Talk Therapy vs. Somatic Therapy: Why Sound Healing Helps You Go Deeper

Thankfully now there is major awareness around the importance of mental health. More and more people are reaching out for support, and traditional talk therapy, such as psychology, counselling or coaching, have become a trusted tool in helping us process life’s challenges.

Talk therapy provides space to share our stories, make sense of our thoughts, and gain clarity around patterns and behaviours. For many, it’s the beginning of their healing journey and an essential one at that.

However what happens when you’ve talked everything through and still feel stuck? When the mind understands, but the body won’t let go?

This is where somatic therapy, like sound healing, steps in. I’ve learned, through years of holding space in both 1 to 1 and group sound healing sessions, that talking is not enough.

You Can Only Talk So Much

The mind is powerful, yes, but it’s not the only part of you that experiences pain. Trauma, stress, grief, anxiety, these all live and are stored not only in your thoughts, but in your nervous system, your body, and even your energy field, your subtle and spiritual bodies.

Talk therapy works primarily with the mental and emotional layers. However your body also holds cellular, energetic, and subconscious reactions that cannot always be accessed and cleared through words. This is the realm of somatic healing.

The Analogy: Brushing vs Washing Your Hair

Think of it like this:

Talk therapy is like brushing your hair. It detangles, smooths out the surface, and helps you feel more together. It’s effective, necessary, and helps maintain wellbeing. However after a while, you need something deeper.
Somatic therapy, such as sound healing, is like washing and deeply cleansing your hair. It clears out what brushing alone can’t touch, rinsing out the deep residue, the build up, the parts you didn’t even realise were there.

Talk therapy can take you so far, but when the same external stressors return or your body is still holding the charge of old pain, a somatic approach is the next natural step.

What Is Somatic Therapy?

“Somatic” comes from the Greek word soma, meaning body. Somatic therapy works by helping your body process and let go of what your mind alone cannot. Your body does not hold trauma, it stores your reaction to trauma. It's not the traumatic event itself that the body holds but rather it's the unresolved survival response to that event. So yes, your body doesn’t store the “memory” of trauma like a file on a hard drive. Instead, it holds the physiological reaction to what happened, until it feels safe enough to release it.

Somatic Therapy includes practices like:

Sound healing
Breathwork
Movement therapy
Trauma-informed bodywork
Energy healing modalities

As a sound healing practitioner, I work with people from all walks of life, many of whom have already done extensive talk therapy. They come to a sound healing practitioner not because therapy failed, but because they need to go deeper. They’re ready to release what their physical, subtle and spiritual bodies are still holding on to.

How Sound Healing Fits In

Sound Healing is a non-invasive, somatic healing modality. Sound healing works through the use of vibration and frequency, influencing the physical, emotional, and energetic bodies at once.

The sounds from instruments like crystal bowls, gongs, tuning forks, chimes, and drums resonate through the body, helping to:

Calm the nervous system
Regulate breath and heart rate
Release tension and stored trauma
Trigger the relaxation response
Create a safe place to release your trauma response
Shift emotional blockages
Bring the body into a parasympathetic (rest and repair) state

This process bypasses the thinking mind and works directly with the felt sense, which is the cornerstone of somatic healing.

Sound Healing as a Somatic Experience

In a sound healing session, participants often report:

Feeling energy shift or move in the body
Deep emotional releases without needing to talk
Release of physical pain
Physical sensations of warmth, tingling, or lightness
Accessing memories or emotions stored in the body
A profound sense of peace, grounding, and reconnection

These are all hallmarks of a somatic process, not just thinking about healing, but feeling and experiencing it in the body.

Attending a session with a sound healing practitioner who will use sacred tools and appropriate techniques allows trauma to gently rise and be witnessed, held, and released, without needing to relive it mentally or speak it aloud.

So, Which Is Better?

Neither. They both matter. Talk therapy and somatic therapy each have their place in your healing journey. One isn’t better than the other, they are simply different tools.

If you’ve reached a point in your life where you understand the story and still feel like something is unresolved, it’s time to go deeper. It’s time to experience the full spectrum of healing your physical, subtle and spiritual bodies.

You don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t even need to talk. Just come, lie down, and let the sound do it's sacred work.

Healing isn’t just about thinking your way through it. It’s about feeling your way free. Let the vibrations of sound remind you of who you truly are, peaceful, whole, and free.

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