Somatic Therapy

You can understand your story perfectly and still flinch at a raised voice, still brace when the phone rings, still collapse into exhaustion every Sunday night. That's not a failure of willpower or insight. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe.

Somatic work starts from the body rather than the story. In session, we pay attention to what's actually happening in you, the tightening in the chest, the held breath, the urge to look away, with enough safety and slowness that those patterns can begin to unwind. This is informed by polyvagal theory and decades of clinical work with trauma: the body needs to experience safety, not just be told about it.

This isn't bodywork, and there's nothing you need to perform. Much of it looks like ordinary conversation, with regular pauses to notice what the body is saying underneath the words. Over time, clients describe having more room inside: reactions that used to hijack a whole day pass through in minutes, and rest starts to feel like rest again.

We weave somatic attention into nearly everything we do, and for some clients it becomes the primary work. It integrates seamlessly with IFS: parts live in the body, and the body is often where they speak first.