What is Somatic Therapy?
The body holds so many messages. It’s always communicating. Somatic therapy provides a supported way, without pressure, to begin to discover the way feelings live in your body.
The story of our lives lives in our bodies. What shows up as chronic issues—anxiety, depression, reactivity, no-reason aches and pains—may have begun as emotions we experienced long ago that did not find connection in a supportive other, and got stuck in our tissue.
This might look like nervous system dysregulation: a body stuck in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, or a tendency toward collapse or dissociation. When we create a safe enough space to slow down and actually be with these places within us we’ve learned to avoid, and to explore them with compassionate curiosity, the feelings are able to move through and be released. In the process, we deepen in self-knowledge: we begin to understand at a visceral level what has until now been an unconscious, repeating process. We begin to know how we tick. With this self-awareness comes acceptance of who we are and a greater tolerance for life’s chaos.
What happens in a session?
Hard as we try, we can’t think our way through our feelings; they’re here to be felt. Much of each session is devoted to this practice, by dropping below the level of the conscious mind and into the depths of the emotional body.
We might do this through:
Landing in the felt sense of the body as a way to deepen your connection with yourself, to welcome the truth of your experience from moment to moment, without judgment or agenda.
Expanding the window of tolerance to be with and create spaciousness around the full spectrum of emotions that are part of being human.
Creative visualization/harnessing the imaginal. The nervous system doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and imagined.
Fewer words, more embodied listening: incorporating pauses to digest each piece of the process, rather than speeding past or riding on top of it. Somatic therapy is an experiential modality, rather than solely cognitive.
Tending to the inner child as they live inside our adult body and nervous system, understanding how they show up them in our present day experience, and taking steps toward integration.
Expressive arts: activating the right brain by creating images and gestures and using them a a map.
Why me?
In a way, I am a couples therapist, but the couple is you and your body, and I’m helping you communicate with each other.
I bring my own humanity into the room, believing that energetic reciprocity is a requirement for trust, and thus for healing.
I received my training (RSMT/E) from the Leven Institute for Expressive Movement, an Approved Training Program of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), as well as a designated Training Center for the US Association of Body Psychotherapy (USABP).
As someone who’s been in and out of talk therapy since I was a kid, I am living proof that somatic work can access a deeper, often unconscious core of our wounding. As a client of somatic therapy myself, I’ve experienced a profound shift from head into body that has allowed me to have more of myself in my daily life: more empowerment, presence and clarity; less self-sabotage and rumination.
By learning to deeply listen and to be in dialogue with my system, I can now access a sense of Home in myself: more grounded, more centered, more aligned, and with a greater capacity to hold and flow with the enormous peaks and valleys of being alive.
I believe this kind of transformation is possible for everyone who’s open to it, and I want to help facilitate it.
I’m not a guru, nor am I here to fix you, but rather to help direct you to the deeply knowing self that is already in you, waiting for a listener.