It’s one thing to learn SE and yet another to develop these skills from the inside out. As you do your own work, you will become more versed in how to apply SE skills in an intuitive way.

An important element of these sessions is that over time, you will naturally become more embodied. Embodiment can be defined in many ways, but for our purposes, let’s define embodiment as “continuity of the felt sense”. When you stay connected to your body, you remain connected to your intuition, the coregulation field, and to somatic resonance. This is a far more effective way to work, and far more enjoyable in my opinion.

I have been approved by SEI to be a personal session provider at all levels, and work with many SEPs and participants in the training. Within the work, I weave in physioeducation, potential choice points, and why we might choose go in a specific direction. In my experience, this enriches the personal work rather than distracting from it, and it creates a deeper experience to reinforce what you’re learning in the training. 

Expanding capacity is a cornerstone of my client work with healing professionals. Unfortunately, so few of us learned a useful model for managing our capacity in therapy training. On the contrary, we were often taught to override our own needs. Not only is this a bad model for clients with appease tendencies and relational challenges, but this will also inevitably cause a personal toll on our physical and emotional well-being, manifesting in burnout, compassion fatigue, and adverse effects on health. There needs to be a better way.

Our relationship to capacity can be broken down in this way: there is knowing capacity and there is growing capacity, but these are not the same things, and growing it cannot happen without knowing it first. This is especially true when clinical training teaches therapists to override capacity, then subsequently steel oneself to the body’s warning signs of overwhelm and fatigue. Yet when you know your actual capacity, you can learn to stay within it, avoid overwhelm, then allow capacity to grow naturally over time. With this awareness, you can shift your relationship to client work. Operating within capacity will help you stay connected to your passion for healing and ensure the work stays fresh. 

Then there’s capacity growth or expansion, which is different from simple awareness of where your capacity lies. Clinicians get excited about the prospect of this, and it can seem mysterious or even magical, however it’s relatively simple: your capacity will grow over time naturally as a by-product of our work. I can explain how this happens more in our consult, but it won’t make sense in a meaningful way until you have begun to experience it. Over time, you will be able to take on more and more challenges while simultaneously staying calm and grounded. This can exponentially increase your ability to stay connected with clients without overwhelming yourself. In fact, if you’d like, you can take on more clients or consecutive sessions, and then feel recharged rather than drained at the end of the day. 

It's important to add that there’s a depth to the somatic processes that talk therapy often fails to reach, and deeper layers can be addressed that might otherwise go unnoticed. This will give you the ability to be with clients that would have previously triggered your unresolved material, and in turn, supporting those clients will propel your own personal somatic work. As a result of that, you become more embodied, and in turn can bring a different quality of yourself to your clients, allowing them to feel more connected, more supported, and even safer in your presence. 

First, we will build connection to the felt sense. In other words, we'll begin to notice what’s happening in your body. At some point in life, you may have disconnected from the body due to physical pain, overwhelming emotions, or a traumatic event. When this happens, body sensations can feel very unpleasant. To defend against this, you may have cut off connection to the body. Over time, this temporary solution to pain can become its own problem though. Disconnection from the body can cause (1) limited intuition around safety or danger (2) difficulty sensing emotions as they come up, and (3) chronic pain or syndromal patterns caused by bracing. All of this can make life very challenging to navigate... so our first job is to rebuild this bridge to body sensations, then go from there.

Once this connection to the body and emotions is online, we begin working on regulation. This will allow you to feel things, even unpleasant things, without feeling overwhelmed. You can experience low levels of fear without it becoming a panic attack, anger without it turning into rage, or any emotion without it turning into dissociation. This part of the work is about teaching your nervous system a different way to be. As you experience this new way of being, your nervous system will say “I like this” and continue to regulate more naturally in this way. Typically clients feel calmer, sleep better, and feel less fear of being out of control.

Now we turn the focus to expanding your window of tolerance (your capacity to feel things without being overwhelmed). I sometimes refer to this phase as “stretching”, but really it's about building up the ability to tolerate difficult sensations or emotions. It is akin to lifting weights in the gym: building up to heavier weights over time, increasing strength and solidness in order to take on more. With an expanded emotional capacity, you will be able to stay calm and grounded when difficult situations arise in life. This will be especially helpful if you choose to move into trauma processing. Benefits during this expansion stage include taking on bigger challenges with much greater ease.

If both Somatic Experiencing and myself as a practitioner feel like a good fit for you to do deeper processing, then the previous steps are important prerequisites. However, it's also important to have a solid support system such as an understanding partner, supportive friends, a good psychotherapist, and a physically and emotionally safe living environment. With a basic support system in place, we can work through any past traumas that stand in the way of living your life to the fullest.

Trauma is stored in the body as bound up energy and dysregulation, as well as in the brain as implicit memories (snippets of sound, images, smells, and sensations). A major myth around trauma is that it is necessary to tell and retell the story of what happened. Although this can be helpful for some, more often it is quite destabilizing. Together we'll gently work with implicit memories while also tracking the body’s sensations. Sometimes small releases in the nervous system take place, and at other times full completion of survival responses can occur. This ultimately leads to the release of constriction in the body as well as lessening suffering around daily triggers.

I've supported clients in overcoming medical trauma, crashes and falls, sexual trauma, inescapable attacks, traumatic grief, environmental disasters, and relational or developmental trauma.

It differs in two major ways. First, we are working within a coaching model which means that we are more forward-leaning in terms of moving toward the life you want rather than strictly focusing on the past. Second, this is what’s known as a "bottom-up process.” This means that in order to heal, we don’t spend all our time talking about events and meaning (as one would in traditional talk therapy). Instead, we address disorganization and dysregulation in the physiology. After bound-up energy discharges from the body, meaning will naturally arise through your intuition and the felt sense. My experience has been that the deep insights that come from this process can be far more powerful and long-lasting for clients than mere intellectual realizations.