Somatic Therapy

Somatics is a fancy way to saying ‘In the body’ and at it’s core, somatic therapy is work that we do in your physical body instead of solely the content in your brain. When I explain how it works to my clients, I will usually describe our experience of the world as having two lanes that run parallel; one lane is our personalities with our beliefs (the stuff we talk about), and the other lane is our animal body. The animal body doesn’t give a hoot about what’s socially appropriate or convenient. The animal body totally gets left in the dust by traditional talk-therapy, and is the most common reason I hear people say “Well I tried therapy and it didn’t work.” You can’t talk your way out of trauma.

The body keeps an echo of every experience that we have, because our bodies love to use patterns of what we have seen before to figure out if we are safe in any given moment. If you have heard of Somatic Therapy before, you might have a strong association that it’s only for treating trauma, but I’d like to share with you what our body considers trauma:

1. We were out of control and couldn’t protect ourselves (limited power & agency)

2. No one could help (isolation & disconnection)

You may have read that and thought “Well if that’s the case, everyone has trauma!” Ding ding! The world can be very hard on our nervous systems, and even if you wouldn’t consider yourself to be traumatized, you may have a chronically stressed out nervous system. Many of my clients who lead overall productive, successful lives come to me with teeth grinding, sleep issues, migraines, and irritable bowel symptoms. In our sessions, I will teach you actionable techniques from our very first session to teach you how to start hearing your body, learning to understand it’s messages, and restore calm to your nervous system.

I practice Somatic Experiencing, which you can learn more about here.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Have you ever been laying on the couch and there’s a part of you that wants to get up and go do something and then there’s another part of you that just wants to veg and watch TV and you want them both equally? How I usually explain parts work is that we store an echo of every story that ever happens to us in our bodies and those parts of our story play an unconscious but very active role in our lives.

Internal family systems, also known as internal attachment work is wonderful for people who self-sabotage, who feel like something is missing, or who have tried other forms of therapy and felt like they missed something. We will heal the polarized parts of you and help them discover balance and self-compassion.