At The Atypical View, we often work with late diagnosed-autistic clients who have found that traditional approaches, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), don’t always meet their needs. Research has shown that CBT can fall short in the neurodiverse community, especially when it relies too heavily on logic and thought-based strategies. We talk about CBT and it’s shortcomings in the neurodiverse community here.
Somatic work provides a more embodied way of healing and self-discovery. For neurodivergent folks, who frequently struggle with challenges such as poor interoception (the ability to sense what is happening inside the body), somatic practices can be especially transformative.
Why Somatics Work for Neurodivergence
Somatic therapy focuses on awareness of bodily sensations, movements, and nervous system regulation. For many neurodivergent individuals, this approach can be life-changing.
Neurodivergent people, especially those with autism or ADHD, or trauma histories, often struggle with:
- Poor interoception: difficulty sensing hunger, fullness, fatigue, or tension.
- Dissociation: feeling disconnected from the body or environment under stress.
- Alexithymia: difficulty naming emotions and feeling them in the body
Somatic practices directly target these challenges, providing tools that help clients reconnect to themselves.
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The Atypical View Podcast on this topic:
Key Benefits of Somatic Therapy
Through guided practices that increase awareness of bodily sensations, movements, and nervous system states, somatic therapy helps clients improve their connection to their physical experience. This can support:
- Improved interoception: developing awareness of hunger, fullness, tension, fatigue, etc as they show up in the body.
- Decreased alexithymia: along with interoception, this improves our ability to connect with what emotions we are feeling and where we feel it in the body.
- Reduced dissociation: by gently bringing awareness back into the body, somatic work helps decrease tendencies to “disconnect” from oneself during stress.
- Increased mindfulness: Any act of mindfulness interrupts a dissociation cycle and weakens it’s grip on us, to engage in somatic work inherently is practicing mindfulness
- Presence and grounding: learning to enter the body more fully, which allows for deeper self-regulation and being more present in everyday life.
- Alternative to overthinking: rather than relying on logic and mental strategies alone, somatic therapy empowers clients with embodied tools that can bypass cycles of rumination or overwhelm.
Somatics as a Pathway to Healing
For late diagnosed-autistic individuals, or those navigating ADHD and complex PTSD, somatic therapy offers more than just symptom relief. It creates a pathway toward resilience, regulation, and self-discovery.
At The Atypical View, therapy and coaching always includes somatic elements to help neurodivergent clients feel safer in their bodies, improve their sense of presence, and create practical ways of moving through the world. While therapy provides space for deep healing and emotional processing, coaching offers additional tools for integrating these skills into everyday life.
Somatic work reminds us that healing doesn’t just happen in the mind, it happens in the body, too.
