From a developmental standpoint, protection is the first thing a six or seven year old learns. I remember the first time I was eight and experienced fear. We were swimming in the sea: the moss, crackling waves, stinging salt water. I got scared, because the current pulled my feet out from under me. I called to my dad to help me. At that age, we still believe our parents to be something like super heroes, that they can just emerge from out of nowhere. Yet, he was nowhere to be found. It was the first time in my life that – alone – I had to learn to trust my body. I had to sense the current and the pull of the waves and I had to swim, to survive. It taught be the very basic principles of somatic therapy: that I could use my inner resources and senses to ground, too orient myself, that I had to learn intuitively what was safe and unsafe. However, not all of us learn to trust ourselves in moments of danger. When protection fails, or when our environment is consistently unsafe, our system adapts. We develop defenses — both psychological and physiological — that live in the muscles, tissues, and reflexes and even cellular biology of the body.
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At birth, most of our muscles operate through involuntary reflexes. Voluntary motor control develops gradually, as specific muscles are innervated by the somatic nervous system. As this happens, the felt sense of those muscles begins to shift. Voluntary muscles — those we consciously control — carry not only physical memory, but often psychological content. This is one reason why, under stress, the body can express emotional states: the tight chest, the aching heart, the clenched jaw. To separate emotional experience from physiological response is to underestimate the complexity of our human system. Cognition happens in the mind — but emotion is experienced through the body.
As we age, the ego develops alongside our ability to regulate and defend ourselves. With that development comes a natural aversion to pain. The older we get, the more rigid these ego defenses become. The more developed the ego, the more strategic — even unconscious — our character defenses become. We avoid the epicenter of pain and instead orient toward areas we believe we can manage. This is the beginning of complex defense structures — not because the inner child holds all the pain, but because the adult self, with its developed sense of autonomy and responsibility, becomes more skilled at suppressing it.
Ironically, in trying to avoid our childhood wounds, we often reinforce them. When a child experiences trauma without choice or agency, the defense system that develops is survival-based — reactive, involuntary, often frozen in time. If this structure remains unprocessed, the adult may unconsciously recreate familiar patterns of suffering: revictimization, emotional regression, or chronic self-abandonment. Pain becomes familiar. Tolerable. Even expected.
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This is where we begin to see learned helplessness — a deep, embodied belief that no action can change our reality. And within this helplessness, the child’s psyche creates what Freud called a fantasy: an internal story to compensate for external failure. In this case, the fantasy of the superhero — a parent or protector who will swoop in and make things right. But the fantasy is not reality. It is a symbolic effort to meet an unmet need. As adults, we may continue to chase that fantasy in relationships, authority figures, or even spiritual beliefs — not realizing that true safety can only be reclaimed by turning inward, learning to trust the body, and restoring what the child never had: agency.This is where somatic therapy becomes essential. In working with the body, breath, and consciousness, we begin to deconstruct ego-based defenses not through force, but through felt sense awareness. Understanding the interplay of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is key — it helps us recognize how muscle tone, posture, and energy regulation reflect personality adaptations.
The somatic practitioner learns how to guide clients gently between different nervous system states while tracking the ego’s protective impulses. It is a balance of honoring survival strategies while creating new patterns of regulation. Somatic work allows for a bottom-up reorganization of the self — one that trusts the wisdom of the body, and in doing so, liberates the defenses that once helped us survive, but no longer serve us.
The Neuroscience Behind Your Fight, Flight and Freeze
Under ordinary circumstances, when we encounter something stressful, our nervous system processes the input from the body through a complex sequence: the thalamus receives sensory data, which is then passed to areas like the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and prefrontal cortex — regions involved in self-awareness, emotional regulation, and decision-making (van der Kolk, 2014). In a well-regulated system, this allows us to interpret the experience, soothe ourselves, and return to a grounded state.
But when a perceived threat overwhelms our capacity to cope — especially if it mirrors unresolved trauma — the nervous system shifts rapidly into survival mode. Cortisol and adrenaline surge through the body, activating the sympathetic nervous system and pushing us toward fight or flight. If neither is possible, the system may default to freeze, a parasympathetic collapse. These states, though physiological, deeply influence how the psyche learns to defend itself.
This is where ego defense mechanisms come into play. Just as the body organizes around survival, so does the psyche. Over time, the nervous system’s survival responses and the mind’s defenses become intertwined. For example:
A fight response may pair with projection or splitting, as anger becomes the first line of psychological defense.
A flight response might align with avoidance or intellectualization, where fleeing emotionally mirrors fleeing physically.
A freeze state often maps onto repression, denial, or dissociation, where the body shuts down and the mind follows.
The fawn response — appeasing or pleasing to maintain safety — is often paired with defenses like idealization or identification.
These strategies begin in childhood, often as necessary and brilliant adaptations to environments that were too chaotic, frightening, or emotionally unavailable. But in adulthood, they become unconscious patterns that limit our capacity to feel, connect, and regulate. The body reacts, and the mind justifies. The mind defends, and the body constricts.
This is where somatic therapy becomes essential. By working with the body, we can access these ingrained survival patterns directly — through sensation, movement, and breath — without needing to override or bypass the ego. Understanding the interplay of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, as well as the body’s defensive adaptations, allows the practitioner to recognize how posture, tone, and energy reflect not just trauma, but personality and protective identity.
The somatic therapist learns to guide clients gently between nervous system states, tracking both physiological activation and egoic defense. It is a delicate balance: honoring the wisdom of survival while creating new experiences of safety, embodiment, and choice. In this way, somatic work becomes not just a tool for healing trauma — but a method of reuniting the mind and body in service of true integration and freedom.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
