Somato Emotional Release: How the Body Stores and Releases Trauma

Written by Roland Bal

Somato Emotional Release (SER) was developed by Dr. John Upledger and Dr. Zvi Karni. They discovered that undischarged emotional stress settles in the body tissues. These observations reestablish the fact that one's psychology has a direct impact on the body.

Undischarged emotional stress caused by a traumatic event or period in one's life creates concentric tensions within the body tissues. In the therapeutic process of Somato Emotional Release (SER) these tensions are referred to as "energy cysts."

How Does the Body Store Trauma?

When an incidental event or period in one's life has been too overwhelming to deal with, the body's response is to store the trauma in the body by walling off this energy. Through further exploration, this was identified on a psychological level as dissociation. This means that a response to a traumatic event pushes the emotion into the unconscious. The energy of emotion is then stored in the body tissues through the formation of an energy cyst. This truly is a survival strategy, as it allows us to be able to carry on, in one way or another, with our lives.

When an incidental event or period in one's life has been too overwhelming to deal with, the body's response is to store the trauma in the body by walling off this energy.

The problem is that these energy cysts — these trauma identities — require a lot of energy to be kept in place. Our remaining available energy must then move around this area. It is similar to a river flowing around a large stone: the water keeps moving, but there is turbulence and disruption in the flow. The body adapts, but the adaptation has a cost.

In time, when we go through different experiences and difficulties, our compensating systems are overstretched and we might start breaking down. Depending on the exposure to trauma a person has experienced, this can be relatively soon after an event or take shape later in life. Physical symptoms will most often show up as chronic pain, complex syndromes and possibly manifest as cancer. Psychological symptoms will appear as lack of energy, burnout, depression and dissociative disorders. Often you will see a combination of physical and psychological symptoms.

Tissue Memory and the Body-Mind Connection

One of the key observations behind Somato Emotional Release is that body tissues — fascia, muscles, bones, viscera — can retain memories of experienced trauma without depending on centrally located neurons for storage and interpretation. This is sometimes called tissue memory. The tissues themselves hold the energetic imprint of what happened, including the specific emotions that were present at the time.

This is why someone can have fully healed from a physical injury yet still carry tension, restriction, or pain in the area where the injury occurred. The structural damage is gone, but the emotional energy associated with the event remains lodged in the tissue. The body keeps a record that the mind may have moved on from. And when a similar situation arises — a similar stress, a similar threat — the tissue activates. The contraction returns. The pain flares. The person does not understand why, because the connection between the original event and the present symptom has been buried beneath years of adaptation.

This is also why talk therapy alone often cannot reach what is held at the somatic level. The trauma was not encoded as a narrative. It was encoded as a pattern in the nervous system and in the tissues of the body. Accessing it requires working at the level where it lives — in the body itself.

How Somato Emotional Release Works

In the SER therapeutic process, a practitioner is able to feel the energy cysts through skilled palpation. The client can, through guided relaxation, become aware of these energy cysts and tensions in the body. A dialogue will be initiated to access and work with the trauma.

This will entail tracking body sensations during the dialogue, giving voice to a body part or organ, regressing to and replaying the event and associated emotions in slow motion, bringing a new perspective to the current situation and using survival strategies — once the emotional energy is released — as constructive strengths.

The unfolding of the therapeutic process is assisted by providing context and containment. It is NOT the aim to move as fast and with as much catharsis as possible through trauma. This only leads to retraumatisation. Rather, it is important to slow down the whole process so that emotional energy which is freed up can be digested and constructively integrated into one's life.

This principle of containment is central to all genuine somatic work. The goal is not to blow the lid off what has been held. The goal is to create enough safety and capacity that the body can begin to let go of what it has been holding — at its own pace, in its own sequence. When this happens, the tissues soften. The nervous system recalibrates. What was frozen begins to move again.

What Release Actually Looks Like

Release in the context of SER is not always dramatic. It can be a deep exhale. A wave of warmth through an area that has been cold and contracted. A spontaneous tremor or shaking as the nervous system discharges energy that has been locked in place. Sometimes it involves tears or emotional expression. Sometimes it is quiet — a subtle shift in how the body holds itself, a sense of space where there was previously tightness.

What matters is not the intensity of the release but the integration that follows. The nervous system needs time to reorganise after letting go of a pattern it has maintained for years or decades. Rushing this process — pushing for more release, more catharsis, more intensity — is counterproductive. It overwhelms the system and reinforces the very pattern of overwhelm that created the energy cyst in the first place.

The work is gradual. It respects the intelligence of the body's protective mechanisms while also recognising that those mechanisms, once necessary, may now be creating more suffering than they prevent. The art of somato emotional release lies in knowing when the body is ready — and in trusting that readiness rather than forcing it.