What is somatic psychotherapy?
Somatic psychotherapy is a holistic approach that honors the body as a source of wisdom and awareness. While talk therapy is still very much part of our work, we practice listening to and understanding our body’s messages and how they inform and interact with our thoughts and emotions. The body, the mind, and the spirit are in a reciprocal dance, and somatic psychotherapy is an invitation to witness your inner dance, create choice in your perceptions and actions, and restore inner harmony.
Thoughts, feelings, and sensations will be explored and felt in order to build and deepen a relationship to self, which inevitably supports relationships with friends, partners, and family. This can include understanding and sensing boundaries, awareness of needs, why something is “triggering” us, and sequencing it through the body to regulate the nervous system.
It might mean creating movement to allow emotions to release, or to subtly connect to our internal experience and simply get to know the deeper feelings. For awhile, it might mean very light check ins, as the body can be a site for suffering and trauma and we may have strategies to avoid being in touch with our bodies.
We respect your body-mind-spirit’s rhythm and pacing, and listen to what is safe for you..building the skills to establish safety in your nervous system and respond to situations with more conscious choice, rather than reacting from unresolved patterns.
According to the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy,
“Body Psychotherapy is a distinct branch of the main body of psychotherapy with a long history and a large body of knowledge based upon a sound theoretical position. At the same time, it involves a different and explicit theory of mind-body functioning that takes into account the complexity of the intersections of and interactions between the body and the mind, with the common underlying assumption being that a functional unity exists between mind and body. The body does not merely mean the “soma,” which is separate from the mind, the “psyche.” Although many other approaches in psychotherapy touch on this issue, Body Psychotherapy considers this principle to be fundamental.”
Read more here
What Somatic Psychotherapy is NOT:
massage, body-work, energy healing (these can be incorporated if there is training, consent from the client, and a clinical rationale, but it is not inherently in these realms, and I do not offer these at this time)