The Art of Reading Non-Verbal and Somatic Signals for the PLR Therapist
“If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips.”
— Sigmund Freud (1905)
Twenty-three minutes into the session.
The client is describing a scene in a calm voice. An old house. A closed door.
But —
his hand is slowly curling into a fist.
His shoulders have risen.
His breath seems caught somewhere.
And he says, “I’m not really feeling anything.”
The words say one thing. The body says another.
Albert Mehrabian’s experiments in 1967 looked at exactly this kind of moment. When words and body don’t match, the listener trusts tone and facial expression far more than the words. That is where the famous “7-38-55” rule comes from, and it applies only to this situation.
For a PLR therapist, these signals are data. But noticing a signal is one thing. Deciding what it means is another.
Observe first, interpret later
The client’s shoulders rose. That is an observation.
“You carry a karma of heavy responsibility.” That is an interpretation.
Between the two lies a long list of possibilities: fear, a defensive posture, an old habit, a cold room, a memory from this life. Ray Birdwhistell, who founded the study of kinesics, concluded that no gesture carries a fixed meaning outside its context.
So the questions follow an order. What happened? What changed? When did it change? And only at the end: what might it mean?
Five windows into the body
Posture. Did the body lean forward or pull back? Did it stiffen or collapse?
Breath. Did it speed up, stop, or turn shallow? Was there a deep sigh? A change in breath doesn’t prove fear on its own. Look at the context.
Movement. A fist forming, a hand pulling back, a pushing gesture, trembling. In Waking the Tiger (1997), Peter Levine describes how a deer trembles after escaping a predator, then returns to grazing. Levine sees this as the body’s own way of completing an interrupted response to threat. Calling it “karmic residue” straight away is premature.
Location. In 2014, Lauri Nummenmaa’s team surveyed 701 people and found that each emotion is felt as a distinct map across the body. But those maps are averages across many people. In 2019, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s team reviewed about 1,000 studies and found that no single bodily expression reliably maps to a single emotion. So don’t build a dictionary of the body.
Sensation. Eugene Gendlin noticed that the clients who changed most in therapy were the ones who could pause on a vague bodily feeling and find words for it. He called that feeling the felt sense. So instead of asking “What emotion is this?”, sometimes ask: Where is it? Is it heavy or light? Is it spreading or contracting?
Story → Sensation → Awareness → Response
Context and timing
In a 2012 study published in Science, Hillel Aviezer’s team showed people photographs of tennis players at the moment of winning or losing a point. Looking at the face alone, people couldn’t tell whether the player had won or lost. When they saw the whole body, they guessed correctly.
Meaning doesn’t come from a signal on its own. Notice when the signal started, when it changed, and when it ended. A signal alone is weak data. With context and timing added, the same data becomes strong.
Three questions before saying “karma”
- Does this response keep coming back?
- Is it consistently linked to the same trigger?
- Did its context emerge on its own during the regression?
Even if all three answers are “yes”, it is still a hypothesis. Repetition makes something more relevant. It doesn’t prove cause.
The therapist’s own story
In Telling Lies (1985), Paul Ekman wrote that deception has no sign of its own. He gave a common mistake a name, the Othello error: taking an honest person’s fear as proof of guilt.
In PLR, too, a client’s fear can look like evidence of a “past life”, when it may have come from the discomfort of the session or from one of your questions. So keep asking yourself:
“Is this the client’s data, or my interpretation?”
Release is not always healing
The title of Bessel van der Kolk’s book is a finding in itself: The Body Keeps the Score (2014).
Dr. Brian Weiss, whom I regard as my Param Guru because our mentor respected venu sir trained under him, wrote about his client Catherine in Many Lives, Many Masters (1988). Even there, change wasn’t marked by a single dramatic moment. Catherine’s fears and panic attacks eased gradually, and that is how the change showed.
Crying, trembling and deep breaths are powerful moments, but they aren’t proof of healing. The proof is that the response to a trigger changes, the client has more choice, and something shifts in their life.
Sometimes the deepest change is very quiet:
“Earlier, my body would shrink the moment I remembered this. Now I can remember it and still breathe.”
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
In the end
Freud was right: the body speaks. But its language isn’t written in a dictionary. It is made of context, sensation, memory and each person’s own experience.
So don’t treat a signal as an answer. Turn it into a question. And let the client become the interpreter of their own body.
Reading the body is an art.
Not projecting our assumptions onto it is the greater discipline.
A question for fellow practitioners: which non-verbal signal has proved most reliable in your sessions? Do share in the comments.ss resources which have helped PLR Therapists.
Author’s Note
To help put these ideas into practice in the session, I’ve prepared a concise Somatic Observation Checklist, attached to this post as a PDF. It walks through each step from baseline to red flags, and ends with a One-Minute Card you can keep in front of you during a session.
Do try it in your sessions. Your experience will help make it better.
PLR_Somatic_Checklist.pdf (205.7 KB)