Intergenerational trauma is often described as wounds passed down through families—patterns of fear, shutdown, hypervigilance, or emotional disconnection that don’t always make sense in the present, yet live vividly in the body. Many people feel like they are reacting to life with intensity that doesn’t match the situation, or find themselves repeating relational patterns they consciously want to change. These are not personal failings. They can be the echoes of experiences that earlier generations were never able to process or resolve.

Somatic therapy offers an effective and compassionate way to work with these inherited patterns—not just by talking about the past, but by helping the nervous system to understand what it has been holding.

Functional Neurological Disorders (FND) can be confusing, frightening, and deeply disruptive. Symptoms such as seizures, paralysis, tremors, gait disturbances, or sensory loss feel very real—yet standard neurological testing often comes back “normal.”

For many people, this creates a painful mix of self-doubt, frustration, and fear. But FND is not imagined and it’s not voluntary. It is a genuine disorder of the brain–body connection.

Body-based psychotherapy (also called somatic therapy) is emerging as a supportive and effective therapeutic approach for FND. Below, we explore what FND is and how somatic treatment helps restore the nervous system’s capacity to regulate movement, sensation, and safety.

Lately more and more emphasis has been put on using body-based approaches in psychotherapy over more traditional talk therapy and cognitive models. These approaches can be used on their own and also combined with talk therapy approaches. But understanding exactly what body-based therapy means can be difficult for new clients.