When Somatic Awareness Turns Into Vigilance

Why more noticing isn’t always more healing

Somatic therapies have given us an essential corrective to purely cognitive approaches to healing. After decades of privileging insight, meaning-making, and narrative coherence, the field rightly turned toward the body toward sensation, nervous system regulation, and implicit memory.

And yet, there is a quieter experience many clients (and therapists) have that doesn’t always get named:

Sometimes, somatic awareness itself becomes a form of vigilance.

Not because somatic work is wrong but because awareness without enough safety can turn into surveillance.

When Awareness Stops Being Gentle

In its healthiest form, somatic awareness is spacious, permissive, and optional. Sensations are noticed when they arise and released when attention naturally moves on.

But for many trauma-exposed, attachment-injured, or highly conscientious people, somatic work can subtly shift into something else:

• Tracking sensations to make sure nothing is missed

• Scanning the body for signs of dysregulation

• Waiting for activation or discharge as proof that therapy is working

• Turning inward so often that the external world fades away

At that point, the body is no longer being listened to it’s being monitored.

This isn’t presence. It’s performance.

From Curiosity to Self-Surveillance

A useful distinction here is the difference between curiosity and vigilance.

Curiosity is spacious. It allows sensation to be vague, incomplete, or fleeting. There is no demand for meaning.

Vigilance is tight. It carries urgency. It asks:

Am I regulated yet?
Is this a trauma response?
Am I doing this right?

For nervous systems shaped by threat, neglect, or relational unpredictability, the internal observer is rarely neutral. It often carries the same expectations the outside world once did: pay attention or something bad will happen.

So instead of creating safety, awareness rehearses danger.

Why This Happens (Especially in Somatic Work)

There are several reasons somatic approaches are particularly vulnerable to this pattern:

1. Interoception without enough relational safety can feel invasive

Turning inward without sufficient co-regulation, external orientation, or choice can recreate early experiences of being alone with overwhelming states.

2. The “witness” can become a supervisor

The observing self becomes managerial rather than compassionate tracking, correcting, and evaluating instead of accompanying.

3. Slowness can amplify threat

While slowing down is regulating for some nervous systems, for others it increases intensity. Stillness can feel like being trapped with sensation rather than supported through it.

4. Many clients are already excellent self-monitors

Highly reflective, intellectualizing, or perfectionistic clients don’t need more awareness they need less pressure to attend.

Healing Requires Flexibility, Not Constant Awareness

A common but unspoken assumption in somatic work is that more awareness is always better.

In reality, the marker of health is flexibility of attention.

The ability to:

• move in and out of bodily awareness

• be absorbed in the external world

• forget the body when it feels safe enough to be forgotten

• return to sensation by choice, not obligation

Sometimes regulation doesn’t come from tracking sensation it comes from rhythm, engagement, creativity, productivity, laughter, or connection.

Sometimes healing looks like living without narrating the moment.

A Simple Orienting Question

One question can often restore choice for both clients and therapists:

“Is this listening, or is this surveillance?”

If attention feels tight, effortful, or evaluative, it may be time to widen the lens:

• orient to the room

• engage the senses externally

• allow attention to drift

• do something absorbing and ordinary

The goal is not to abandon somatic work but to return it to its original gentleness.

For Therapists: A Gentle Reframe

Somatic therapy does not require constant inward focus.

It requires enough safety that the nervous system no longer needs to be watched.

When a client stops tracking their body because they’re engaged in life, relationship, or pleasure, that is not avoidance it may be evidence of integration.

Healing is not a state of permanent self-awareness.

It’s the growing trust that nothing terrible will happen if attention rests elsewhere.

Sometimes the most therapeutic move is not another insight, another sensation, or another question but permission to stop looking and start living.