Somatic & Body-Oriented Comparisons

Comparing Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor, Hakomi, bioenergetics, polyvagal-informed and biofeedback approaches.

Body-oriented approaches share a starting conviction — that experience is organized somatically and that talking about it is not the same as changing it — and diverge sharply on what to do about it. Some track sensation and let discharge complete on its own timing. Some intervene directly in posture, breath and muscular holding. Some are instrumented, feeding physiological data back to the client in real time. The lineage label is Reichian for historical reasons; several members trace to judo and physics, to osteopathy, or to cybernetics, and reach the body by other routes entirely.

These comparisons are useful precisely because the field’s marketing tends to blur them. The pages set out what each approach actually does in a session, what the evidence supports, and where a somatic method is being recommended for a presentation it has never been tested on.

48 comparisons · 24 within the same tradition · 24 across traditions