Somatic Therapy for Athletes and What to Do When You Understand Exactly Why You Are Like This and Nothing Has Actually Changed
Most of the former athletes who find me have already done some version of therapy.
They can tell me all about why they struggle with perfectionism and trace their anxiety back to coaches or parents. They can explain why they hate to slow down and rest or recount all the times in their sport career where they fell short and didn’t feel good enough. They’ve journaled, meditated, listened to hours upon hours of self growth and mindset podcasts. They have all the insight in the world r but continue to leave sessions feeling like nothing is changing. As a former college athlete and current mental health therapist, I know this experience well because it’s been my own for the majority of my post-sport healing path until I found more somatic based therapy.
In this blog, I’m going to address why insight alone often stops short for people who came out of sport, what it actually means to bring your body into therapy, and what that looks like in a session, so that you can decide whether it sounds like something that would support you.
Key Takeaways
Insight isn't the same thing as change, especially for former athletes trained to analyze their way through everything. So much of what keeps people stuck lives in the body and nervous system, not just in thought, and sport often teaches you to override your body's signals along the way. "Trauma is stored in the body" is a popular phrase, but what's actually happening is more precise: a protective response that never got to complete. Somatic therapy isn't the one missing key for everyone, but for many former athletes, especially those who intellectualize or feel stuck despite doing "all the work," reconnecting with the body is part of what actually creates change.
Why isn't talking enough to create change?
I want to start right away by saying this is not a blog bashing talk therapy. Talking is an extremely important part of the therapy and healing journey. Talk therapy works well for many people and many challenges they bring to therapy. But talking, cognition and insight alone aren’t meant to carry the sole load of healing. They often aren’t enough to create change and rewire patterns and challenges that keep us stuck.
For former athletes this comes up constantly, because you were trained to analyze. Breaking down film, identifying what went wrong, correcting it, and moving on is a genuinely useful skill set, and it transfers straight into a therapy office. You can arrive with your history organized, describe the pattern accurately, name where it started, and still walk out feeling the same way you’ve felt for 20 years.
Our society, and sport culture specifically, emphasize thinking, cognition, and mindset as the answer to everything. We're taught that the answer to all our problems is thinking about things the “right” way and honing a tough, unwavering mentality.
But theres many things insight and mentality alone cannot touch. Understanding your history intellectually doesn't automatically give your body or your nervous system a different response.
So if this is the case, what does that mean and where do we go from here?
Why can't I feel my emotions?
For a lot of former athletes, emotions themselves feel uncomfortable, even unsafe. Feeling vulnerable can feel threatening, and most never actually got the practice of noticing, experiencing, or processing what they're feeling in the first place.
Long before sport ever enters the picture, we learn how to be with our emotions from our earliest attachment relationships and our family systems. For former athletes, sport then becomes another major place where that gets shaped and reinforced.
In sport, emotions are often explained as the opposite of mental toughness. They get labeled, both implicitly and explicitly, as weak, distracting, or something to rigidly control and eliminate. The expression of emotion in particular is often labeled as sensitivity or being "too much."
This is also deeply connected to the body. Sport turns your body into a performance entity. It’s something you train, measure, evaluate, rehab, and more. It often teaches you to override your signals, push past discomfort, and ignore what your body is telling you in the name of performance. Years of this influences how you sense into your body and actually feel what's happening, particularly as deeper, more vulnerable emotions arise.
So yes, athletes use their bodies constantly but that doesn’t mean they’re connected to it.
Through years of competitive sport, this compounds. The way you learned to relate to emotions early on, combined with what sport reinforced, shapes your overall capacity to be with and navigate emotion.
So what tends to happen? Patterns of emotional suppression, avoidance, distraction, and numbing take shape. For a lot of former athletes, the go-to move is to analyze instead of feel. "I often intellectualize rather than feel." "I try to solve my emotions as quickly as possible." This makes complete sense given everything sport taught you. Discipline and willpower were the tools. Control equaled strength.
Something that's less recognized or talked about is emotional volatility. Many former athletes tell me they feel out of control or experience a real sense of unpredictability with their emotions. They never know when something is going to set them off, and they feel confused about why they feel what they feel or respond the way they do.
None of this means something is wrong with you. It means you were never taught that emotions are information, signals about what matters, what's unresolved, and what your nervous system actually needs.
For some former athletes, this is also tied to something deeper: unresolved stress or trauma held in the nervous system.
Is trauma really stored in the body?
Kind of. The phrase “trauma is stored in the body” or “the body keeps the score” is reductionist and not nuanced enough. Your body and nervous system don’t file trauma away like a document, and it isn't sitting somewhere specific in your body, like your hips.
In order to understand this we have to look at the human survival or protective response. When a threat or stressor show up (real, perceived, or remembered) your brain and autonomic nervous system shift into a protective state and mobilize energy to address it in the name of keeping you safe. That's not a cognitive choice although we are able to bring cognition and awareness to this.
Once the threat or stressor is handled or it resolves, your brain and body are designed to complete the response and return back to baseline or homeostasis. Completion of our protective responses can’t be done through thinking alone, it must include the physiological (aka the body). If the stressor is ongoing, or if you didn't have the safety, support, or resources to navigate it at the time, that response never gets to complete. Your system stays stuck in protection.
And that incompletion has real, physical consequences. Chronic bracing and tension. Shallow, altered breathing. A harder time reading your own hunger, fatigue, or exhaustion. Changes in how your brain processes threat. This isn't imagined and it isn't a personal failing. It's a nervous system that's still running a pattern it never got to finish.
Your brain and nervous system are incredibly smart. They learn, adapt, remember and hold on to patterns because pattern recognition is what survival depends on.
This is what people actually mean when they say trauma is stored in the body. It's not that your trauma is sitting in one place. It's that the protective response never got to finish, and your body absolutely carries the impact of that, which is the piece worth understanding if you want to know why insight alone doesn't always change anything.
What is somatic or body-centered therapy?
Lets start by defining somatic. Soma means body so somatic therapy is any approach that intentionally includes the body, not just thoughts and cognition, as part of the work. There are many somatic therapy theories or interventions including things like Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, EMDR and Trainspotting. All of these approach the work from slightly different angles and sometimes have different goals depending on what the client needs.
For me, somatic therapy is less about the intervention or theory you’re using and more about how we’re integrating the mind and body. Somatic therapy isn't void of talking because talking and cognition are important. We’re helping you rebuild a relationship and a sense of connection to your entire internal experience, which includes your body, your emotions, and your nervous system responses. The goal is to build flexibility in how you attend to yourself and respond to the world around you. There are several key components that are the foundation of somatic work:
Safety and stabilization. A major piece of this work is helping you understand what safety actually is.Deb Dana describes safety as an embodied experience rather than a cognitive one (Dana, 2024). This becomes especially important for former athletes, because as we've talked about, many don't have the bandwidth or capacity to feel or process emotions yet. If you come into this work and are asked to immediately feel everything, without the resources or grounding to actually do that safely, there is the potential to flood or even re-traumatize your system.
Pacing. Many former athletes tend to be very type A and operate at 100 miles per hour. You want to get in, solve the problem, and get out as quickly as possible. Pacing slows that down on purpose. It's very hard to sense into your body and your nervous system when you don’t slow down enough to sense into whats actually showing up.
Co-regulation: Therapy, regardless of modality or intervention, is relational, because you're in relationship with another person as you do this work. But in somatic therapy specifically, co-regulation is a key component. Our nervous systems are wired to respond to and regulate, or dysregulate, off of other nervous systems. A major part of what a therapist is doing in this work is attuning to and tracking what's happening in your nervous system in real time, and extending regulation to you. That co-regulation is foundational to the healing itself. Sometimes it's what actually allows a protective response to finally complete, so the mind, body, and nervous system can reregulate, rewire, and re-pattern.
Choice. When we're working with protective responses and deep-rooted survival patterns, we're often working with something that took choice away. So while the work involves the body, what it's actually teaching you is agency and the ability to regain choice and stay in choice around your own process. Therapists are there to gently guide and walk alongside you but you are the ultimate decider when we go somewhere, how we get there, and how much intensity you can hold. This matters even more for former athletes, because so much of the athletic journey ran on the opposite of choice. You were told where to be, what to do, and how to do it.
How do I know if I need somatic therapy?
I'll start by saying that there is no one perfect modality or type of therapy that works for everyone. We all need different, individualized approaches to this work.
I'm not saying somatic therapy is the one missing key to your healing, or the missing key for every former athlete. I speak from personal experience here in that somatic work has been a critical part of my own healing journey, and a huge reason why I do the work I do as a therapist and coach. But that doesn't mean it's the answer for everyone.
Do I believe former athletes ultimately benefit from some sense of reconnection, or rebuilding a relationship with their body, to fully do this work? Yes. I believe that, and I've seen it, not just in my own life, but in the clients I sit across from every week. Because we’re working with the nervous system and your physiology I also find somatic or body centered therapy to be extremely de-pathologizing for former athletes because they can begin to see that they make perfect sense.
I think it can be particularly helpful for people who have strong intellectualization and suppression patterns, or for people who feel like they're doing all the work but aren't sensing any change or relief in what they're experiencing. I think it's imperative for people who are navigating the trauma spectrum and challenges like emotional flashbacks, constant hypervigilance and stress, panic attacks, and even physical symptoms like chronic pain.
At the end of the day, we know the therapeutic relationship is one of the biggest predictors of whether therapy actually works. So the most important thing is finding a therapist you can build real safety and trust with. From there, even small threads of reconnecting with your body can start to matter.
So as you finish reading this, I'd invite you to notice what came up while you read it. Where did this land in your body, and what did you feel? There's no correct answer, and whatever showed up is worth being curious about rather than something to talk yourself out of.
If you’ve done a lot of thinking about why you feel the way you do and you are ready to explore what is underneath the thinking, that is the work I do. At Perrin Wellness and Performance, therapy for former athletes is trauma-informed, relational, and includes your body as much as your mind. I am a licensed therapist and a former Division I athlete and coach, so the sport part is not something you will need to explain to me before we can begin. You can read more about individual therapy
Frequently Asked Questions
What is somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy is a broad term for therapeutic approaches that intentionally include bodily sensation and physiological responses in psychological work. The specific methods vary. Somatic Experiencing focuses heavily on internal sensation, while other therapists integrate body awareness into relational, trauma-focused, or cognitive work.
Is somatic therapy effective for PTSD?
Brom and colleagues (2017) found significant improvement in post-traumatic symptom severity and depression in a randomized controlled study of Somatic Experiencing with 63 participants. That is promising, and it is a smaller evidence base than the one behind established trauma-focused therapies. Research testing somatic approaches specifically with athletes remains very limited, so nobody can honestly claim it is proven for sport-related experiences.
What is the difference between EMDR and somatic experiencing?
EMDR is a structured trauma-focused therapy that pairs attention to distressing material with bilateral stimulation, most commonly eye movements. Somatic Experiencing puts more emphasis on tracking physical sensation and working gradually with your body's responses. EMDR currently has a substantially larger research base for PTSD.
Does somatic therapy help with fear of reinjury?
It can be a reasonable thing to explore, because fear of reinjury often shows up physically well after you have been medically cleared. Body-centered work pays attention to what happens in your body around the movement itself rather than only discussing the fear. Whether it is right for you depends on your history, your goals, and the training of the clinician you work with.
About the Author
Emily Perrin, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, former Division I soccer player, and former Division I coach. She works with current and former athletes who are dealing with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, identity loss, and the emotional weight that can come with years in competitive sports.
Having spent nearly 15 years in athletics, Emily understands the pressure athletes often feel to keep going, stay disciplined, and look like they have it handled, even when they are struggling. Her work combines clinical training with lived experience in sport.
Emily’s approach is trauma-informed and body-centered. She helps clients make sense of patterns like emotional shutdown, overthinking, people-pleasing, chronic stress, and harsh self-criticism. Her goal is to help athletes feel more grounded in who they are outside of performance, achievement, and sport.
She has supported athletes, coaches, teams, therapists, and sports organizations, including Division I programs and professional teams.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care, diagnosis, or treatment.
References
Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22189
Cosh, S. M., McNeil, D. G., Jeffreys, A., Clark, L., & Tully, P. J. (2024). Athlete mental health help-seeking: A systematic review and meta-analysis of rates, barriers and facilitators. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 71, 102586. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2023.102586
Dana, D. (2024). Foundations of polyvagal informed practice [Training].
Gouttebarge, V., Castaldelli-Maia, J. M., Gorczynski, P., Hainline, B., Hitchcock, M. E., Kerkhoffs, G. M., Rice, S. M., & Reardon, C. L. (2019). Occurrence of mental health symptoms and disorders in current and former elite athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(11), 700–706.
Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal. Penguin Random House.