Embodied Vitality: Somatic Trauma Integration
Virtual or in-person sessions that support you in true recovery from traumatic or difficult experiences, whether acute or long-term.
It’s time for you to feel alive.
Is unintegrated trauma in the way of your thriving?
Trauma can often feel like a thing that other people experience, and not you. Maybe you’ve had the thought ‘I don’t have trauma, I just have stories’?
Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes and can be hard to pinpoint or recognize. Our brains are highly skilled at making meaning of our experiences, which can leave us thinking that it was normal or just something to ‘get over.’
Signs that you might have unintegrated trauma include:
Feeling numb or dissociated from your body
Struggling to build long lasting, supportive relationships
Chronic pain
Unable to remember sections of your childhood
Getting stuck in the same reactions with your partner
Feeling disconnected from your emotions
Lacking sexual aliveness and expressiveness
It’s time to get out of your head and into your mammalian body.
We will work with the organism of your beautiful body and all of the innate intelligence it holds to help you find peace, presence, and power. I’m going to gently push you towards those big, scary things- like holding yourself with acceptance, recognizing the gorgeous wisdom of your protective responses, and allowing yourself bask in your imperfections. Those are the foundations. You see, true recovery from trauma or chronic stress requires resourcing. It requires you to build warm, safe islands to rest on.
It’s from that place that you can move into deflating the scaries from your past.
Somatic Experiencing facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions.
It’s not uncommon for folks to find me after discovering that they plateau in therapy without feeling much better.
Somatic Trauma Integration is highly effective for both acute and long term traumas or chronic stress. You will find spaciousness and aliveness in your body.
Have you hit a wall with your therapist?
However, cognitive-based talk therapy has a big, glaring blind spot. It doesn’t include the body. It trains people to be really good at talking about their experiences and coping skills, but it doesn’t necessarily help them choose a new path. This is where somatic work differs so greatly from traditional talk therapy.
You’re not just a floating brain; you’re a whole organism. And your whole organism contains a multitude of feelings, thoughts, reactions, defense responses, beliefs, desires, and needs.
You’ll come away from these sessions with a greater ability to move through difficult emotions and a greater capacity to feel joy and pleasure.
The body is the subconscious. Somatic Trauma Integration assists you in differentiating between multiple channels of awareness, including your thoughts, images, movement, emotions, and sensations. This is different than all that talk therapy you’ve tried. When your body’s experience is incorporated into your process, and you learn to trust what it has to say, you finally have access to integration and healing.
If you have either a strong meditation background or a highly cognitive style, this may feel difficult or frustrating for you in the beginning. Don’t worry! You’ll catch the hang of it.
Are you often overwhelmed by your emotions?
Is your emotional capacity stuck between frustration and rage?
Have you spent your life crying in closets and under beds, and don’t know why?
Does depression ‘run in your family?’
Do you feel a sense of emptiness or loneliness, even when surrounded by your friends?
I work with individuals recovering from longterm relational/developmental difficulties, as well as acute traumas such as:
Gynecological appointments that left you feeling assaulted
Sexual assault and boundaries breeches
Birth difficulties
Motor vehicle accident
Falls from bikes, horses, snowboards
Soma
“..the organism of your body and all the intelligence of experience it holds.”
-Livia Shapiro, “The Somatic Therapy Workbook”
For those of you who really like a good definition:
Somatic
“The study and practice of exploring and understanding the fabric of your soma through internal awareness.”
-Livia Shapiro, “The Somatic Therapy Workbook”
Experiencing
What is happening right now. It’s an active, present form of the verb. That is, while you are recounting the story of what happened in the past, what’s happening right now in your body?
“The Somatic Experiencing approach facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions.” - Somatic Experiencing Internation
Request a consultation.
The first step to working together is to shoot me a quick email. You’re welcome to provide as little or as much detail as you’d like, and I will get back to you with some potential times for a 20-30 minute consultation call.
(I know it’s a bit tedious, but my schedule is so full I no longer have standing spaces for consultations.)