Your Body Is Reading the Book Too
Somatic experiencing practitioner Alan Massetti on romance, the nervous system, and the body of the reader.
Content note: This post and the episode it accompanies touch briefly on a sexual assault scene from a romance novel as the entry point for a somatic conversation. The scene itself isn't described in detail. But the activation it caused in my body is part of what we explore. Please read with care.
There I was reading late in bed, just before going to sleep. It was a sci-fi romance I was just starting when, early in the story, a side character gets sexually assaulted in a scene I wasn't expecting. It felt like a slap of shock to me, I kept going. Although that scene marred the story for me, I managed to finish the book and set it aside.
Or I thought I had.
Several weeks later, sitting with Alan Massetti — somatic experiencing practitioner, fellow Brazilian, someone whose work I've had the privilege of knowing from a few years ago when I worked with him doing some deep healing around my birth trauma — that scene came back into the room with us. Not as a memory, but as an activation. There it was, still alive in my body. Still holding a charge I didn't know to release.
And this is the conversation that widened my perspective on how embodied reading actually is.
I'd been thinking about romance reading through the lens of metabolizing. The idea that we don't just consume these books, we digest them. That in doing so, something is being processed inside us as we read; psychologically, archetypally, in the space where personal psychology meets our collective dream. That's what I've been focusing on for months now.
What I hadn't done was take the body of the reader, itself, into this equation.
What Alan helped me expand in my thinking, is that metabolizing isn't a psychological metaphor. It's literally the body doing the work. And when we take this into consideration, we see that the reader's body — not the heroine's, not the hero's — is the third character in every romance novel we read. And this is something nobody talks about. But this is where the story actually lands, activates, and (hopefully) metabolizes too.
He also helped me see that arousal isn't just sexual. Arousal is nervous system activation, the body getting ready to respond. The same physiology that makes a sex scene land also makes a violence scene land. When you read at home in your reading chair, your body doesn't fully register that the events aren't happening to you. It just registers what's coming through. The cascade begins. And then the chapter ends, you put down the book, you go make dinner, and the charge has nowhere to go, and stays there moving through us, while we are oblivious to this activation.
This works the other direction too, and this is the part I feel is also important to name. The activation we feel in a slow-building yearning scene, in the moment two characters finally come together, in the quiet ache of recognition between people the world has refused to see — that's also nervous system activation. Pleasurable activation. The good kind. The body learning what it feels like to be moved by tenderness, by appetite, by the long-awaited yes.
Romance, read this way, is teaching the nervous system things many of us were never taught anywhere else.
The trouble isn't the activation. The trouble is that we have almost no language for what's happening to us as we read. We have plot vocabulary. We have character vocabulary. We have very little body vocabulary. Thus, when BookTok readers reach for wrecked and destroyed, they're reaching for body language because the body language is the only honest description available. The hyperbole is doing more than TikTok drama, it's an attempt, although overused, to something that is actually happening in the body.
What is needed is something that we mostly don't have, and that is the practice of pausing. Of naming. Of asking where is this in my body right now?
This is what metabolizing actually requires.
Slowness.
Naming the bubbly sensation in the throat, the pressure in the chest, the contraction in the ribs that means no.
It's seeing our 'reading slump' as the way our body is saying I'm still digesting, give me a minute.
Throughout this episode, Alan invites us to bring the body and its presence not just into our conversation, but also in our reading, with simple things like putting your hand on your face mid-chapter and noticing that's a tiny hug, to bring you back to the present moment.
In this conversation, I learned that the small somatic moves are not small at all; they're how the medicine actually gets in.
This way, our reading of these books isn't just work for the mind. It invites us to become aware of our bodies as the reader.
The one doing the unseen work.
The one that once we start paying attention to will enrich our reading lives and help us metabolize the stories that grab us.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Alan as much as I did. I hope you walk away with ways to embody your reading so that the medicine of these stories is well metabolized in your life.
Guest Bio
Alan Massetti - Somatic Experiencing®️ Practitioner (SEP)
Nervous System Regulation & Integrative Approach
My work is informed by lived experience with complex trauma and by the profound impact Somatic Experiencing®️ had on my own healing process, shaping both my personal and professional path.
As a Somatic Experiencing®️ Practitioner (SEP), I work with individuals navigating complex trauma, dissociation, and high levels of nervous system dysregulation, including clients from minority and marginalized communities. My background includes Somatic Experiencing®️, IOPT (Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Therapy), and the use of spiritual and energetic modalities.
