What Is Somatic Therapy?

A somatic approach honours your body’s innate wisdom as an essential part of healing—held within a safe, attuned therapeutic relationship. While talking and analysis offer insight, they can miss the deeper patterns stored in the body: the sensations, impulses, emotions, and beliefs shaped through past relationships and lived experience. Somatic psychotherapy helps us access these layers so healing can occur not just in the mind, but through the body’s intelligence and wisdom.
In our work together, I support you in inhabiting your body more fully and safely. Together, we meet your nervous system to recognize safety, possibility, and expanded choice.

How Somatic Therapy Differs from CBT and Other Talk Therapies

CBT and other talk-based therapies focus on identifying thoughts, reframing beliefs, mindset work, and understanding behaviour through conversation.

Somatic psychotherapy works differently by centering the body—where emotions, habits, trauma and long held patterns live. We pay attention not only to what you think, but to how you brace, collapse, rush, or hold your breath, and how your body responds in moments of stress or relational connection.

By working directly with movement patterns, sensation, breath, posture, and impulse, we reach layers of experience and conditioning that talking alone cannot. Somatic awareness is the first step, allowing change to be not only understood but felt and practiced in the nervous system. It’s the difference between knowing “water is good for me” and sensing your thirst cues and naturally reaching for water—leading to shifts that are more integrated and aligned with your deeper needs and values.

How I Work: SE, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, IFS, Mindfulness compassion and Dance/Movement Therapy

My work draws from several somatic and trauma-informed modalities that support healing through the body, the nervous system, and the therapeutic relationship.

Somatic Experiencing (SE)

Helps regulate the nervous system by gently working with sensation, pendulation, grounding, and titration. This approach supports the release of trauma patterns stored in the body and helps you develop greater capacity, resilience, and embodied safety.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)

Integrates mindfulness, relational attunement, and movement-based experiments to explore how posture, impulses, boundaries, and habitual response to adversity, attachment history and trauma experiences. By tuning into the body’s sensory information—breath, gesture, tension, stillness—we access material that talking alone can miss. This process increases your awareness of automatic reactions and supports more regulated, connected ways of being.

Parts Work

The parts work I am trained comes from the SP lens, and can be also be found in Internal Family Systems (IFS). Parts Work helps you connect with the protective, reactive, and wounded parts of yourself with compassion and curiosity. By acknowledging and validating the unique voice and intention of each part, you can soften internal conflict, repair emotional wounds, and cultivate self-leadership. This integration leads to greater coherence, self-compassion, and trust in your ability to create meaningful change.

Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMT)

Uses movement, expressive gesture, imagery, and symbolism to access emotions and unconscious material that may not surface through talking alone. Grounded in the mind–body connection, DMT recognizes how movement patterns shape both our physiology and psychology. By expanding your range of motion and attending to the qualities of your movement, you deepen your emotional awareness, regulation, and sense of embodied presence.

Mindfulness & Compassion-Based Approaches

I integrate mindfulness and compassion-focused practices to help you observe your internal experience with without judgment and with warmth. This includes grounding, breath work, somatic tracking, and self-compassion practices. These tools strengthen emotional tolerance, soften reactivity, and support healing from relational wounds.

Together, these modalities provide a contained, relational, and body-based pathway to healing—supporting regulation, emotional expression, quietening patterned reactivity, and a deeping connection to self and others.

What happens during A session?

Every session is tailored to your unique needs and comfort level. Some clients prefer to focus primarily on verbal reflection (talk therapy) as starting point to explore thoughts , emotions, and experiences . As trust deepens, we may work deeply with unconscious beliefs or patterns through somatic, movement-based, or creative approaches that engage the body to help process what words alone may not capture.

For those navigating intense emotions or overwhelming sensations, I introduce many grounding techniques, mindfulness practices, and other tools to support nervous system regulation and help you feel safe and present. Sessions can also include inner child work, guided imagery, expressive art therapy, dance therapy, or relational attunement practices, depending on what resonates with you in the moment.

Together, we explore what feels most supportive, integrating verbal, somatic, and creative methods to strengthen the mind–body connection, cultivate internal safety, and foster embodied awareness. The pace, focus, and approach are always collaborative, giving you choice and agency in how you engage in your healing journey.

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