Somatic psychotherapy adds more to conventional talk therapy. It adds listening to the sensations and story of your body - a wealth of information that is missed when we focus on just your thoughts and words about what is going on.

Working with the body allows access to what is stored away in the sensations and physiology of the body, both the pain of the past as well as our deeper truths and strengths. It’s the place we find a deeper resilience when we come back home and reconnect to our body; a deeper wisdom when we listen and pay attention to more then just the thoughts in our head. Somatic psychotherapy shows us how to come home to this resilience safety and wisdom that every body has within it - if we are only given the right environment and tools to allow it to unfold.

For some, depending on one’s goals, the utilizing of the body simply accesses a deeper part of themself to gain then their thoughts alone - helping them gain clarity and move through the issue they are bringing into therapy.

For many others, including the body in their work is the key missing piece, allowing them to access and then shift the source of what truly keeps them stuck. The process occurs in a way that words, thoughts, and left-brain strategies never could reach. Trauma and chronically stressful experiences, especially when we are younger, have a way of wiring our brain, nervous system, and how we manage our body's physiology in unhelpful maladaptive ways. These experiences get stored in our implicit memory - the place where we cant quite verbalize how to ride a bike, it needs to be re-experienced and felt in the body. Somatic techniques are needed to access these areas and allow for a re-wiring in our brain body and mind that brings us back to our optimal health and wellness in the mind and body.

To better give an idea of my work, Ill explain below some of the modalities I utilize in my work - each one offering a different set of tools and foci for the varied nervous systems and challenges that come into my office :

Modalities I Integrate:

Focusing® -

Offers a body-centered way to work with the challenging thoughts, feelings, and sensations we may have. Often it is the case that we either distract ourself from our inside world, or we get consumed or overwhelmed by it. Focusing offers guidance in how to get into "right relation" with our inside world in a way that allows us to do effective work. I often draw upon these skills in the beginning of our sessions together in order to help guide you in learning how to be with your inside world in a different, more refined way then you may be used to. It begins, and stays, centered on the sensations or felt sense within the body, and from there works with your thoughts and feelings on the topic at hand to bring clarity and restore balance.

Somatic Experiencing® (SE)

SE resolves how trauma and past stress and experiences live in your body. It helps build inner capacity and resilience, and return to a sense of vitality and connection with yourself and the world around you. It’s strategies are ideal for those stuck in anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation, chronic irritability overwhelm or depression, and all PTSD symptoms.

SE focuses on bottom-up change: making changes in how you manage the physiology of your body (literally the wiring of your brain and body) in order to shift how you feel, think and act in the world. so that you then create change in your thoughts and feelings and behaviors. This is strategically different then traditional talk therapy which focuses on cognition or changes in how you think about your challenges, in the hope that that creates changes in how you feel and act. SE actually utilizes any one of the realms of information as a way in to transformation (thoughts, sensations, feelings, images, memories, behaviors). The focus on the body largely stems from neuroscience research revealing how our past gets stored in the brain and body in unconscious ways that then effect how we feel, think, and behave in the world, in addition to studying how animals respond to trauma and how wild animals almost never have trauma symptoms nor the host of mental and physical disorders that humans have due to how we hold stress.

EMDR

EMDR is another powerful way to work through traumatic or stressful experiences. It works with singular events or a challenging way of behaving or feeling in your life that has been a theme throughout your life. It utilizes the effects of bilateral stimulation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This can be done either through the movement of the eyes left to right, bilateral sounds in the ears, or a tapping of the left and right side of the body. This bilateral stimulation allows for a re-processing of a traumatic event or a theme of beliefs and feelings in a way that the brain is able to reorganize the material in a more adaptive, healthier way. Instead of talking about an issue, we follow the thread of what organically arises to your attention on the topic as you do bilateral stimulation. I, and many in the clinical field, have found this method to bring quicker, more thorough results.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques or “Tapping”)

EFT is a way to strongly and quickly calm the body’s stress response and work through challenging feelings or any situation where you feel triggered. It involves tapping on body points that are believed to calm the Fight or Flight parts of the brain (the amygdala) while bringing attention to the challenging topic, feeling or trigger. It can quickly get people out of their head and able to let go of thoughts or situations that are stressing them out, dropping them into their present moment senses. It’s a powerful tool client’s often take with and use on their own.

YOGA and Breathwork

A majority of somatic work is not about making things shift through breathwork, etc., but rather becoming more aware of what is already taking place in our body and mind and learning how to support it to move towards balance and health. At times, a short daily practice of moving the body and breath can help build resilience and energetic capacity, remove chronic tension, and help rewire a calming in the nervous system. It can also be a helpful daily practice of moving towards and into our body instead of numbing or dissociating from our body.

It can be the same with meditation - sometimes an experienced meditator needs to back off of their meditation practice because their meditation process allows them to enter a certain part of the brain and makes shifts to the whole system from their, but - that place is compartmentalized in the nervous system and they need to not go their, stay in the other parts of the nervous system (less deep) and make shifts from there.

Therapeutic Touch & Somatic Bodywork

Touch can communicate what words may never be able to. The unconscious organization of our internal world may be most directly contacted and effected through touch, which, is why it is always used with the utmost care and procedure.

Touch contacts how we are “always already” responding to others and the world around us. It can offer safety, support and containment in ways that our system sometimes doesnt sense without the direct invitation from touch. Or, touch will show you exactly how your body resists safety support or downregulation - keeping you in a state of fight or flight and the associated symptoms and disorders that develop.

When appropriate and with consent step by step, touchwork can be a powerful way to move into regulation and connection with yourself and others, help your body soften settle and feel supported, and reprocess content that is stuck in your body.

Is Somatic Psychotherapy Right for You?

This approach may be especially ideal if:

• You long to feel more grounded, alive, and at home in yourself

• You yearn for a more holistic way of working and being in the world.

• You’ve tried traditional talk therapy yet are not accessing where things are stuck

• You have a hunch your mental/emotional challenges have something to do with your brain and body,

• Or that your physical symptoms need a larger container than what conventional western medicine offers.

• You’re living with the effects of trauma, chronic stress, or overwhelm

Let’s Work Together

If you're curious about how somatic psychotherapy can support your healing, I invite you to reach out. Together, we can create a safe space where your whole self can begin to unwind, heal, and grow.