What Is Somatic Psychotherapy?

The Body Says What Words Cannot

Somatic Psychotherapy is a holistic psychotherapy that includes traditional cognitive, emotional, and relational focuses, while also including the body and the nervous system. Our bodies hold within them a memory of everything we have ever lived through. Especially when there has been developmental wounds, attachment challenges, or traumatic experiences, it is vital that we include the body in treatment in order to resolve, transform and increase capacities and options.

When we are able to mindfully include awareness of sensation, autonomic nervous system arousal, postural shapes, movement patterns, and, when appropriate, touch, the possibility for direct transformation and lasting integration is increase dramatically.

In therapy, a focus on somatic resourcing, verses historical processing, shifts the focus from endlessly exploring old wounding to building a felt sense of increased capacities and competency, otherwise known as resources, in the here and now. Because challenging life experiences and traumas overwhelmed our resources at the time of occurrence, building more resources in the present supports increased balance, resiliency, options, creativity, and choice. Unless our bodies are able to feel the capacity to perform a certain function (make a boundary) or a sense of resource (like self support, containment, ability to regulate emotions and arousal), then no amount of talking, thinking or feeling about it will change our current abilities.

In this therapeutic approach, I work fluidly across the mind-body interface, continuously folding in thoughts, beliefs, statements, images, feelings, emotions, sensations, movement, postures, touch (where appropriate and agreed upon), energetic states, arousal patterns, and attachment and relational experience.

Many who have had years of therapy, come to this approach because their work in traditional psychotherapy has not been able to fully address or resolve their suffering, their inability to realize their full potential or resolve their attachment issues or traumatic activation and PTSD symptomolgy. Somatic psychology has offered many, a more integrated, direct, and effective treatment experience, allowing them to be more fully who they are and lead a life with more creativity, freedom, and satisfaction. I invite you to explore this approach and see if it might be a good fit for you.