Introduction
At Somatic Psychotherapy Center, we have many clients who reach out to us who have anxiety while living in New York City. These individuals are often highly capable, conscientious, and self-aware who feel a great amount of internal pressure to perform. They might also ruminate constantly about things that might go wrong in their careers, their relationships, or social situations, to the point that it significantly impacts their day-to-day experience.
Our clients often report that while, on the outside, their lives might look great, on the inside they are struggling with something very different. They describe a constant sense of tension. Feeling clenched or on edge. Feeling like it is hard to fully relax into a moment, even when there is nothing obviously wrong.
Many people describe feeling as though their system never quite turns off. Even during moments that are meant to be restful, there is a sense of monitoring or vigilance that remains in the background. Over time, especially living in New York City, this can become exhausting. Many people start to wonder why, despite years of reflection, insight, or therapy, their anxiety still feels so physical and persistent.
When Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough
Many of our clients report having spent years in talk therapy, developing a strong understanding of where their anxiety comes from. They can often trace it back to early family dynamics around performance or approval, experiences of not feeling safe socially, previous trauma, or long periods of chronic stress or acute trauma.
Anxiety can arise from many different places. Internal and external pressure to perform. Disconnection from self or others. Life transitions that were never fully metabolized. Longstanding questions about trust, safety, or belonging. And yet, despite this awareness, they often say the same thing: the anxiety is still there.
This is often the point at which people begin seeking alternative ways of working with anxiety. This includes somatic, ketamine-assisted, and relational approaches like the ones we specialize in at Somatic Psychotherapy Center.
Somatic Psychotherapy: A Different Way of Understanding Anxiety
At Somatic Psychotherapy Center, we do not approach anxiety solely as a symptom we need to fix or solve, even though reducing suffering is, of course, part of the work.
Instead, we tend to approach anxiety as something that has developed for a reason. Anxiety often reflects a nervous system response rooted in survival and physiology. It carries information about unmet needs, unresolved emotional material, or areas of life that feel uncertain or unsafe.
From this perspective, we cannot simply reason away anxiety. Instead, we see anxiety as something that needs to be listened to, understood, and worked with at the level at which it is operating.
This opens the door to somatic and bottom-up exploration, or therapeutic approaches that work with experience before cognition. In these approaches, we start by learning how to notice what happens in the body, how to move deeper emotions that may be held beneath anxiety, and how to build more capacity to stay present with uncertainty rather than immediately trying to control it.
Working with anxiety in this way often leads far beyond symptom relief and into deeper psychological integration.
How We Work With Anxiety Using Somatic Therapy
This is why we use somatic therapy alongside talk therapy.
Talk therapy can sometimes keep people oriented toward thinking, explaining, and reflecting. While this can be helpful, it often leaves the body out of the process. There are almost always layers of emotional experience beneath anxiety that are difficult to access through language alone.
We often ask, when working with anxiety, what other feelings might this anxiety be protecting a person from feeling? What happens when the body is allowed to slow down just enough to notice what is underneath the urgency?
Somatic therapy allows us to take a “bottom-up” approach rather than relying only on top-down insight. This helps us access emotional and physiological layers that are often driving anxiety without being fully conscious.
Our role at Somatic Psychotherapy Center is to build a safe and trusting therapeutic relationship so that this exploration can happen through felt experience. Regulation, attunement, and embodied sensing become central as ways of helping the nervous system experience something new. To do this, we draw on many different therapy modalities, including Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Therapy, and Ketamine Assisted Therapy.
Healing Anxiety Through Somatic and Relational Experience
As this work unfolds, anxiety often begins to point more clearly toward what has been underneath it.
For many people, this includes the perfectionism that once helped them feel safe as children, or the pressure absorbed in school or work environments, or the ongoing question of how to trust themselves and develop agency in the places where they feel most constrained. There may be layers of grief, loss, anger, shame, and joy hiding just beneath the anxious experience.
We work together to uncover these roots of anxiety, but we do not stop at awareness.
Using somatic tools, we work directly with what is uncovered. This may involve allowing fear responses to complete, attuning to younger and more vulnerable parts of the system that keep anxiety in place, grieving past losses, and supporting the nervous system in experiencing safety in ways it may not have before.
Our goal is not just understanding, but rather to have a different experience that shifts how anxiety is held. With somatic therapy for anxiety, we work together to experience moments of attunement, safety, agency, trust, and release from anxiety within the therapeutic relationship, and then gradually bringing those experiences into daily life.
Who Somatic Therapy for Anxiety Helps the Most
Somatic therapy for anxiety often resonates with people who feel that their anxiety lives primarily in their body, not just in their thoughts., and who have tried talk therapy for years with little progress in changing their anxiety.
It can be especially helpful for people who have already done significant insight-oriented work and feel that, despite understanding themselves well, their anxiety patterns have not shifted. This work requires patience and curiosity, and a willingness to slow down rather than push for immediate relief.
FAQ: Somatic Therapy for Anxiety
What is somatic therapy for anxiety?
Somatic therapy for anxiety focuses on working with bodily experience and nervous system patterns rather than relying only on cognitive insight.
Why doesn’t thinking my way out of anxiety work?
Because anxiety is often maintained through physiological and deeper emotional responses that do not change through reasoning alone.
Can somatic therapy help chronic anxiety?
Yes. It is often helpful when anxiety feels persistent, physical, or resistant to insight-based approaches.
Do you still talk in somatic therapy?
Yes. Talk therapy is part of the process, but it is integrated with body-based exploration.
How is this different from coping strategies?
Rather than managing symptoms, somatic therapy works with the underlying patterns that maintain anxiety.
Work With Us
What would it be like to stop relating to anxiety as something that is wrong with you?
For many people, healing does not mean anxiety disappears entirely. It means developing a different relationship with their nervous system, one that is less driven by control and more grounded in trust.
When anxiety is understood as something that once helped you survive, the work becomes less about elimination and more about learning how to respond differently, over time, with support.
If you’re interested in working with us, reach out using our Contact page.
