Somatic Psychotherapy

Somatic Psychotherapy

• Gently guided meditative processes
• Deep grounding in your self
• Witnessing you in the fullness of your being
• Revealing and reveling in your inner wisdom
• Honoring vulnerability and taking risks
• Encouraging self-expression and creativity
• Making space for all your emotions
• Expanding what is possible through experimentation and discovery
• Linking past to present and present to future
• Spontaneity and playfulness
• Connection and transformation
• …and so much more

What does a typical session look like?

A somatic therapy session can start in two different directions. If you come in with a particular issue you would like to work on, you can bring it to mind, or briefly talk about it. If you do not have a particular theme in mind, don’t worry, we will work with the wealth of present experience that’s showing up in your body that very day. In either case, I will help guide you into a mindful state, and we will both pay attention to what comes up for you. This could be a sensation in your body, a memory, an image, an internal voice, or an impulse to do or say something. As each piece emerges, we will focus on it, and where it leads us. Typically, as you feel safe, consciously and unconsciously, more will unfold.

We will begin to create some experiments together, and by experiment I mean ways to get closer to understanding how each piece of your experience impacts you. I may offer you some words and ask you to pay attention to what arises for you, for example, I may say “Your voice matters “. When you hear that phrase, you might notice a tightening in your chest, a sense of forward moving energy, an impulse to say “No it doesn’t!” , an entirely different, reaction or even no particular reaction at all.    Each reaction (or lack thereof) tells a piece of the story of how you orient yourself, and in discovering more, we can open the possibility to change.  We may play with moving closer or farther from each other, keeping eyes open or closed. Each experiment is designed to allow us to study your experience, to invite more to unfold, and to create nurturing experiences.

Sometimes, your inner child might come out to play.  Much of our emotional wounding takes place initially at a very early age, in our developmental process.  We may have needs that were unmet (for emotional support, for the ability to say no and have it respected, for the ability to make our own choices and express who we are, etc).  We each came up with the best way to adapt to that situation, based on our own temperament, understanding of our family system and available resources, etc.  These were brilliant and lifesaving, but often we also kept those adaptations to our early environment as our go-to response for our current life struggles, where they may or may not be the best response.   In somatic psychotherapy we can speak to those younger parts of ourselves directly, let them have the nurturing experiences they did not  have, provide explanations about the world or why things happened the way they did.  Honoring all of the ways you acted to protect yourself, and opening the door to respond in news ways can lead to transformation not just in how you think, but how you experience yourself in the world.

These are just some possibilities, but the way each session can play out is nearly endless, and is based on what comes up uniquely for you at that moment.