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.

We’ve been trained, not only by our families of origin but also by modern society, to overvalue our minds and underestimate the wisdom that lives in the rest of us: we’ve learned to override the signals from our bodies in favor of pleasing or meeting the needs of the external world at the expense of our own needs.

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 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.

SCIENCE

What somatic therapy is NOT

What happens in a session?
Creative visualization/harnessing the imaginal. The nervous system doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and imagined
Fewer words, embodied listening (experiential modality, rather than solely cognitive)
Inner Child
You can’t think your way through your feelings
Expressive arts
Creating spaciousness through pausing, guiding the awareness inside, and exploring the truth of What’s Here from moment to moment. Landing in the felt sense of the body as a way to deepen your connection with yourself, to welcome in the truth of your experience, and to take a step toward healing, wholeness, and integration of all your parts.
Not meditation (not transcending, but rather landing in the body’s moment to moment experience/sensations)

Why me?
Profound shift from head into body

Bringing my own humanity into the room: reciprocity is a requirement for deepening trust

In a way, I am a couples therapist, but the couple is you and your body, and I facilitate a process of helping you to deeply listen and to be in dialogue with your system, so that you can access a sense of being Home in yourself: more grounded, more centered, more aligned, and with a greater capacity to hold the spectrum of feelings that are part of being human.

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.

Benefits