somatic counseling

when understanding your patterns isn’t creating change…

In my counseling sessions, I can support you to expand your nervous system’s regulatory capacity, integrate past trauma, work towards secure attachment, and embody your intentions.

Somatic Counseling is not psychotherapy, but unlike many forms of coaching, it focuses less on achieving goals, and more on uncovering resources, shifting limiting beliefs, and moving beyond deep-rooted patterns in a gentle and safe way. It is oriented towards healing rather than action, and focuses more on our experience of an issue than the external issue itself. When we can understand why we are having the response that we are to an external situation, we can begin to slow it down and work with the material that it is allowing us to access, using this to create change at a deeper level. From here, we can shift our relationship to that issue through making an internal shift. My style of coaching focuses on body sensation to access these internal patterns, and is resource-oriented. I also have skills in somatic trauma resolution, allowing us to work together to resolve past traumatic experiences that are continuing to impact your quality of life.

We use the body as an access-point to understanding the patterns that we wish to change, at a deeper level than the mind. The body shows us what is underneath the conscious understanding - after all, if understanding was enough, these patterns would have already changed by now. We explore the somatic memory that is held in the body, from pre-verbal developmental material (which is generally the key to working with attachment states), as well as in the case of shock trauma. Through being with these body sensations, we can unfold a deeper understanding of what needs to be seen or completed from those earlier memories. When understanding our patterns isn’t creating change on its own, we often need to heal it at the level of the body memory.

My work is developmentally-informed and relational, in two different ways. I understand developmental material, and am tracking your process to understand that material, and how I can meet you in the present-moment relationally in a way that supports a corrective experience around that material. I also support you to learn to be with your attachment system in a new way, with me there as an ally of support. This is what allows us to work together to support you to heal from unwanted attachment patterning and create more secure attachment with yourself and others over time.

The inspirations for my coaching work are my training in the modalities of Somatic Experiencing, Ray Catellino’s training in Pre and Perinatal Somatic Healing (which specifically works with early pre-verbal developmental material), and Anna Chitty’s Polarity Life Coaching approach, which are all body-centered approaches to healing with a focus on the nervous system. My sessions may at times feel similar to talk therapy or counseling, although I will be orienting our work around Intentions, and asking you to feel your body as a way to deepen into emotions or broaden out of an activation trigger as we explore the material this is arising for you.

Though I speciliaze in trauma integration, nervous system regulation, and attachment healing, my passion and goal is to help you uncover what is beyond those initial goals. Working with Intentions supports something deeper to emerge beneath the layers of the stuck patterns. Through exploring the somatic shapes and memories of stuck patterns, we can find new shapes and patterns that come from a deeper place, and foster the emergence of these states through our sessions together, and sometimes through practices that I may give you in between.