NERVOUS SYSTEM & TRAUMA THERAPY
The Body's Memory: Nervous System and Trauma Responses
Body-based approaches to healing trauma and overwhelm
The nervous system carries its own history. For many seeking trauma therapy in NYC, the challenge isn't remembering what happened—it's that the body continues to respond as if it's still happening. Long after an experience is over, the body may hold patterns of activation, shutdown, vigilance, or a sense of drifting out of presence. These reactions are evidence of how hard the system has worked, and how much it has been holding. This kind of therapy looks closely at what your body has been trying to communicate.
Rather than focusing on symptoms in isolation, somatic therapy pays attention to patterns: the ways you come toward and recede, how your system opens and closes, the shifts in pace or presence when something feels too close or not close enough. Within this, we often see recognizable nervous system signatures, such as:
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Heightened activation — a sense of being on, tracking everything, even in ordinary moments
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Collapse or dimming — losing access to feeling or clarity, as if the system pulls the lights down
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Vigilance — attuning to tone, timing, or subtleties that others might overlook
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Loss of presence — drifting, going blank, or feeling far away from yourself
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Push–pull — part of you leaning in, another part reflexively pulling back
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Emotional bottlenecking — feelings arriving all at once or not at all
These are the nervous system's adaptations to overwhelm, and each one tells us something about what you've lived through and what your system protects.
Somatic Approaches to Trauma
Therapists at Atrium approach trauma work differently. Some work more somatically through body-based techniques, some through talk therapy, some through parts work or an attachment-oriented lens. What unites us is an attunement to your rhythms: how your system opens, how it closes, and what those movements reveal about past overwhelm and present capacity.
The aim of somatic experiencing isn't to push your nervous system toward calm or force it to behave differently. It's to create a relational space in which the body gradually senses it does not have to work so hard to stay safe. As that safety increases, familiar strategies—hypervigilance, collapse, emotional constriction, checking out—often begin to shift on their own. Not because you are trying to change them, but because the system is no longer bracing against an old reality.
The aim isn't to push your nervous system toward calm, but to create a space where the body gradually senses it does not have to work so hard to stay safe.
Trauma isn't just what happened; it's what remains unmetabolized in the body. Sometimes that shows up as hypervigilance or reactivity. Sometimes as numbness, dissociation, or an inability to feel much at all. Sometimes the body remembers what the mind has worked hard to forget. Body-based therapy helps restore a sense of agency — the felt sense that you can influence your internal state rather than being at its mercy.
What Happens in Sessions
We pay attention to shifts in breath, muscle tension, eye contact, the impulse to flee or freeze. These aren't problems to fix but signals to follow. The body holds intelligence that predates language, and this work respects that intelligence rather than overriding it with insight or interpretation.
In sessions, you might notice a tightening in your chest when discussing a particular memory, or a sudden urge to change the subject. Rather than pushing through these moments, we slow down and attend to them. What is your body trying to protect you from? What does it need in order to feel safer? These questions guide the work.
Somatic therapy doesn't require you to relive traumatic experiences in vivid detail. In fact, that can sometimes retraumatize rather than heal. Instead, we work with the nervous system's responses in the present moment, helping it complete protective actions that may have been interrupted during the original experience. This might involve tracking sensations, gentle movement, or simply noticing what shifts when you allow yourself to feel what's there.
Trauma Therapy Held Within a Depth-Oriented Frame
Trauma therapy held within a depth-oriented frame is relational, careful, and attentive to the whole organism. The story matters, but so does the felt sense beneath it. We're interested not only in what happened to you, but in how your system organized itself in response—and what it might need now to reorganize differently.
Over time, you begin to recognize the landscape of your own nervous system—what tightens, what softens, what needs protection, what wants contact. Therapy becomes a place where new responses can take shape. Where the body learns, gradually, that the threat has passed. That it's possible to feel without being overwhelmed. That collapse isn't the only option when activation feels too intense.
For those working with the aftermath of trauma, chronic stress, or developmental wounds, body-based therapy offers a pathway that honors both what happened and what the body continues to carry. We work at the pace your system sets, tracking sensations, building capacity, and helping you come home to yourself.
This approach is especially helpful for people with a history of trauma or relational wounding; those who feel disconnected from their bodies or struggle with dissociation; anyone whose emotions feel either overwhelming or inaccessible; and those interested in somatic, embodied approaches to healing that go beyond talk therapy alone.
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