Harness the Innate Wisdom of Your Physiology

It’s one thing to study SE and yet another to develop proficiency from the inside out. As you do your own personal 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 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 in my experience, more fulfilling.

I am an SEI-approved session provider at all levels, and work with many SEPs and participants in the training. Within the personal work, we weave in physioeducation, potential choice points, and why we might choose a specific path. This enriches the work rather than distracts from it, and creates a deeper felt sense experience to reinforce what you’re learning in the training. 

Unfortunately, psychotherapy training rarely teaches us a useful model to manage our capacity as healing professionals. On the contrary, we are taught to be present with our clients at all costs. Yet by doing this, we end up overriding our capacity, then steeling ourselves to our body’s warning signs of overwhelm and exhaustion. This singular focus takes a toll on our physical and emotional well-being, manifesting in burnout, compassion fatigue, and adverse effects on our health. For this reason, with therapists I begin by focusing primarily on understanding and expanding capacity. 

By learning to track your capacity and stay within it, you’ll be more present to your own experience. You’ll notice pitfalls, that is, ways of working that are harmful for you. When you avoid them, you’ll feel less drained at the end of each day. The more you learn to stay within your capacity, the more it will grow over time. As a result, you can take on bigger challenges while simultaneously staying calm and grounded. This will help you stay connected to your passion for healing and will also ensure that the work stays fresh. 

Not only is this more sustainable for you, but it’s also better for clients. When you bring your authentic self into the room, you offer them a healthier relational model and a greater depth of coregulation. However, if you inhibit your own experience to be present with clients instead, then you actually become less so. Inhibiting your experience will make you feel disconnected from the moment, so you must fake it to stay “present.” It’s impossible to show up consistently this way, so over time this harms client relationships and can create irreparable ruptures. On the other hand, when you can be fully in your own experience, you’ll naturally be more present in session without having to work so hard. 

Apart from capacity considerations, there’s a depth to somatic processes that talk therapy fails to reach, and deeper layers can be addressed that might otherwise go unnoticed. This allows you to work with clients who had previously triggered your unresolved material, and in turn, supporting those clients can propel your own personal work. As a result, you will become more embodied and bring a different quality of yourself to all your clients, allowing them to feel more connected, more supported, and even safer in your presence. 

Although I see many of my clients in-person, this work can be equally effective when meeting virtually. I have clients that have been seeing me for years, making consistent breakthroughs, and yet have never met me in person. I am always amazed how this process can be tremendously beneficial in so many forms, creating lasting shifts that clients can bring into all aspects of their lives.

It’s worth noting that some clients truly need the relational element of being physically in the room with a practitioner. If you think this could be you, please don’t shortchange yourself. Should I not be able to meet you in person, I will help you find someone in your area who can. Alternatively, if we are meeting virtually I am open to working concurrently with your in-person talk therapist and even coordinating care if that would be helpful.

If you’re still unsure if virtual sessions would be appropriate for you, consider this:

• Can you sense that your therapist is able to attune to your experience, and do you feel felt by him or her?

• Can you stay with challenging internal states while simultaneously sensing into the safety of the relational container?  

These are important prerequisites for any healthy therapeutic alliance, virtual or otherwise. However, it’s important to notice if being virtual is the thing that’s getting in the way of having this alliance.

To get the most out of virtual sessions, you’ll want to optimize your setup as it will enhance your experience and improve your therapeutic outcome. Beyond the obvious (comfortable private space, robust internet connection, etc.), here are a few considerations that will vastly improve our ability to do great work:

• Position device straight ahead of you at eye-level. This will prevent you from having to twist and turn to see the screen. This way you can stay connected to your felt sense and your body’s subtle impulses.
  
  

• Wider framing: when possible, frame for more than just your face. I am tracking physiological responses in the body so the more visual information, the better.

• Larger screen: unless your vision is perfect, having a wider screen (at least laptop or iPad size) will help you better see me or the slides and videos I show in session.

• Ensure your device is free standing (off your lap and not having to be held in place). Otherwise you may cut yourself off from fully sensing your physiology.

• Set up your environment so you have visual access to resources and ideally, an exterior window. A resource is any object in your environment that connects you to peace, joy, or calm. Even pets are welcome as long as they do not overly distract you from your process. Having this support from your environment will allow organic pendulation to take place so that you can have one foot in the door of safety while the other is in the door of your emotionally challenging material.

  
  

• Appropriate lighting: have enough light for me to see your microexpressions and subtle involuntary movement. Avoid silhouetting from the sun or bright light. If possible, refrain from blurring backgrounds as the artefacts will mimic movement and pull my attention away from what’s actually happening.  

• Do not feel like you have to make eye contact with me or the screen the entire time! This is unnatural and produces zoom fatigue. In session, I will teach you how to avoid zoom fatigue and get the most out of online video communication.

Unlike talk therapy modalities, we are using your physiology as the lens to identify cognitive, emotional, and somatic patterns. We are looking for stuckness or “fixity” in the system and finding ways to allow these patterns to unravel and resolve. Over time, this will reorganize the nervous system and allow you to experience a felt sense of safety and connection. Then, as the experience of your inner world shifts, the experience of your outer world will shift as well.

Most of my clients come in having already done extensive somatic processing, but I will also take on motivated clients who are newer to this work. If after beginning, we find I am not a fit for you, I can connect you to someone who is more specialized in the type of support you need.

More info for those new to somatic processes