“People are shaking and screaming to ‘release’ trauma–so, after years of talking therapy, I tried it too”

This is Neo Emotional Release therapy, or NER: a form of body-based therapy that I first heard about through a friend. She’d become so intrigued by one practitioner online that she travelled from France to Britain for a session, later describing guttural and animalistic noises, uncontrollable shaking and intense sensations moving through her hips and throat. To her, it felt as though years of things she’d never been able to verbalise were finally being expressed. Colour me curious.

I’m something of a therapy veteran, thanks to a gnarly Anxiety Disorder with some fun obsessive and depressive traits thrown in for good measure. Over the years, I’ve tried medication, traditional talking therapies and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), among many other attempts to quieten a brain with an impressive capacity for catastrophizing and rumination.

So following that conversation with a friend, and when increasingly dramatic videos of somatic therapy online started hitting my feed – bodies trembling, people screaming into pillows or dissolving into tears (surely you’ve seen that one of singer LeAnn Rimes having her jaw released and bawling?) – I wondered whether this could be the one approach I’d overlooked.

Said curiosity and a spot of Googling is what brought me to the home of Neo Emotional Release practitioner, Pascale Haller.

NER combines techniques including bodywork, breathwork, guided visualisations and what practitioners describe as ‘energy work’, alongside ideas borrowed from other therapeutic approaches, such as inner-child work (think: meditation exercises during which your current self travels back to have a conversation with your younger self).

According to Haller, whose certification comes from the Neo Emotional Release Institute (rather than a regulated clinical psychotherapy qualification), practitioners are trained not to force catharsis, but to follow the client’s pace.

Haller herself came to NER after 20-odd years of working for high-pressure tech companies and start-ups, where she describes herself as a “highly functional alcoholic”. As the load of her corporate career intensified, so did her drinking. Talking therapy and AA hadn’t worked for her, she says, and after leaving her job Haller turned to yoga, breathwork and meditation, which she credits with helping her get sober. Eventually, she heard about NER through Instagram.

“I had this really strong sense of needing to heal through the body somatically,” she tells me. She initially trained in the method just for herself, rather than with plans to become a practitioner, but began working with clients full-time in February 2024 and hasn’t looked back.

Before we get going, Haller tells me that there is no single way a session should unfold: despite the dramatic releases that perform well on social media, some clients simply leave feeling relaxed. Given a typical appointment is £180 (although Haller does offer concessions depending on circumstance), I immediately think how anti-climatic it would feel if that were the case, and if I’d be left wondering whether getting a massage would have been a better use of my time and money, but I try to bat those thoughts away and embed myself fully in the process.

Before my first appointment, I completed a form detailing difficult experiences from my past, my current emotional state and what I hoped to work through. When I arrived at Pascale’s, we talked through the elements that felt most pressing in the moment, before I was encouraged to lie down, shut my eyes and embark on a guided body scan – and what followed was somewhere between meditation, massage and therapy.

Haller periodically asked what I could feel, as she pressed her hands on different body parts, and at one stage I noticed burning and tightness across my chest. I pictured thick layers wrapping around it, which Haller interpreted as ‘armour around my heart’. When my neck felt stiff, we talked about carrying the weight of decisions (the theory being that each area of the body corresponds with different emotions). At another point I pushed my hands against Haller’s while breathing out forcefully, as she encouraged me to, well... scream? It triggered a slight internal battle, in which I started questioning ‘Why is it so hard for me to let go and make a loud noise in a safe space, where I’m actively being invited to?’ before I had to nudge my thoughts back to the task at hand.

There was no Hollywood-style sobbing. Mostly there were smaller bodily sensations, images and thoughts, and I definitely appreciated the feeling of safety that Haller had worked to create for me. But still, I thought afterwards, perhaps those quieter signals were worth paying attention to: I spend much of my life waiting for enormous signs that something is right or wrong. Here, I was being asked to pay attention to the subtler ones. Or perhaps, I kept thinking, I was simply constructing meaning around perfectly ordinary sensations. Given that one of my biggest problems in life is relentless overthinking, it’d seem that sadly one NER session was not a silver bullet for that.

At £180 (typically) for a first session, it’s not exactly a cheap experiment either. Haller does also offer discounted packages for clients who return and says most people don’t need to attend indefinitely in the way they might see a psychotherapist weekly for months or years. In her experience, she says, clients can see “big transformations” after three, four or five sessions – so perhaps financially it would work out efficiently for some – although, crucially, there isn’t currently robust clinical evidence showing NER produces those results.

Haller also runs healing private retreats for individuals or groups of two, alongside yoga teacher and Tension and Trauma Release provider, Jo Selwood, for those who want to “go deeper” and have a more intense, personalised experience (the price for which varies).

The idea that emotional experiences remain trapped in particular parts of the body has become popular in the Western world in recent years, helped by books including psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s bestselling The Body Keeps the Score and the work of physician, trauma writer and now frequent podcast guest, Gabor Maté.

But there’s a difference between saying trauma affects the body (we know, for example, there’s a link between childhood trauma, severe stress and an increased likelihood of developing an autoimmune disease) vs. saying a specific emotion is literally stored inside your hips, liver or connective tissue waiting to be released. So, when I speak to consultant psychiatrist Dr Chetna Kang, who has more than 25 years of experience across the NHS and private practice, and who is trained in body-based approaches alongside conventional psychiatry, I ask her: when people say trauma is “stored in the body”, what do they actually mean?

Her answer starts with the stress response. When the demands put upon us outweigh the resources we feel we have to cope “we go into the stress response”, she explains, triggering hormonal and nervous-system changes – and that response is physical as well as psychological.

“If you think about [responses to stressful or anxiety-inducing situations] fight, flight, freeze or fawn… all of them get your body ready to do something,” Kang says. “If you’re going to fight, your muscles tense up. If you’re going to fly, your muscles get ready to flee. Your body gets a message: ‘Whoa, we need to react. We need to do something.’ That’s what the stress response does.”

Kang says that although she uses “release” in a fairly broad and experiential sense, rather than describing a measurable substance leaving the body, her explanation is essentially: if the body repeatedly adopts physical responses to stress – tension, bracing, freezing – then later movement or positioning can sometimes bring associated feelings back into awareness. She gives the example of stretching tight areas of the body in a yoga class and says that “when it opens up, [it] can also give rise to tears”, which she interprets as emotion surfacing alongside the physical change.

She also says: “When we say the body stores, the more times your body’s held in a particular way, that is physiologically a way that you’re storing, but metaphysically and emotionally, you’re also storing.”

I understand this more than the idea of an emotion sitting patiently inside a hamstring, silently crying to be crunched or stretched out, but I still don’t get how we ‘release’ said upsets. Kang’s answer is less literal than the language might suggest. When I ask how we actually know something has been released, given there is no blood test or brain scan to point to – like pain, she says, much of it is subjective. The proof, in her view, is whether something changes afterwards, whether “your relationships are better”, you’re “showing up better” or “that burden has lifted”.

To Kang, many of the practices now packaged as different somatic therapy aren’t actually new at all. “Neo Emotional Release therapy is basically something that's been around for a long time, but rebranded,” she tells me, pointing towards long-standing therapeutic use of breathing exercises, movement and body awareness. What has changed (and notably) is our appetite for them. The numbers back that up, too: search interest in ‘somatic therapy’ has risen 22% year-on-year, reaching an estimated 223,000 searches a month, according to trends platform Glimpse.

After decades in which mental health treatment has often been presented as either medication or sitting opposite somebody talking, perhaps while awkwardly ripping at a tissue with your nervous hands, there is something seductive about getting the physical body involved instead. It’s particularly compelling if, like me, you are extremely capable of talking about your own brain but can’t seem to break out of age-old unhelpful thought patterns; Kang notes that some people become so accomplished at intellectualising their experiences that language itself can become a defence. Body-centred work may offer another route into noticing and tackling distress.

However, critics of the broader movement associated with figures such as Maté and van der Kolk argue that the T-word (trauma) is increasingly being stretched to encompass normal, healthy human emotions and, at its most extreme, is being positioned as an explanation for an enormous range of mental and physical illnesses.

Haller herself tells me clients seek NER for depression, anxiety, chronic pain and physical illness, and describes a belief that emotional pain can underlie some health conditions, including autoimmune diseases and cancer. She is clear that someone with cancer still needs conventional medical treatment, but these broader causal claims go beyond what NER-specific clinical evidence currently establishes.

There is also the issue of who is delivering a treatment – Kang says anyone working with intense emotional material needs to recognise the limits of their training. Ideally, she says, treatment begins with a proper assessment, and complementary practitioners should have a network of more traditional clinicians to whom they can refer somebody if serious symptoms emerge.

Psychotherapist Kaye Smith, PhD, Senior Contributor at Cosara, also cautions against reducing somatic therapy to simply “releasing emotions through the body”. “A more accurate way to think about somatic therapies is that they help people notice and regulate the body's stress responses, especially when chronic tension has become automatic,” she says.

The phrase she often hears is: “I know I’m safe, but my body doesn’t believe it.” For Smith, that makes body-focussed therapies potentially useful alongside, rather than instead of, evidence-based psychotherapy.

This is where my sceptical journalistic outlook hit a pleasant stumbling block: the morning after my first session with Haller, I woke at around 7am with an extraordinary sense of peace and love surging through my veins, quietening my normally argumentative internal monologue. I remember desperately trying to cling to that feeling – of trusting myself, of feeling a deep and innate sense of calm, knowing what truly mattered in life and moving through the world without mentally cross-examining every decision I was making. It was a state of being I’m not sure I’ve ever felt while sober (and regrettably, it vanished after I had a couple of glasses of wine later that day – which Haller had admittedly advised against).

Was that feeling evidence that NER had successfully moved my bad energy on? Maybe, but I can’t prove it. It could have been the breathing. The meditation. The physical touch. Placebo. Genuine nervous-system regulation. Some combination of all of them. But whatever it was, it was enough to see me quickly book in for another appointment with Haller.

The second time around, I went deeper into guided visualisation around my anxieties about the past and future. My body twitched in places. I felt extraordinarily sleepy and was noticeably less embarrassed about making noise. But the next morning? No beautiful transcendence. I was kind of tired, slept a bit badly and basically felt ‘okay’.

I don’t know whether trauma is ‘stored’ in my body in the way social media sometimes tells us it is, or that every twitch is a hidden memory attempting to break free or reveal a psychological truth – but I do know I’ve spent over a decade trying to think my way out of anxiety (along with taking SSRIs), while largely treating the body (which carries my anxious brain) as an afterthought. Neo Emotional Release therapy has reminded me it is vital to pay attention to both.