to read your own body - is trainable, and training it moves the needle on anxiety.
Body-based approaches for trauma outperform their own controls, and they hold where talk-based approaches relapse. Insight fades. Something that goes through the body tends to stay.
Breathwork does its own job - it earns its own claim, and it isn't a stand-in for the rest of somatic work. And ancient meridian-based work has real evidence behind it, whether or not the mechanism is what the old maps said.
Suppression tracks with worse physical outcomes, though the study we have on that is small and borderline. My session experience says the effect is real; the science hasn't caught up yet.
Mindfulness gets a bad rap in the headlines because the studies keep measuring it with the wrong metrics. Presence isn't a mood management tool. Once you separate those two, the, “meditation doesn't work", studies stop looking like a threat and start looking like the wrong instrument on the right thing.
And how you address yourself matters. The register of the inner voice does real work, and the form of self-address - pronouns and all - has a causal effect on stress, performance, and how you appraise what's in front of you.
The science establishment still has a ways to go in measuring the more nuanced dynamics. But it's clear anecdotally that it will catch up. There are people in the field who do care about finding out if this stuff is true, and some of them were clearly present within a few of these studies.
One more thing
Nobody has yet to run a randomized controlled trial on my Somatic Mechanics + Litmus System.
If anyone wants to, message me and I’ll support as best I can.
While I have numerous endorsements toward this work on an anecdotal, practical level, I can say that almost every load-bearing component of my work has independent support in real journals.
“Interoceptive" training - Proven.
Breath and autonomic regulation - Proven many times over.
Body-based trauma processing - Proven for specific populations (women with treatment-resistant PTSD, via yoga) and moving in the right direction elsewhere.
Talking to yourself - Proven.
Talking to your body - Not yet proven; the field hasn't tested it yet.
Somatic movement - Emerging evidence, meta-analyses landing in the last two years.
Moving emotion through the body, rather than stuffing it down - is not yet proven, but at least being studied with structures of study likely to improve. And it is available to experience through systems like Vipassana and plant medicine.
Somatic Mechanics and Litmus methods include science-validated parts as well as ‘shamanically’ validated and anecdotally validated on a large scale. It survives contact with people whose job it is to poke holes and I love it.
Rage around surpressed communication might look or feel like this…
To summarize : Yes, emotions and healing, happen and live through the body, But these studies scratch an itch rather than take it away
Scientifically, more work is to be done here. Science validates a few pieces of my work but not the whole thing. And I might learn something new and update my model, or science might catch up and improve what they can measure.
So here’s my hypothesis
This doesn’t mean the brain isn’t involved in emotional processing - it means the body is always a part of the puzzle.
At least that’s my hypothesis from lived experience and my own lens on these studies cross-referenced with ancient wisdom.
As for the ancient wisdom meets my own practical experience lens, here’s how I have learned to understand and experience the relationship between brain, body and mind :
The brain is an organ.
The brain is like a cursor directing our attention to experience and activate processing things, both in conscious and subconscious manners.
The mind is a created structure of consciousness patterning.
It’s a structure containing a process of thinking, feeling, consciousness and responding (someone else might describe it better) - it works with and embeds in the nerve system.
The body is the meat machine we live in and the brain and mind live and exist within it.
The mind and emotional experience is mapped through the body.
From wisdom shared through indigenous and shamanic spaces, the brain is seen more of a receiver and transmitter, with an ability to operate the guidance of our attention.
It processes but more like a conductor with the whole system, rather than exclusively within itself. The brain regions seem to correspond to areas of the body or types of activity according to neuroscientists. That’s all I have there.
A mind is considered the structure of ‘being’, Someone can have many ‘minds’. I can be in my artist ‘mind’ or my ‘healer’ mind and in each one, I feel like a subset of parts of myself. My sense of time changes and my ability to focus.
My body and your body have been tracking and recording lived experience since before we could create words for any of it. That's not a metaphor and it's not a belief system - it's a deliberate design feature we all have. It contains a measurable relationship to how you feel, how you decide, and how well you hold up under load.
Most people never learned how to experience the signals - some because of coping adaptations in childhood, and most because the system has never been taught as essential human wisdom - which it is.
If you want to experience these ideas for yourself…
Somatic Mechanics will teach you the language. The Litmus method (LTMS) gives you the interpretation key: Location, Temperature, Motion, Speed. Four questions that turn, “I'm stressed" into something specific enough to actually work with.
The body's been talking this whole time. Get fluent and your lived experience gets more clarity so you can live more.
All the studies above were verified against primary sources. Links go to the papers, not to summaries of the papers so you can come to your own conclusions.
