Body psychotherapy
through a disability lens.
Somatic work is often assumed to be automatically disability-friendly, because it centres the body. It isn’t automatic. Body psychotherapy carries its own inherited assumptions about what a body can do.
Questions worth asking of any somatic method
- What counts as bodily defence when a body genuinely has physical limitations?
- When does “collapse” describe autonomic experience, and when might it simply be disability?
- Does an intervention assume standing, walking, symmetrical movement, or muscular capacity?
- Does embodiment work implicitly treat the “healthy body” as normative?
- Can disability be misread as trauma physiology?
- Can necessary dependence be pathologised as a defence to be worked through?
- How should concepts like grounding be understood when someone cannot stand?
- What does “completion of a defensive action” mean when the action itself is physically constrained?
A critical canon, not a devotional one
This isn’t an argument against somatic work — it’s an argument for reading its major thinkers critically rather than assuming their frameworks are neutral. That includes Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, Gerda Boyesen, David Boadella, Lisbeth Marcher, Ron Kurtz, Stanley Keleman, Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Allan Schore, Daniel Siegel, Babette Rothschild, Janina Fisher, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Moshe Feldenkrais, Thomas Hanna, and Eugene Gendlin.
The aim is the same question, asked of each: what does this theory illuminate, what does it distort, and what assumptions about bodies or normality did it inherit?
Trauma concepts, applied without erasing disability
Nervous-system language — window of tolerance, polyvagal theory, fight/flight/freeze/fawn, titration, pendulation, orienting, resourcing — is powerful, but it isn’t meant to become “everything is dysregulation.” The disability lens asks how these concepts apply without erasing real danger, medical experience, structural discrimination, chronic uncertainty, pain, fatigue, dependency, or embodied limitation.