Therapist’s Body

On somatic practice, neurodivergence, and the therapist who lives in her head

I am, professionally speaking, very good at noticing bodies.

The tension in a jaw. The breath that stops mid-sentence. The hands that start moving before the words arrive, reaching for something the mind hasn't caught up with yet. I notice when someone's shoulders creep towards their ears during a silence. I notice when a client's body says no while their mouth says I'm fine.

This is what it means to work somatically. To take seriously the idea that people are not brains carried around by reluctant flesh, but bodies that think, feel, remember, and know. Often before any of it reaches language.

And then I go home and live entirely in my head.

We don't have bodies. We are bodies.

There's a line from Merleau-Ponty that I return to often, and badly paraphrase to clients: the body is not an object in the world, but our means of having a world at all. He wasn't being poetic. He was making a philosophical claim that most of Western thought had got backwards. We don't have bodies. We are bodies. Perception doesn't happen to us. It happens through us — through the thickness of muscle and breath and sensation that we tend to treat as packaging for the real stuff happening upstairs.

In therapy, this matters enormously. When I sit with a client who is neurodivergent, who has spent decades masking, who has learned to override every signal their body sends because the world told them their signals were wrong, I am sitting with someone whose relationship to their own flesh has been profoundly disrupted.

Not broken. Disrupted. Rerouted. Made strategic.

Masking is not just a cognitive act. It is a bodily practice. It lives in the gut that learns not to register hunger at the wrong time. In the hands that learn not to move. In the face that learns to perform interest, calm, surprise in the right sequence at the right moment. The neurodivergent body that masks is a body in constant negotiation with itself, suppressing its own intelligence in order to be legible to others.

And then we invite that person into a therapy room and ask them to feel.

What happens to the therapist's body?

I recently started doing The Class by Taryn Toomey. It's a somatic movement practice: repetitive, loud, sometimes uncomfortable. You're invited to make noise, to stay with sensation rather than narrate it, to move without performing coherence. It is not, by any reasonable definition, relaxing.

What it is, for me, is confronting.

Because here's the thing about being a therapist whose work is deeply somatic: I spend all day attuning to other people's bodies. Tracking their nervous systems. Noticing the micro-movements that reveal what language conceals. And I am good at it. I am trained for it. It is, in many ways, easier to notice someone else's body than to inhabit my own.

Merleau-Ponty wrote about what he called the body schema — the pre-reflective sense we have of our own bodies in space, the way we reach for a door handle without calculating the distance, the way a musician's fingers know the keys before the mind has named the note. The body schema is not conscious. It is not a representation. It is the body knowing itself through its own activity.

But what happens to the body schema of someone who has spent their professional life directed outward? Whose bodily attention is trained, hour after hour, on another person's breath, another person's stillness, another person's pain?

I think, honestly, it gets quiet. Not peaceful-quiet. Forgotten-quiet. The way a room you never enter starts to gather dust.

Therapists are trained to attune. We are not trained to be attuned to. The therapeutic frame positions us as the one who holds, notices, witnesses — rarely as the one who is held. Supervision helps, but supervision is still largely a cognitive practice: we talk about what happened in the room, we reflect, we process. The body sits in the chair while the mind does the work. Again.

The double burden

And if you're neurodivergent, as I am, there's a layer underneath this. Because you've already spent a lifetime learning to monitor yourself from the outside. Learning to watch your own body as if it were someone else's, checking it for errors, adjusting it for palatability. The transition into therapeutic work can feel almost seamless: you were already practised at tracking bodies. You just turned the skill outward and called it a career.

I say this with humour, but I also say it with recognition. The neurodivergent therapist's body carries a double burden of directed attention: the masking that preceded the training, and the training that reinforced the masking's basic architecture. Look outward. Monitor. Adjust. Repeat.

What The Class does — and I suspect what any genuinely somatic practice does when you commit to it — is refuse to let you stay in that position. You cannot observe yourself doing burpees. You cannot narrate your way through a held squat while someone is telling you to breathe and make noise. The practice asks you to be in your body rather than about your body, and the difference, when you've spent years in the second mode, is vast.

The lived body

Merleau-Ponty distinguished between the objective body — the body as seen from outside, measured, described, diagnosed — and the lived body — the body as experienced from within. Therapy, at its best, is an invitation to move from the first to the second. To stop explaining what your body does and start listening to what it knows.

But therapists rarely get that invitation directed at themselves.

Here's what I'm circling around, and I'll say it plainly: I think many neurodivergent people have spent years in talk therapy trying to articulate experiences that don't live in language. And I wonder whether the most therapeutic thing isn't always more talking. Sometimes it's finding a practice that lets your body move without asking it to explain itself.

This is not an argument against therapy. More so I am talking about expanding what we mean by it. And it's a confession, of sorts, from a therapist who needed a loud, sweaty, uncomfortable movement practice to remember what she already knew: that the body is not an afterthought. It's the whole thought.

We are our bodies. Not: we have them, use them, maintain them, override them, perform through them, monitor them for the comfort of others.

We are them.

The question is whether we're willing to find out what that actually feels like. Not as a concept, but as a practice. Not in our clients' bodies. In our own.