How Somatic Therapy Helps Heal Body Image Issues & Disordered Eating

Written By Chloe Bean

If you’re constantly thinking about your body, obsessing over food, or stuck in a cycle of restriction, bingeing, and guilt — you’re not broken. These patterns aren’t just about food or willpower. They’re about safety .

As a somatic trauma therapist in Los Angeles who works with high-achieving millennial women, I see a common thread: a deep sense of body shame, control, and disconnection with self. Most of my clients have spent years in therapy, journaling, or reading self-help books — but still feel stuck in their heads, trapped in a critical relationship with their body.

Somatic therapy offers a different way in.

What’s Beneath Disordered Eating?

Disordered eating is often a coping mechanism — a way to manage what feels unmanageable. It can look like emotional eating, constant dieting, compulsive exercise, or obsessive food rules. But beneath those patterns, there’s often:

  • Chronic anxiety or panic

  • Perfectionism and people-pleasing

  • A history of childhood trauma, neglect, or enmeshment

  • Toxic relationships or narcissistic abuse

  • A need to control something when everything else feels overwhelming

You may have learned to disconnect from your body to survive. To numb. To belong. To be “good.”

And yet, your body never stopped keeping score.

Body Image + Trauma: Fight, Flight, Freeze

When you’ve experienced trauma — especially relational or developmental trauma — your nervous system adapts in order to protect you. The problem? Those survival responses can get stuck.

Your inner critic may be a fight response: attacking your body before someone else can.

Over-exercising or restricting? A flight response: running from discomfort.
Feeling frozen, foggy, or ashamed? Classic freeze — the body’s way of numbing out.

Your relationship with your body didn’t start with food. It likely started with an early message from society, the media, and the environment you grew up in: You’re too much. You’re not enough. Your worth depends on how you look or perform.

That’s why deep, sustainable healing must go beyond mindset work.
It must go into the body.

How Somatic Therapy Heals the Nervous System’s Relationship to the Body

Somatic therapy helps you get underneath the thoughts and connect with the felt experience — where shame, fear, and self-protection live.

Instead of talking about your body image, we gently explore how your body holds the story. Somatic work doesn’t force or push; it supports your system in feeling safe enough to reconnect.

This trauma-informed approach integrates modalities like:

  • Somatic Experiencing to discharge stored fight/flight energy

  • IFS (Internal Family Systems) to work with protective parts (like the perfectionist or the inner critic)

  • EMDR to reprocess painful memories that shaped how you see your body

The goal isn’t to “fix” your body image overnight — it’s to slowly build trust with your nervous system and cultivate safety from within. 📚 Relevant Research:

Practices for Reconnection: Tracking, Resourcing, Parts Work

Healing body shame starts with tiny, compassionate steps. Some of the somatic practices we use might include:

1. Tracking Sensation 🌀
Learning to notice subtle shifts in your body without judgment — like tension in your chest, warmth in your hands, or shallow breath. This helps you build awareness without overwhelm.

2. Resourcing 🌿
Identifying what helps you feel grounded or safe — a sound, an image, a movement, or memory. These “resources” help your nervous system stay regulated when we explore difficult material.

3. Parts Work (IFS) 🧠
You may have parts of you that hate your body… and parts that desperately want to be free. We create space for all of them, helping each one feel seen, heard, and softened.

4. Movement + Stillness 🧘‍♀️
Simple gestures, breathwork, or grounding exercises that help you come back into your body gently — with curiosity instead of criticism.

From Shame → Safety → Self-Compassion

Most women I work with think they have a “body image problem.” But what they really have is a safety problem — in their body, in relationships, in the world.

Somatic therapy helps shift the core wound from shame (“There’s something wrong with me”) to self-compassion (“I was doing my best to stay safe”). And when that shift happens — slowly, steadily, from the inside out — your body becomes a place you can finally live in, not just manage or control.

You don’t need to “love” your body to start healing.
You just need a safe space to be with it. 💛

You Deserve to Feel at Home in Your Body Again

If you’ve been stuck in the loop of negative body image, disordered eating, or perfectionism — know this: it’s not your fault. And you’re not alone.

Somatic therapy offers a new path — one that’s gentle, deep, and rooted in safety. Together, we can work at the pace your body needs to help you reconnect with your truth, your voice, and your body.

📍I offer in-person sessions in West LA and online therapy throughout California.
✨ Ready to begin? Book a free 15-minute consult here.

Want to learn more about how unresolved trauma, perfectionism, and narcissistic abuse can lead to disordered eating and body image issues ? 📚

Chloe Bean
Next

When the Body Remembers: Understanding Somatic Experiencing and Trauma Healing