The Body as an Archive: Notes from a Settler Therapist's Practice

The body as an archive: notes from a settler therapist's practice

The body holds things it was never told

The body remembers things it was never told in words. A flinch in a lineage that has seen persecution. A smile that arrives too quickly, because a grandmother learned to smile through fear. A breath that catches at a certain kind of tone. These are not metaphors. They are what lives in a body that comes from somewhere, which is to say, every body.

I'm Clayre, a therapist and art therapist. I am also a white settler on unceded Coast Salish territories, and I have been spending the last few years listening more carefully to what my own body remembers. Some of what it holds is mine. A lot of it is older.

This post is a reflection on one of the books that has shifted how I understand that kind of listening: Somacultural Liberation by Dr. Roger Kuhn, a Two-Spirit Indigequeer psychotherapist and somacultural theorist. I do not offer his framework as my own. I name it here to honour the teacher and to share what his work has opened in my own practice.

What my body had been carrying

A few years ago, I began working with a somatic therapist who understood that what shows up in a body is not only personal. It is also inherited, cultural, historical. Under her care, I started noticing a particular survival tendency I had carried for a long time: a smile that appeared whenever I was frightened. Not a genuine smile. A mask.

In some European ancestral work, this is called the witch wound. The body learning, across centuries, that to be noticed in certain ways is dangerous. That to be visible, strange, creative, queer, or different is to risk persecution. The body learning to hide by smiling, or by shrinking, or by becoming very agreeable. My body had been carrying a version of this for longer than my own lifetime.

Dr. Kuhn's work names something similar from a very different lineage: that dominant culture writes itself onto the body, and that the body cannot simply be disentangled from that cultural inscription through individual effort alone. His framework is Two-Spirit and Indigenous, rooted in his own community, his own ancestors, and his own healing. It is not transferable to other contexts in any simple way.

Still, sitting with his work shifted something for me. It gave language to a question I had been circling: what does it actually mean to do body-based therapy in a way that does not pretend culture and history have left the body alone?

Encountering the book as a settler therapist

When I first read Somacultural Liberation, I read it slowly. Not because it was hard. Because it felt important not to consume it the way I had been trained to consume clinical texts. Kuhn weaves personal narrative, Two-Spirit and Indigenous cultural theory, and practical somatic work in a way that resists extraction. You cannot really pull out the technique and drop it elsewhere. The technique is inseparable from the cultural and community context it comes from.

That resistance to extraction is part of the teaching.

Reading it reminded me that much of what I learned in my somatic training came from somewhere, too. That grounding and resourcing and nervous system regulation have specific lineages, specific authors, and specific cultural contexts. That I have a responsibility not to float these approaches free of their roots when I use them.

Kuhn does not ask settler therapists to borrow his framework. What he offers, by modelling his own integration of body, culture, and community, is an invitation to do that integration work for ourselves. To ask, honestly, what is my own cultural and ancestral context, and how does it live in my body, and in the way I practise?

What has shifted in my clinical work

A few things have changed in how I work since sitting with this book.

• I hold more space for the idea that a client's symptoms are often responses to historical and cultural pressure, not personal malfunction. The body rarely misbehaves for no reason.
• I slow down before naming what I think is happening in a client's body. Meaning belongs to the client's context, not to my interpretation of it.
• I am more explicit with clients about the cultural origins of the somatic approaches I use. When I offer a grounding practice, I try to name where it comes from.
• I think more carefully about my own lineage when clients ask what I carry in my body. I am more willing to say: my ancestors were afraid, too. My body has its own inheritance.
• I trust, more than I used to, that healing is not only individual. What a person carries often became lodged in a body long before they had language, and repair often asks for relational and community context, not only internal work.

None of these changes is about adopting Kuhn's framework. They are about letting his work reshape the questions I ask in my own.

Cultural humility is ongoing, not a destination

One of the things I appreciate most about Somacultural Liberation is its quiet refusal of the tidy arc. Kuhn does not suggest you can read a book, complete some exercises, and arrive at liberated. The work is ongoing. The body continues to teach. The cultural and political context continues to press. Healing is not something you finish.

For me as a settler therapist, this means cultural humility is also not finished. I will not read the right books and arrive somewhere I no longer make mistakes, or where my position in systems of harm is somehow cleared. The work is to keep showing up, keep listening, keep being accountable, keep repairing when I miss something. Not for a destination. For a practice.

If any of this lives in you

If you find yourself carrying things that do not feel only yours, you are not making it up. The body remembers a great deal. In my own practice I work somatically, drawing on approaches like Sensorimotor Psychotherapy online, with close attention to the cultural and historical context each person brings. If any of that resonates, you are welcome to reach out.

And if Dr. Kuhn's work calls to you, particularly if you are Two-Spirit, Indigenous, or a settler like me wanting to learn, I would encourage you to read him directly. His teaching deserves to be met, not summarized away.