Adjunct Somatic Therapy
Working with your Current Therapist
Adjunct somatic therapy is for folks who are already working with a therapist but would like to add in somatic work for additional healing. Particularly if you have a trauma history, somatic work may allow therapy to continue in a deeper way. Perhaps you have a history of trauma, sexual trauma , childhood trauma, shock trauma, or athletic trauma. Perhaps you also have chronic pain. Or you may have no memory of trauma but you feel stuck. Your therapist may also have a sense that somatic work could help.
I offer adjunct somatic trauma therapy where we do a very focused kind of work to help you move forward. We work somatically while you continue working with your current therapist and I am available to consult with them to coordinate care.
My Speciality in Somatic Therapy
Feel free to browse below about the somatic therapies I use. I’ve found that different people need different methods at different times. I’ve also found that one method may work for one layer of trauma or wounding while another method works for the next. If needed and wanted, I also integrate these methods into frameworks you may already be finding helpful such as Internal Family Systems or Emotionally Focused Therapy. We decide together what feels right for you.
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Brainspotting
Brainspotting evolved from EMDR and somatic trauma methods. It uses focused eye positions to heal wounding held in deeper subcortical parts of the brain. Recent research has shown that Brainspotting may be as effective or even more effective than EMDR, which is my experience.
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Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing works with the nervous system to heal trauma and stress. It is very gentle, harnessing your body’s innate power to heal itself. It focuses more on physical sensations than thoughts or emotions. It resolves trauma through corrective experiences in the nervous system in a safe therapeutic relationship.
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Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a combination of body-based therapy and talk therapy. It can feel more accessible for people who enjoy talk therapy for healing. It can be helpful with all kinds of trauma. It is also designed to bring healing in complex cases when there may be many different types of trauma and wounding at one time, such as with childhood trauma and complex trauma.
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EMDR or IFS-Informed EMDR
Eye Movement Densitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a highly effective treatment backed by research that uses bilateral stimulation. This could happen with eye movements, tapping, or sound. Integrating Internal Family Systems or IFS-Informed Parts Work into EMDR can be especially helpful with childhood trauma and complex trauma.
What to Expect in Somatic Therapy
You will be invited to notice how your thoughts and emotions are connected to your physical sensations. This is called interoception and it is foundational to somatic trauma work.
In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic Experiencing, you may learn somatic techniques to regulate your emotions to support trauma processing
In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic Experiencing you may mindfully and gently notice processes in your body and nervous system that did not get to complete at the time of the trauma.
In Brainspotting, you may be asked to look at a specific point in your field of vision associated with reactivity to mindfully notice what unfolds. You may be invited to listen to bilateral music.
In EMDR, you may use bilateral stimulation through your eyes or body to process past memories until they are not longer overwhelming to your nervous system.
In IFS-Informed Parts Work, you may be asked to check with all the parts of your system to make sure it is ok to move forward with any given somatic intervention. Particularly if trauma was in childhood, you may be invited to befriend and become curious about parts of yourself that could be impacted by an unresolved trauma response. This can be a huge relief for young parts that did not have agency and did not get what they needed during an overwhelming experience.
You may feel your body come out of freeze or collapse responses which can be associated with tremendous body sensation for a short period of time. Some people report feeling reconnected to new parts of their life force after this happens.
How Does Somatic Therapy Work?
Healing unresolved trauma somatically is often about allowing the nervous system to complete processes that needed to happen at the time of the original trauma but could not.
This does not mean that you necessarily have to remember, relive, or describe what happened. Somatic trauma work focuses on how trauma lives in the body and nervous system in present time.
I use several somatic healing methods because different people may need different things at different times. One tool may work for one layer of the trauma, and another works for the next one. I use Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting, and EMDR. Particularly with childhood trauma, we may use IFS-informed parts work to bring agency and healing compassion to younger aspects of your inner world.
All of this is done with an attachment focus in a warm therapeutic relationship. I am an EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) therapist at heart, so I also pull from evidence-based ways of viewing relationships cycles through an EFT lens, very akin to EFIT (Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) but with an important focus on the somatic resolution of trauma responses and attachment wounding held in the body and nervous system.
Uncoupling Trauma Responses from Emotions
If you are a survivor of overwhelming life experiences such as trauma in childhood or adulthood, your emotional responses may be either really big or really absent at times. You may feel overwhelmed, rageful, frozen, collapsed, anxious, panicked, dissociated, spaced out, foggy, numb, or like you are living in survival mode. This is because your emotional processes may be combined with trauma responses - fight, flight, freeze, or collapse responses in your nervous system.
In a very focused kind of trauma work, we uncouple the trauma response from your emotional reactions so that you can feel your feelings without the intensity of past trauma. This happens by working somatically with the brain, body, and nervous system. Once the trauma responses are healed, emotional work can progress with your current therapist. You might either be able to feel your feelings without getting really activated. You may also begin to feel your feelings where you couldn’t before.
