We were already sixteen sessions in.

For reference, that’s a long time. I usually see real shifts in about 90% of patients after the first three to nine treatments.

Applied Somatic Medicine™ can be deeply effective — for many women, it’s completely life-changing.

But there’s no such thing as a medicine that works for everyone, and I was starting to fear she was wasting her money when regular acupuncture might give her the same result.

Sure, the neck pain that had made it hard for her to sleep was almost gone.

She hardly ever got headaches anymore.

Her body had even started showing small signs of release during our sessions — spontaneous twitching, more sighs and swallows, her head moving as though it were being pushed through tides in the water.

But while her anxiety had reduced, I could still feel a deep tension in her body that nothing I did seemed to touch.

I’ll admit, I was at a bit of a loss for a while.

Some patients come in with anxiety that has a clear physiological origin.

Their gut might’ve been impacted by antibiotics or nutrient deficiencies.

They might not be sleeping enough, or moving enough — and those physiological imbalances send stress signals up to the brain that make the anxiety worse.

But that wasn’t the story with this patient.

She was someone very serious about self-care — daily yoga, weight training, time in nature.

She had a family she loved, giving her a real sense of community and purpose.

She ate well, slept well, and most of the tips in her Personalized Embodied Wellness Plan (a personalized PDF guidebook we provide for all of our patients when they start working with us) were old news to her by the time she got it.

Physiological imbalance wasn’t the root of this anxiety.

Her anxiety — the kind where your mind gets hyperactive, spinning in circles, and just won’t shut up — was rooted in something else: the fear of feeling her own feelings.

With somatic treatment, most patients eventually feel safe enough to let those feelings surface.

But even this kind of anxiety isn’t purely a mental health issue.

The resistance to feeling your feelings creates physical tension in your body.

Most women find that tension affecting the midline first.

You might feel your stomach, chest, or throat constrict.

And from there it radiates—maybe into the shoulders and back, the jaw, the stomach, the hips, the heart, the neck and head.

When tension is stored in your tissues like that, your body stops functioning the way it should — which sends more stress signals up to the brain, which makes the anxiety worse.

It’s a loop. And this patient was stuck in it.

The pain had eased, but when I put my hands on her occiput I could feel that her neck was still hard as a rock, and her stomach was still tender every time I pressed near her diaphragm.

On this particular day, with a doctor’s appointment coming up, her health anxiety was blaring loud alarms.

So in this session, we worked directly with the tension patterns in her body and nervous system that were driving this health anxiety.

I checked her pulse and tongue first — her pulse was wiry overall, showing stress, and deficient in the Earth position, pointing to a lack of felt safety and groundedness that may have been affecting her digestion. Her tongue was red and pointed: tension, paired with Kidney deficiency and deficiency heat.

I chose acupuncture points to bolster those deficiencies, then moved into craniosacral therapy while guiding her through a somatic meditation, using gentle myofascial release to start unwinding the tension lines through her neck and shoulders.

Then I waited for her body to settle.

Once her eyes stopped fluttering with tension, once she’d sighed and swallowed a few times, once I could feel her nervous system shift out of sympathetic survival mode and into parasympathetic rest-and-digest safety — I knew she was ready.

I invited her to notice how her mind and body responded to the thought of going to the doctor.

To feel the way her body constricted against that thought, and to invite softness and movement in instead.

To let the feeling be felt fully, as sensation, without her mind stepping in to interpret it or fix it.

And when she started to cry, I rejoiced.

Not because I wanted her to feel bad — but because I’ve watched this pattern enough times to trust it completely.

When resistance softens, when a patient can finally watch her thoughts instead of believing them, feel her body’s reaction without spiraling further into the story about it, and soften instead of tightening — that’s when feelings are finally able to move and release.

Why “just feeling your feelings” is a physiological event, not a mindset

Here’s what most self-help language gets wrong about emotion: it treats feelings as something to think your way through.

Name it, reframe it, journal it, analyze where it came from — as if understanding a feeling is the same as releasing it.

But emotions are physiological before they’re anything else.

A wave of anxiety, grief, or anger is, at its root, a surge of sensation — tightness, heat, a lump in the throat, a churning stomach.

It’s supposed to be transient.

Left alone, it moves through the body and releases in minutes.

What sustains an emotion isn’t the emotion itself — it’s the mind’s story layered on top of it.

I shouldn’t feel this way.

This means something is wrong with me.

I need to fix this before it gets worse.

The story is what keeps a wave that should pass in minutes circling for hours, days, sometimes years, stored as tension in the very tissues we talked about above.

This is why intellectual insight so rarely resolves anxiety on its own.

You can understand exactly where a fear comes from and still feel overwhelming tightness down your centerline.

Understanding lives in the mind. Release lives in the body.

What we’re really doing in a session like the one above is helping the body finish something it started a long time ago.

Crying, shaking, sighing, the involuntary sounds that fall below language — these aren’t a loss of control.

They’re the nervous system completing a stress response that was stuck, often years earlier, when it wasn’t safe to let it finish.

We call this Primal Release: instinctual, spontaneous, and — for most women — deeply unfamiliar, because we’re culturally trained out of it almost from childhood.

Most patients find that once that happens — once and repeatedly — anxiety subsides on its own, and often, so do the physical symptoms that came with it.

Want to start unwinding your own nervous system’s stored tension?

I recommend The Practice — our 14-day online somatic mindfulness course — to every patient I see. It’s a solid entry point into this work, especially if you’re not local or aren’t ready for in-person Applied Somatic Medicine™ treatment yet.

Curious how much stress patterns are impacting your nervous system?

Take the Somatic Override Quiz to find out.

We can’t wait to see where this takes you.