Body-oriented approaches used to be seen as the whacky fringe. Now, many therapeutic approaches are taking somatic processes seriously. But, suggests Michael Soth, there is a vast difference between ‘having’ a body and ‘being’ a body, between ‘using’ our bodies and ‘inhabiting’ them. To work effectively with the body, he argues, we must be mindful of the conflicted relationship between psyche and soma, and of the external relational dynamics between client and therapist.