Bottom-Up Healing: How Movement Unlocks Emotional Processing

I’d bet we’ve all been in the following situation: we’re sitting across from someone, trying to explain what’s on our mind, and the words just don’t land or maybe even come to us in the first place. There’s a certain type of frustration that builds when we’re trying to talk our way into clarity and only end up deeper in the fog. For anyone who’s ever felt that therapy, journaling, or even venting didn’t touch the root of what they were carrying, don’t worry, the reason is that some parts of us don’t speak in language.

The nervous system, particularly the older, more primitive parts, doesn’t process experience through narrative. It processes through sensation, sequence, and safety. When something overwhelming happens, especially repeatedly, it can register in the body as tension, tightness, or numbness long before the mind knows how to describe it. That’s why healing, or even understanding, can’t always start with words. Sometimes, the body needs to go first.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up

Most traditional talk therapies use a top-down approach. That means they start with conscious thought such as identifying beliefs, reshaping stories, and challenging patterns. Those are incredibly useful tools, especially for cognitive clarity, but they assume the system is regulated enough to process language in the first place.

Under stress or dysregulation, the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain responsible for reasoning and language) goes partially offline. Blood flow gets redirected, focus narrows, and language access drops. What’s left running is the subcortical brain, including the limbic system and brainstem, which care much more about safety than semantics. In that state, trying to “talk it out” is like trying to have a nuanced conversation while our house is on fire.

This is where bottom-up methods come in. Instead of starting with thoughts, they start with the body, and that starting point can be movement, breath, sound, or posture. These are the native languages of the nervous system. When the system feels safe enough, the capacity for reflection comes back online. 

Primal systems are often “simpler” systems, which actually works in our favor here. Are we safe/comfortable/happy/etc. or are we not safe/comfortable/happy/etc.? Binary answer, and if we think “not sure” or ANYTHING along those lines, the answer is no. Keep it straightforward.

Why Talking Sometimes Makes It Worse

It’s counterintuitive, but talking through something before the body is ready can actually deepen the stress response. If the system is still holding the event as a threat, recounting it verbally can retrigger that response—tightening muscles, accelerating the heart rate, and flooding the system with stress hormones.

Even when nothing dramatic is being said, the act of trying to make sense of something our body hasn’t yet released can create friction. We feel disconnected from our words. We may doubt our own story or finish the conversation feeling even more depleted than before. That doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong. It just means our system needed a different entry point. Right race, but wrong start line.

This is also why people sometimes “know” what’s wrong but still can’t change. They’ve identified the issue. They’ve said it out loud, but it hasn’t moved because acknowledgment is not the same as integration. Integration requires more than insight, it requires us to actually believe that we’ve overcome what was weighing us down or are at least on the right path to overcoming.

The Body’s Approach to Emotional Processing

When an animal survives a threat, its body naturally discharges the excess activation through shaking, running, or rhythmic movement. That’s the body’s way of saying, “It’s over.” Humans still have that system, but we’ve layered over it with social rules, internalized inhibition, and expectations to stay composed, so instead of moving the energy out, we hold it. We internalize it. We intellectualize it.

Despite getting pretty good at this in the mind, the body remembers. It holds those uncompleted cycles in the form of fat deposits, muscle tone, breath patterns, and posture. The result is often described as “carrying stress,” but it’s more than that. It's an unresolved experience living in the system without an exit route. We may not consciously feel afraid, but our body might be bracing. We may not recall trauma, but our diaphragm might still be locked. These are adaptations, not flaws, meaning we can make changes if we want to.

Accessing healing sometimes means creating space for those patterns to move. That doesn’t require reliving the story. It requires giving the body permission to complete the loop it never got to finish. That’s where bottom-up modalities work incredibly well; not because they bypass the mind, but because they break down the wall preventing emotional processing.

When the Body Goes First

So what does it look like to let the body lead? It doesn’t have to mean dramatic catharsis or releasing buried trauma. It often starts subtly with movement that’s not about performance, breath that’s not about control, or sensation that’s finally allowed to just exist without judgment.

One example backed by research is called orienting. It’s a simple practice to quite literally "orient" us with our surroundings (i.e. just look around and notice small details in our vicinity). This triggers the part of the brain that assesses safety and helps bring the system out of hypervigilance. It sounds almost too simple, but for a nervous system that’s been stuck in survival, that kind of passive exploration is powerful data.

What’s striking is how often, after movement or breath or even stillness, words do come. Not because they were forced, but because the wall has come down and a channel is cleared. The system feels safe enough to reflect instead of react. Thoughts feel more coherent. Emotions feel more accessible. That’s when talking, whether it’s therapy, conversation, or journaling, can truly begin to shift things.

Bridging the Two

This isn’t about replacing language with movement. It’s about sequencing. Many times, we default to cognitive solutions for somatic problems. We plan our way out of burnout. We analyze our way out of disconnection. This works for some things, but the most sustainable growth happens when the body and mind are moving in rhythm.

When we treat words as the only path to insight, we miss what the body’s been trying to say all along; when we learn to listen through breath, through posture, and through sensation, we gain access to a kind of intelligence that doesn’t need to be translated. It just needs to be felt.

Let the body speak first. The mind will catch up.

References

1. Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

2. Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy: Interventions for trauma and attachment. W. W. Norton & Company.

3. Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

4. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books.

5. Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.