Somatic Therapy.
Feeling “stuck” or disconnected from your body?
Wanting to find embodied ways to address disconnection, numbness, chronic stress, “stuckness,” trauma, depression, and anxiety?
Craving the experience of more freedom, range, creativity, spontaneity, power, and deeper embodiment?
Feeling like you haven’t quite gotten what you needed from traditional talk therapy?
Interested in learning more about yourself?
Looking to tune into your body’s constant stream of information and wisdom?
Therapy that brings your body back into the equation.
Why can it feel so easy to become disconnected from one’s own body? There can be many reasons. For one, the hyper-individualistic overculture that we find ourselves in tends to operate “from the neck up.” In other words, we often get messages (implicit or explicit) to overvalue thinking and “figuring it out yourself” and undervalue sensing, experiencing, feeling, and connection. Further, the mind and body are often incorrectly perceived as being separate from one another.
Living in a society that tends to leave the body out of the equation can result in feeling disconnected from your body, its wisdom, and its natural impulses. It can also make it more difficult to access your body’s capacity to serve as a touchstone for your well-being. When all of this happens, it can contribute to feeling like you’re stuck in a feedback loop with things like chronic stress, unprocessed trauma, depression, and anxiety.
Here's the good news: you already have the magnificent resource of your body available to you. "Somatics" refers to the study of the body—understood not as separate from the mind, but as a continuation of it. Your body is constantly communicating, whether or not you're speaking verbally. Somatic therapy is like a radio antenna that helps you tune into that communication in a supportive, relational, and collaborative environment.
This kind of work can be particularly meaningful for artists and creatives, whose instrument—including the voice, body, imagination, nervous system, and emotional range—are interconnected with their creativity and well-being. It's also well-suited for those who have found traditional talk therapy helpful to a point, but sense that something deeper is wanting to be explored or worked through.
How I work therapeutically with the body.
My approach to somatic therapy is collaborative, consent-based, and attuned to your pace. The therapeutic relationship is always at the center—I work with you, not on you. This is especially important when working with trauma, where pacing and attunement are central to everything.
Ample time and space are given to establishing a felt sense of support, empowerment, and agency in the therapeutic relationship before we go anywhere challenging. We work by moving back and forth—gently dipping into difficult material, then returning to your resources (internal or external things that help you feel a sense of safety). This can help to slowly build your capacity and resilience over time rather than overwhelming your system.
As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, the primary somatic modality I draw from is Somatic Experiencing® (SE™). SE is a body-oriented approach to addressing trauma and stress developed by Peter Levine, Ph.D. Rather than requiring you to revisit traumatic memories directly or intensively, SE works gradually and incrementally—gently approaching difficult material in small doses while continually returning to your resources.
SE aims to help people process symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in their bodies and nervous systems. This helps the body to become unstuck, as self-protective responses (such as anger or the impulse to flee) and survival energy are gently allowed to be expressed, released, and completed. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, this approach helps reinstate resilience and assist the nervous system in becoming unstuck.
I also incorporate other somatic therapy techniques and modalities, such as movement, dance, breathwork, body awareness, and body-based expressive arts. In addition, I incorporate nervous system education for artists, based in part on the Fox Method, developed by Ruby Fox.
Depending on where you are and what the work calls for, somatic work in our sessions may include:
• Somatic Experiencing®: Tracking bodily sensations, working with the felt sense, and gently completing survival responses that have been held in the nervous system
• Movement and dance: Drawing on my training in dance therapy to use movement as a direct pathway into what the body is holding and communicating
• Drama therapy: Exploring embodied role, gesture, play, and story to access and process experience that may be difficult to reach through talk or stillness alone
• Breathwork and body-awareness practices: Developing greater capacity to inhabit the body, support the nervous system, and use breath as an anchor
• The Fox Method (Ruby Fox): A pioneering approach to nervous system education and the arts. This way of working is particularly relevant for artists and creatives working to understand their nervous system as a primary instrument in their creative life and practice.
• Body-based expressive arts: Integrating somatic awareness with dreamwork, drawing, writing, sound, and other modalities to give different forms to what lives in the body
Somatic therapy can be a powerful complement to depth therapy and expressive arts work. When body, psyche, and soul are addressed together, something more complete becomes possible. A kind of integration that doesn't just change how you think about your experience—but how you live in it, and how it lives in you.
For further reading, check out these articles:
Frequently Asked Questions
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"Somatics" refers to the study of the body, which is understood not as separate from the mind, but as a continuation of it. Somatic therapy is any approach to therapy that brings the body into the room alongside the mind: paying attention to bodily sensations, working with breath and movement, and recognizing that the body holds experiences, memories, and wisdom that talking alone doesn't always reach.
Your body is constantly communicating, whether or not you're speaking verbally. Somatic therapy offers a way to tune into that communication—in a supportive, collaborative, consent-based environment—and to work with what the body is holding rather than around it.
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Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a body-oriented approach to addressing the effects of stress and trauma developed by Peter Levine, Ph.D. What distinguishes it from many other somatic approaches is its particular focus on the nervous system and the way the body holds unresolved survival responses. These are the incomplete fight, flight, or freeze reactions that can get “stuck” when a stressful or overwhelming experience doesn't get fully processed.
Rather than requiring you to revisit difficult memories directly or in detail, SE works gradually and gently, approaching challenging material in small doses while continually returning to inner and outer resources (things that help to anchor and support you).
The aim is to help the body complete what it wasn't able to at the time, release survival energy that has been bound up, and restore a natural sense of flow and resilience. It is a slow, careful, and deeply respectful way of working. -
Somatic therapy can be helpful for a wide range of experiences, including trauma of many kinds—whether a single overwhelming event or the slower accumulation of difficult relational experiences over time. It is also well-suited for chronic stress, anxiety, grief and loss, life transitions, burnout, a sense of disconnection from the body or one's emotions, creative blocks, and a desire to develop greater embodiment and emotional range.
It is particularly valuable for people who feel they've hit a ceiling with talk therapy alone. They may find that they understand things intellectually but sense that this hasn't translated into feeling meaningfully different in their body and daily life.
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Trauma is less about what happened and more about what the experience left behind in the body and nervous system. It can result from a single overwhelming event, such as an accident, loss, or violation. Or it can occur from the cumulative weight of difficult relational experiences over time, such as growing up in an unpredictable or emotionally unsafe environment.
Trauma isn't always dramatic or easily nameable. Many people carry the effects of experiences they don't think of as "traumatic" because they compare their experience to what others have been through.
The way people respond to trauma is often shaped by what kind of witnessing and support were available (if any), whether the trauma was able to be processed and integrated, and where it landed in the mind, body, and soul. -
Traditional talk therapy tends to work "from the top down"—engaging the thinking mind to make sense of experience, change patterns of thought, and shift behavior. This can be genuinely helpful. However, it has its limits, particularly when what's driving the difficulty isn't a thought pattern but something held more deeply in the body and nervous system—survival responses, memory, a felt sense of unsafety that persists even when the rational mind knows it's over.
Somatic therapy works from the "bottom up"—starting with the body, the sensations, the nervous system— and integrates the thinking mind from there. Many people find that once they've established a foundation of body-based work, insights that were previously only intellectual begin to feel true in a different and more lasting way.
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Pacing is central to everything in somatic work—and especially in SE. One of the reasons stressful or traumatic experiences are so difficult to process is that they often happen quickly, without time to integrate, and without the support of someone who can be present with us. SE deliberately reverses that: it is slow, careful, and always attentive to your comfort and capacity.
Ample time and space are given to establishing a felt sense of the therapeutic relationship before we go anywhere challenging. We work by moving back and forth, gently approaching difficult material, then returning to your resources. This serves to build your capacity over time rather than overwhelming your system. Your pace is always the right pace.
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Somatic sessions can vary considerably depending on where you are and what the work calls for. Some sessions are primarily conversational, with periodic attention to what's happening in the body as you speak. Others might involve more direct body-based work—noticing and tracking sensations, working with stuck survival responses, exploring movement or gesture, or using imagery to access what's held somatically.
Some examples of what might happen in a somatic session include: noticing what shifts in the body when you speak about a particular topic; paying attention to and following the flow of sensations as they move through the body; working with movement, breath, or sound to access what's being held; or letting a part of the body "speak," giving voice to what's been stored there. The session is always shaped collaboratively, with your consent and comfort guiding what we explore and how.
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No special background or existing body awareness is needed. Many people come to somatic therapy precisely because they feel disconnected from their bodies—that disconnection is often part of what we're working with, not a prerequisite for skipping the work altogether.
The most important thing is curiosity and a willingness to pay attention, however tentatively, to what's happening inside. Everything else develops from there. -
Somatic therapy and Somatic Experiencing® can both be done effectively online. While there are some adaptations involved (we rely more on verbal tracking), the core of the work translates well to a telehealth format. Many clients find that being in their own environment actually supports the work, as it's a space where they already feel some degree of comfort and familiarity.
Your body is a gift.
“This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.”
—Marion Woodman