Every moment in therapy — not just the heavy ones — is a conversation between two nervous systems. I feel it in subtle ways: a tightening in my chest, a flutter in my stomach, or a lightness I can’t quite name. My nervous system constantly attunes to the client’s, noticing the small rhythms, pauses, and cues — like the gentle shifts of wind through branches, signaling movement in the therapeutic/relational field.
Early in my work, I probably wouldn’t have recognized these cues. Now, I register them. My eyes may water, not because I’m feeling sad, but because something is moving in the field. Attending to my own system in the moment allows me to remain present, resourced, and available — a dance of co-regulation, not self-processing.
Capacity as the Ability to Bear Witness
Capacity speaks to the ability to bear witness — to ourselves and others. If we haven’t tended to our own wounds in our own therapy and reflective work, our nervous system can’t fully hold space for similar experiences in another, or even experiences that resonate on some level.
Capacity grows from knowing our own nervous system and cultivating self-attunement and regulation so that we can remain regulated, present, and responsive, moment to moment during sessions. This is always developing; and there is, and always will be, space for more capacity. This expanding capacity allows me to hold space with care, steadiness, and attuned presence — like a forest standing firm through shifting weather, providing shelter and support to the life within it.
The Body as Co-Regulatory Ally
Throughout sessions, I notice subtle bodily cues — a tightness in my chest, a flutter in my stomach, or a shift in posture — that signal to me how the material in the field is moving through both the client’s and my own nervous system. This is not about processing for myself, but about allowing the activation present in the session to be sensed, regulated, and moved in real time.
During sessions, my body helps me remain attuned to the client’s right hemispheric processes, including rhythms, pauses, and cues. Grounding through my feet, softening into my seat, or placing a hand on my heart are ways I support regulation as the work unfolds — like roots stabilizing a tree during a storm, providing resilience while still moving with the air currents around it.
These in-session practices enable me to bear witness and support clients in a way that fosters deeper, more integrated healing — a steady, embodied responsive presence that moves with the flow of the material in the therapeutic/relational field.
From Endurance to Attuned Presence
Many therapists may not fully realize the depth and importance of what holding space requires. Early in my practice, I didn’t realize that true attuned presence isn’t just about being available for the client — it requires an ongoing, intimate relationship with our own nervous systems and psyche.
My own process of learning to hold space deepened profoundly through the two-year Bringing the Body into PracticeSomatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training, which invited me to meet my nervous system and relational patterns with greater curiosity and care. It offered a living reminder that how we tend to ourselves shapes the ground we offer others. This means noticing my own activation in the moment, regulating my nervous system and responses, and continuing that work outside of sessions.
Presence is nurtured through small, somatic practices: noticing breath, posture, and tone; pausing when the client’s system shifts; or using grounding cues like rhythm through the feet or a hand on the heart. Each micro-moment of such noticing and tending strengthens the relational field and allows us to hold space for clients to be seen, felt, and cared for, without losing our own regulation — like water flowing gently around rocks, shaping a channel while continuing onward.
Relational Capacity: We Don’t Hold Alone
Therapy asks us to witness deep emotions and wounding — but capacity isn’t a solo endeavor. Connection with supervisors, peers, mentors, or even the natural world expands our nervous system’s tolerance and capacity. Holding space is inherently relational: the therapist’s system is influenced by, and influences, the client’s system, and support outside sessions builds my capacity, which ultimately strengthens both.
During a clinic in the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training, Lisa Mortimore, PhD shared something that stayed with me: We don’t become therapists without wounds, and we can’t become exceptional therapists without noticing and tending to them. Her words remind me that our own healing happens outside of sessions, so that inside the session, we can remain steady, attuned, and available.
Through my training, I came to see that holding space isn’t just about being available for the client — it begins with tending to our own systems first. Our inner work becomes the soil from which attunement and repair can grow.
Our capacity is shaped not by perfection, but by our willingness to meet what lives within us in our own reflective work — so we can bear witness to clients with tenderness, regulation, and repair. Every session, every moment, is like a river carrying both sediment and water: our own regulation helps the flow move smoothly, holding space for the client’s experiences without stagnation or turbulence. It’s an invitation to stay with, to soften, to keep becoming, like soil gradually nourishing roots and life over time.
A Gentle Closing
A therapist’s capacity is never fixed — it unfolds over time, in layers, through reflection, self-attunement, and connection. As therapists, we are expanding our capacity to stay present, attuned, and steady, even as new layers of experience arise in ourselves and in our clients. This work is ongoing, tender, and deeply human.
Each session, each moment, is an invitation to continue cultivating the capacity to bear witness, with care, compassion, and curiosity. By orienting, breathing, and noticing, I support my own regulation. This helps me remain fully present. Bearing witness doesn’t require endless endurance; it requires presence, embodied awareness, and relational attunement, all things which are at the heart of the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training.
Danielle Morran, MC, CCC is a relational therapist trained in Somatic Attachment Psychotherapyand embodied regulation. She supports clients in reconnecting with their body’s wisdom, cultivating awareness, regulation, and deeper connection, and fostering healing, growth, and meaningful relationships. To reach Danielle, go to her website, https://www.morrancounsellingtherapy.com/
I’ve been having lots of conversations with therapists looking to enroll in our Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training about working with the body in therapy. Lots of therapists identify that they in fact already do use the body in their clinical practices, by asking,
what’s happening in your body?
where do you notice that?
is there a sensation that tells you that?
and then what they share with me is that they often feel uncertain about what to do with that information, or how to take it beyond their initial question/intervention – of course, this is what we teach in SAP over the two years! These conversations inevitably beg the question, is that enough? Is it enough to have people identify what is happening in their body and then notice it, stay with it, watch it? My response is, enough for what? What is the purpose of drawing the client’s attention to their internal sensation or felt sense? What is the working theory, not only about why the therapist is inquiring about the body, but also inviting clients to stay with it? That’s the guiding question here, what is the purpose?
If the intention is to merely have people increase their capacity to be present, be with what is, and increase capacity to tolerate discomfort, then yes, the status quo of how people often use the body might be a worthwhile intervention, though perhaps not the best intervention, as most therapists, prior to somatic training, choose to include the body at a time when there is distress, intense emotion, or disconnection/disembodiment. (More on this later).
If the intention to help process and metabolize material in the system (relational and incident traumatic material), then no, just dropping in and noticing the sensation, and staying with it, particularly difficult or uncomfortable sensations, is not likely going to further the processing of the neurophysiological material or psyche reorganization, and if it does, it will be short-lived. What is likely though, is that simply focusing on the body during these times of arousal will move the system out of the processing window into high/hyper or low/hypo arousal as the dysregulation in the system creates more and more dysregulation. Alternatively, the client may continue to feel the sensation but not really garner further process or understanding from it – for example, the tightness remains tightness, so the intervention fizzles without any further clinical or embodied process unfolding.
In order to process (trauma, grief, loss, etc.), the work is to up and down regulate the autonomic nervous system along side the story. This is where BBP/SAP differs from other somatic dominant trainings – one of our guiding principles is that people need to tell their story, and be witnessed relationally, rather than just experience and process what is happening in their body, so working to re-organize the psyche and body in concert. When we invite the body into the clinical dialogue and process, we want to be able to work to help people to not only be present to what is happening within, but to the nuanced truths of the story that also help anchor and facilitate processing and internal re-organization, both of which are key to change.
Change is key to therapy. We know the body and psyche are wired together, and that trauma is held in the right (versus the left), so we understand as therapists how bringing the body into practice offers an effective way to attend to and process traumatic material (of all kinds) in order to regulate and process the physiological body and reorganize the psyche and internal working models, and ultimately bring forth a new narrative understanding of self and story.
For clinicians, working adeptly with the body necessitates a solid understanding of the Polyvagal Theory (Porges) (read, the Polyvagal made simple) and the Window of Tolerance (Siegal). These conceptual frameworks offer therapists a theoretical framework to guide the use of somatic interventions, rather than simply inserting them into the therapy. Further, I would suggest that correlating sensations and felt sense into this framework is necessary for therapists to have a sophisticated capacity to work with, and in the body.
If we circle back to these conversations I’m having about bringing the body into practice, it seems to me that what we are differentiating here is mindfulness and somatic processing. While there is overlap, they ultimately have different purposes. Mindfulness is a practice oriented towards increasing one’s capacity to be with what is. Somatic process has the intention to shift the internal state and process material. These are significant differences when thinking about the purpose of inviting the body into the clinical conversation. In this way, I want to underscore not only the difference between mindfulness and somatic therapy, but the difference in intention. Somatic therapy is used to process material. It may use mindful presence to attune and be with experience, but it at its core, it’s about shifting and processing—making it different, not learning to be with what is.
This fall I’ve been thinking a lot about the capacity to witness. I have been thinking about what supports it, what threatens it, what builds it, and for therapists, how we are called to witness the unbearable, the unspeakable, and at times, that which has not, and perhaps cannot, or cannot, at this time, be metabolized through the body and psyche of the people we sit with. This is the work we do in the clinical space. As therapists, we serve as witness, and in doing so, material that has been rendered unbearable, becomes tolerable enough to metabolize. Mucci (2018) speaks to this, “by taking in the pain of the other, and bearing witness to it, the other is enabled to retrieve those parts of his or her existence that seemed erased, dissociated, split and disconnected. This retrieval enables a transformation in the social connection, a sign of renewal, reconstitution, collective reparation, and rebirth” (Mucci, 2013 cited in Mucci, 2018, p. 176 – 177). Mucci speaks of this as rebirth as there is a return of vitality as the psyche integrates and the autonomic nervous system processes the life-threatening states held in the body, moving from hypo arousal or dorsal vagal into a stronger, dominant ventral vagal state.
But what happens when we as therapists are also called to witness horror and terror in the larger world, the one outside of our clinical space, and in response to it, we feel fear, despair or helplessness? How do we continue to do the work that we do, and what is called for, when we are taken to our knees by world events, when our clinical spaces are infiltrated with the happenings of the larger world? As an educator in Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy, I’m always thinking about, how do we become more and more robust, where do we lean, what do we lean into, what holds us, how do we maintain our witness when we stumble, and as we stand as witness for and with others, what do we need?
In this time and place in history, where we are inundated by geo-political chaos and disconcerting movements, both in our own small communities and around the world, I am aware of the toll it takes. I know that it taxes each of us as clinicians, even if we are able to shut out some of the bombardment of difficult news, it comes in through our practices, and of course impacts us energetically. I’ve been thinking about that in my own life, and in a broader way, the lives of the therapists I know.
I think about the work that we do. I am awash with memories, scraps of competing truths vying for primary remembering, primary knowing:
I remember that the body is “our primary text and starting point for knowledge” (Rountree, 2006, p. 98). This quiets me. I land.
I remember, “When we remain connected to our body knowledge, it will make it more difficult for the powers that be to control our minds” (Crawford, 1998, p. 57). I nod.
I remember, “A brain disconnected from the stomach, intestines, throat, heart, and other parts of our body isn’t only seriously impaired, it can be as deadly as the proverbial loose cannon” (Todd, 2001, p. 28). I nod.
I remember, “People who can’t trust their own body knowledge feel out of touch, have less tolerance for ambiguity, seek clearcut simple rules to determine their actions, tend to consider complex situations in simplistic terms, and are thus more likely to be swayed by “experts” and by naïve either/or arguments” (Todd, 2001, p. 24). I feel worry.
I remember, “reading the body as one would read a text, we used our lived experience as another valid and valued source of information and knowledge…” (Gustafson 1998, 52). I nod.
I return to remembering that the body is “our primary text and starting point for knowledge” (Rountree, 2006, p. 98). This quiets me. I land.
I come back to the truth that nothing remains static. Embodiment is an ever-shifting evolution. Paired with the body is the capacity to witness, to be present, to hear the testimony of the people we sit with, and to use my body and my regulation in the process, for the process. For me, this has been an ever evolving and expanding quest, and I hope that is for you too.
This past week has called me to dig deeper and steady myself as my perception of reality shifted, as did many peoples’, with the outcome of the US election. By happenstance, my weekly supervision group was the first clinical space I entered into after the US election. I am one of the two Canadians in the group, the others are American. We put aside our cases and we sat, we processed, we made sense, and most importantly we connected and stood as witness for one another.
Since then, I have needed to take time, to be with myself, and come back to what I know beyond this moment. I had to take a bird’s eye view of history, of humanity, and lean into the vastness of time, to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor did it fall in a day, and I had to find commonality of values with those that understand a way forward that is different from my own perspective. Remembering the goodness of people beyond their political leanings helped me remember how to connect across differences, even when the chasm feels vast. This was imperative, not finding it as a philosophical endeavor, but for myself, so I could find my ground again and stand, until the next time I stumble.
Crawford, L. 1998. “Including the Body in Learning Processes.” In Proceedings of the 17thAnnual Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education, edited by Maurice Taylor, 57-60. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.
Gustafson, D. L. 1998. “Embodied Learning about Health and Healing. Canadian Women Studies 17 (4): 52-55.
Rountree, K. 2006. “Performing the Divine: Neo-pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites. Body & Society 12 (4): 95-114.
Mucci, C. (2018). Psychoanalysis for a new humanism; Embodied testimony, connectedness, memory and forgiveness for a “persistence of the human”. International Forum of Psychoanalysis. 27:3, 176 – 187.
Todd, J. 2001. “Body Knowledge, Empathy and the Body Politic.” The Humanist (March/April): 23-28.
