Body-Centered Therapy and Trauma Healing
Listening to the Body as Closely as the Story
Traditional talk therapy is valuable, but sometimes words aren't enough to reach the root of our distress. When we experience trauma, chronic stress, or emotional overwhelm, those experiences don't just live in our minds; they are often also experienced physically. You might feel this as chronic physical tension, a racing heart, persistent exhaustion, or simply a feeling of being disconnected from your own skin.
Somatic therapy bridges the gap between the mind and the physical self. Rather than just talking about your past or your pain, we gently invite the body into the healing process. By paying close, compassionate attention to your moment-to-moment physical sensations, we create a safe environment to process unspoken emotional pain and release deeply held tension.
Whether you are navigating the complex aftermath of trauma, seeking recovery from compulsive behaviors, or carrying the physical burnout of technology overuse, somatic work provides a practical, experiential path forward. Together, we will use techniques like somatic tracking, breath awareness, and gentle movement to help regulate your nervous system.
The goal is not just symptom relief, but a profound reconnection with your physical self. Through this deeply integrative work, you can move out of survival mode and return to a unified, cohesive sense of self, feeling safer, more grounded, and fully present in your daily life.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine, works with the body's incomplete stress responses. Rather than retelling an overwhelming event in detail, SE helps your system finish what it could not finish at the time, releasing the survival energy that stays bound in the body as tension, vigilance, or collapse. As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), I weave this work into psychotherapy rather than offering it as a standalone technique. Learn more at Somatic Experiencing International.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Dr. Pat Ogden, brings the body directly into the therapeutic conversation. Posture, gesture, and movement carry the imprint of what we have lived through; studied with curiosity, those patterns become visible and open to change. It is particularly helpful for the effects of trauma and for limiting beliefs that shape how you move through the world. Learn more at the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
What a Somatic Therapy Session Looks Like
Sessions look much like conversation, because they are one. We talk, and alongside the talking I invite you to notice what is happening physically: where tension gathers, when the breath shortens, what settles you. This is somatic tracking, and it is gentle, paced, and always within your control. You remain in an ordinary chair, in ordinary clothes, in person or on screen.
Who Somatic Therapy Helps
Body-based approaches support recovery from trauma and PTSD, chronic stress and burnout, anxiety that lives in the body, grief, and the physical depletion that follows technology overuse. They also deepen other work: EMDR and IFS both move differently when the body is included.
