Why Somatic Experiencing makes sense for neurodivergent people
If you've ever understood something completely — and still couldn't shift how it felt in your body — this is for you.
There's a particular kind of frustration that many neurodivergent people know well. Say a friend cancels plans at the last minute — they're apologetic, kind about it, and on a cognitive level you know they still value you. But your body doesn't get that memo. Your chest tightens. Your heart races every time you think about it. You can't concentrate. You've analysed it, talked it through, maybe even journalled about it. You know you're safe. And yet something in you is still braced, still waiting.
This isn't a failure of insight. It's a question of where the information needs to land — and for many of us, the body needs to learn safety directly, not through reasoning alone.
The body keeps its own records
When something overwhelming happens — a sudden shock, an accident, a moment of humiliation, a situation that moved too fast — the nervous system responds before the thinking brain has a chance to catch up. It mobilises survival energy: heart rate climbs, breath changes, muscles brace. This is normal. This is what bodies do.
What's less talked about is what happens when that response doesn't get to complete. When there's no moment of safety after the threat. When the body stays in a state of readiness — waiting, braced — long after the event has passed. That unresolved activation doesn't disappear. It goes quiet and becomes a background hum: reactivity that seems out of proportion, a nervous system that startles easily, emotions that flood before you can name them.
Why this hits differently when you're neurodivergent
For neurodivergent people, the nervous system is rarely starting from neutral. Before any particular event, there's already a significant load being managed: sensory processing, masking, the cognitive effort of translating your own internal experience into language that makes sense to others, the accumulated weight of years of adapting to environments not designed for you.
Many neurodivergent people also experience interoception — the sense of what's happening inside the body — differently. This might mean sensations feel more intense, more sudden, harder to locate or name. A spike of anxiety might arrive as a wave of full-body overwhelm rather than a background flutter. The line between an emotion and a physical crisis can feel very thin. Think of walking into a loud, brightly lit supermarket and feeling your body go into full alarm before you've consciously registered anything as threatening. When that's your baseline, anything that adds further dysregulation to the system can tip things quickly.
Understanding what happened is rarely enough. The body needs its own experience of safety — and that takes a different kind of work.
What Somatic Experiencing actually does
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach developed by Dr Peter Levine. Rather than working through trauma primarily via narrative and insight, SE works with the nervous system directly — tracking sensation, following activation as it moves through the body, and supporting the discharge of survival energy that has been held for too long.
In practice, this is slow, careful work. A key concept in SE is titration — working with very small amounts of activating material at a time, rather than diving into the full intensity of an experience. Another is pendulation: moving gently between states of activation and states of relative ease, gradually expanding the window of what the body can tolerate without overwhelming it.
For neurodivergent clients, this paced approach is often where something shifts. There's no pressure to narrate. No requirement to find the right words. The body's signals — a shift in breath, a release of tension in the shoulders, a sense of something settling — are treated as meaningful information, not background noise. Someone who shuts down completely whenever they sense disapproval at work, or who can't stop replaying a difficult conversation at 2am, isn't choosing to react that way. SE works with that, at the level where it's actually happening.
What this can look like over time
The changes that come from SE work tend to be quiet ones at first. A reaction that used to arrive at full intensity begins to have a little more space around it. The supermarket that used to feel impossible becomes something you can navigate, then something you barely think about. A situation that reliably triggered shutdown starts to feel slightly more navigable. Sleep becomes a bit more restful. Emotions, when they arrive, feel less like an emergency.
Over time, something more fundamental can shift: a growing sense that your body is a place you can be, rather than something you need to manage or escape. For many neurodivergent people who have spent years finding their own physiology difficult or confusing, that shift is significant.
If any of this resonates, I'd be glad to talk. You're welcome to book a free 15-minute consultation to get a sense of whether this approach might be a fit.