From Thinking About the Body to Listening to it: Somatic’s, EMDR, Conscious Connected Breathwork and Interpersonal Neurobiology

Over the last few years, I have found myself becoming increasingly interested in what happens when therapy moves beyond cognition alone and begins to include the body more intentionally. As a mental health nurse of over 30 years, an EMDR therapist and consultant, and someone trained in body-based approaches including conscious connected breathwork (CCBW), I have become less interested in simply asking “What do you think?” and more curious about “What is your system doing?”

Because often, long before we have words, the body already knows.

In EMDR, we understand this through the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. Trauma is not only stored as narrative memory. It is stored in sensations, impulses, autonomic responses, emotions, images, posture, breathing patterns and procedural learning. Clients frequently arrive in therapy able to explain their lives brilliantly - intellectually insightful, psychologically minded, highly articulate - yet their nervous system remains organised around danger.

They can understand they are safe while their body continues to prepare for threat.

This is where somatic approaches and interpersonal neurobiology begin to feel deeply relevant.

Dan Siegel and the idea of integration

One of the thinkers who has increasingly influenced how I conceptualise this work is Dan Siegel. His work in interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) explores how the mind, brain and relationships interact to shape human experience.

At the centre of Siegel’s work is the idea of integration - the linking of differentiated parts into a connected whole. When integration is disrupted, systems can become rigid or chaotic. Trauma often creates exactly this: fragmentation between thinking and feeling, body and mind, past and present, self and others.

Clients may know something cognitively while their nervous system remains trapped elsewhere.

Siegel often describes wellbeing as the ability to remain flexible, adaptive, coherent, energised and stable. In many ways, this aligns beautifully with what we see clinically in EMDR and somatic work. Healing is not simply about symptom reduction; it is about increasing integration within the nervous system.

For many traumatised clients, attention itself becomes organised around threat prediction. The system scans constantly:

• What if this happens again?

• What if I panic?

• What if the pain returns?

• What if I lose control?

The nervous system stops observing the present moment because it is busy preparing for anticipated danger.

From prediction to observation

This idea - moving from prediction to observation -has become increasingly important in how I think about both breathwork and EMDR.

When clients begin consciously observing their breath, body sensations or internal responses without immediately reacting to them, something important can happen. Attention becomes less fused with fear-based prediction and more connected to present-moment experience.

Siegel describes this kind of awareness as creating the conditions for neural integration. The simple act of noticing - with curiosity rather than judgement -can help link previously disconnected networks within the brain and body.

This feels highly relevant in:

• complex trauma

• dissociation

• functional neurological disorder (FND)

• persistent pain

• panic disorder

• health anxiety

In many of these conditions, the body becomes experienced as dangerous, unpredictable or disconnected.

The body as a doorway, not a problem

Many clients I work with do not feel safely connected to their bodies. Sometimes the body feels overwhelming. Sometimes numb. Sometimes only noticeable through symptoms.

What I have become increasingly aware of is that healing is often less about “fixing” the body and more about helping someone develop a different relationship with it.

Noticing.
Observing.
Tracking.
Allowing.
Staying.

This is one of the reasons I have become interested in conscious connected breathwork.

What is conscious connected breathwork?

CCBW involves continuous connected breathing without pauses between the inhale and exhale. Unlike many traditional breathing techniques designed to immediately slow physiology, conscious connected breathwork can initially activate the system before regulation emerges.

Importantly, this is not simply “deep breathing.”

Physiologically, conscious connected breathing alters carbon dioxide levels and influences autonomic nervous system functioning. Clients often report changes in sensation, emotion, imagery, memory and body awareness. Some experience shaking, temperature changes, tingling or emotional release. Others simply experience a profound sense of presence.

What interests me clinically is not intensity for its own sake, but what the process reveals about how tightly many people control, suppress or disconnect from their internal world.

For some clients, remaining present with breath for 20-30 minutes is profoundly reparative.

Breathwork, EMDR and implicit processing

I am often asked whether breathwork and EMDR are “the same thing.” They are not.

EMDR remains a structured psychotherapy with a clear protocol, comprehensive assessment process and strong evidence base. It works directly with traumatic memory networks using bilateral stimulation and dual attention within an eight-phase model.

However, there are fascinating overlaps.

Both approaches:

• reduce reliance on purely top-down cognitive processing

• engage implicit material stored in the body

• create opportunities for reconsolidation and integration

• often produce shifts before clients can fully explain them cognitively

From an interpersonal neurobiology perspective, both may facilitate greater integration across neural systems — linking sensation, emotion, cognition and meaning.

Breathwork can sometimes help clients become more available for EMDR processing, particularly those who are highly defended cognitively, perfectionistic, over-intellectualising or disconnected from bodily experience.

Sometimes the work is not about helping somebody think differently first.

Sometimes it is about helping them feel safely enough to notice.

Why this matters clinically

As therapists, many of us were trained primarily in language-based models. Yet trauma is often not encoded in language alone.

Clients frequently say:
“I know I’m safe, but my body doesn’t.”
“I understand it logically, but it still happens.”
“I feel disconnected from myself.”
“I can’t get out of my head.”

Increasingly, I think these are invitations to work differently.

Not abandoning cognition.
Not abandoning evidence-based therapy.
But widening the doorway.

For me, somatic approaches and conscious connected breathwork are not alternatives to EMDR. They are companions to it. Ways of helping clients develop enough nervous system flexibility, embodiment and regulation to remain present during processing.

Perhaps this is what integration ultimately means:
Not the absence of pain or trauma, but the growing ability to remain connected to ourselves while experiencing them.

And perhaps healing begins when the nervous system no longer has to face experience alone.