Talking about the thing won’t change the thing: Why you need somatics & embodied practices

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having talked about your pain for years, and still feeling it live in the same place in your chest, the same tight coil in your belly, the same old ache, the same familiar loop you get caught in over and over again.

You've named the thing, you’ve talked about the thing, your friends know about the thing, you've traced its origins back to childhood, back to loss, back to the moments that shaped you. You understand it, intellectually.

And yet! It persists.

This is one of the most important things I want to say to anyone who is in the midst of healing: talking about the thing is not the same as healing the thing.

Why Understanding Isn't Enough

We live in a culture that deeply trusts language, that exalts the brain, where intellect is king.  We believe that if we can name something, explain it, trace its roots, we will become free of it. And while language has its place of course,  it is a bridge, a container, a way of making meaning — it cannot reach into the subcortical regions of the brain where traumatic and stressful experience actually lives.

As I've explored in other writing, traumatic experiences — including grief, heartbreak, chronic stress, and early relational wounds — are often encoded not as narrative but as sensation, implicit memory, and embodied knowing. They live in the right hemisphere of the brain: felt, wordless, pre-verbal. They live in the body. And they do not respond to being talked at.

Its not a flaw! It’s neurobiology. And often we have some strong intellectualizer parts that want to keep us talking instead of feeling.

In a IFS-informed somatic trauma healing training I’m a part of, Dr. Frank Anderson — a psychiatrist and leading voice in trauma work — put it plainly: “You can talk to an intellectual part till you're blue in the face and nothing is going to change. Most psychotherapies teach talking. You talk to me, I'll talk to you. I'll give you a great interpretation. It doesn't work. It doesn't heal trauma."

What he described next is something that anyone who has sat in a therapist's office week after week, year after year, might find both validating and quietly paradigm-shifting: citing the work of Bruce Perry, he noted that it is literally impossible to change the nervous system in fifty minutes once a week. The research simply doesn't support it. The brain doesn't work that way.

So what does work?

Repetitive, Receptive Corrective Experiences

The science of neuroplasticity — the brain's capacity to change and form new neural pathways — tells us something important: change requires repetition. Every time we have a thought, feeling, or experience, we reinforce an existing neural network. If we are constantly stressed, anxious, or caught in old patterns of reaction, we are literally reinforcing the neural architecture of that pain. If you’ve ever lived through mud season on country roads, you’re probably well aware of how ruts get formed in the road, and how challenging it can be to avoid them.

To change the brain, we need what Dr. Anderson calls repetitive microcorrective experiences — not one profound insight in a therapy session, but hundreds of small moments of healing woven into daily life. This is also why somatic based follow up integration sessions post psychedelic healing experiences are key. Moments where the nervous system gets to practice something new. Where a part that learned to contract around pain gets to practice, gently, opening. Where we start to build trust with ourselves.

And crucially — these corrective experiences need to be felt in the body. Not just understood. Not just witnessed from a comfortable analytical distance. They need to land, be received and integrated at a somatic body-based level.

This is why practice matters so much more than insight alone. This is why healing requires not just a weekly session, but a relationship with your own body and heart— tended daily, with care, consistency, and compassion.

The Practice of "Being With": A Somatic and Buddhist Lens

One of the most powerful forms of corrective experience available to us is the practice of being with our own inner experience with compassion rather than judgment.

This is where somatic work and Buddhist-informed practices meet in truly transformative way.

In the Buddhist tradition, particularly in the Theravada and Tibetan streams, there is a recognition that our suffering often comes not from the original pain itself, but from our relationship to it — the tightening, the resistance, the desperate wish that it were otherwise. When we contract around pain, we amplify it. When we can meet it with spaciousness and warmth, something begins to move.

Tara Brach's RAIN practice is one of the most accessible and beautiful expressions of this in a contemporary context. Ive shared it before and I’ll share it again (and again!) RAIN is a sequence of four gentle steps designed to bring mindful self-compassion to whatever is arising:

Recognize — what is here? Can you notice what you are feeling without flinching away or rushing past it?

Allow — can you let it be here, even just for this moment, without trying to fix or escape it?

Investigate — with genuine curiosity, what does this feel like in the body? Where does it live? What does it need?

Nurture — can you offer this part of yourself something tender — a hand on the heart, a breath, a word of care?

The power of RAIN is not merely intellectual. It is somatic. When we turn toward our experience instead of away from it, the nervous system registers something new: this is safe to feel. I am not alone in this. That moment — repeated again and again — is itself a corrective experience. One that can slowly, over time, begin to rewire the patterns of fear and avoidance that keep us frozen in our pain.

Self-Compassion as Neurological Medicine

There is a reason that practices like RAIN, loving-kindness meditation, and somatic self-holding are not just spiritual techniques — they are, in a very real sense, neurological medicine.

I say that because time and time again I have clients who feel incredibly resistant towards practicing self compassion. I get it! People are afraid that if we practice kindness towards the parts of ourselves that are driving us mad, we will essentially be giving them permission to continue this bad behavior.

When we place a hand on our heart and breathe into a place of pain, we are activating the parasympathetic nervous system. We are releasing oxytocin. We are signaling to the body that the perceived threat has passed, that it is safe to soften. We are doing, in a quiet and embodied way, exactly what the nervous system needs to shift out of the survival-dominant state that keeps old wounds alive.

But here is the key: it has to be practiced. Not once. Not when things get unbearable and we finally remember to be kind to ourselves. Regularly. Daily, ideally. The way you would water a plant, tend a garden, show up for someone you love, or brush your teeth.

Self-compassion is not a belief or an attitude. It is a practice — a somatic, relational, lived practice. And every time we engage it, we are laying down new neural architecture. We are building the internal corrective experience that our nervous systems have always needed.

And paradoxically, the more we can accept, soften, and offer compassion to the parts of ourselves we dislike, the more likely we are able to make a change.

Why Somatics Is the Missing Piece

For all of this to land AKA for insight to become healing, the body must be part of the process.

This is not a soft, woo-woo claim. It is grounded in the same neuroscience that maps the peripheral nervous system flowing through every muscle and organ of our body. Psychotherapy, as a field, has historically focused almost exclusively on the autonomic nervous system — the heart rate, the breath, the gut. But the somatic nervous system — the one that innervates our muscles, the one that governs our movement, our posture, the way we hold and brace and collapse — is equally implicated in trauma, and has been largely left out of the conversation.

Movement matters. Touch matters. The slow tightening and releasing of a muscle held in grief matters. The painting that lets the body speak what words cannot carries. The hand placed over a hurting heart matters.

Somatic practices meet us below the level of narrative. They speak the language of the right hemisphere: sensory, non-linear, relational, embodied. They offer the nervous system something it cannot receive from words alone — a direct, felt-sense experience of something different.

This is the gift of somatic work. And this is why it must be woven into daily life.

An Invitation

If you are in the midst of healing something, grief, old wounds, anxiety, heartbreak, the quiet ache of having not been seen,I want to offer you this:

The understanding you have is not wasted. It matters. But it is a beginning, not an endpoint.

Most likely, you don’t need more analysis. You don’t need to tell the story one more time.

What you most likely need is consistent practice.

Small, consistent, embodied moments of meeting yourself with presence and compassion.

Moments where the body gets to experience, again and again, that it is held.

Try RAIN today — not as a concept to understand, but as a somatic practice to inhabit. Find the feeling in your body. Let it be here. Get curious about its texture. Place a hand somewhere that needs it. Breathe.

Do this not once, but many (many!) times.

Your process needs your embodied presence, and we cultivate embodied presence through practice.

In need of more somatic support?

If you are seeking support with grief, anxiety, or emotional healing and you're ready to move beyond the talking, I offer somatic bodywork and holistic coaching to support you in that process. Explore working with me through my three-month program, The Embodied Path, a 1:1 somatic healing and embodied spirituality container designed to support you through change, transitions, and loss.