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, habitual responses to emotions, and beliefs shaped through past relationships and lived experience.
Somatic psychotherapy works with these layers directly — so healing can occur not just in the mind, but through the body’s own intelligence.
In our work together, I support you in inhabiting your body more fully and safely. Together, we meet your nervous system where it is, and gradually expand your capacity for safety, possibility, and choice.
How Somatic Therapy Differs from Traditional Talk Therapies
CBT and other talk-based therapies focus on identifying thoughts, reframing beliefs, and understanding behaviour through conversation. These approaches offer real value — but they work primarily from the neck up.
Somatic psychotherapy works differently, by centering the body — where emotions, habits, trauma, and long-held patterns actually live. In our work together, 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, sensation, breath, posture, and impulse, we reach layers of experience that talking alone cannot access. This is sometimes called bottom-up therapy — working from the body’s signals upward, rather than from thoughts downward. Somatic awareness becomes the first step toward change that is 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 and naturally reaching for it — change that is felt in the body, not only understood by the mind.
This is especially meaningful for people who have already done significant talk therapy and feel they’ve hit a ceiling — where insight is present but something in the body hasn’t caught up yet.
How I Work
My approach draws from several somatic and trauma-informed modalities, woven together relationally and collaboratively — always at a pace that honours your nervous system.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Developed by Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing works gently with sensation, pendulation, grounding, and titration to support the release of trauma patterns held in the body. Drawing on polyvagal theory and an understanding of how the nervous system responds to threat and safety, SE helps the nervous system complete what it couldn’t at the time — building greater capacity, resilience, and a felt sense of safety.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy integrates mindfulness, relational attunement, and movement-based experiments to explore how posture, impulse, boundaries, and habitual responses were shaped by adversity, attachment wounds, and traumatic experience. By tuning into the body’s sensory information — breath, gesture, tension, stillness, we access material that talking alone can miss. This process supports greater nervous system regulation, increased self-awareness, and more empowered ways of being in relationship and in daily life.
Parts Work / Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Parts Work helps you connect with the protective, reactive, and wounded parts of yourself with compassion and curiosity. Rooted in both the Sensorimotor and IFS frameworks, this approach acknowledges that no part of you is the problem — every part has a role, a history, and a reason for showing up the way it does. By acknowledging and validating each part’s unique voice and intention, we can soften internal conflict, repair emotional wounds, and cultivate self-leadership. This integration leads to greater coherence, self-compassion, and trust in your capacity for change.
Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMT)
Dance Movement Psychotherapy uses movement, expressive gesture, imagery, and symbolism to access emotions and unconscious material that may not surface through words. 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 emotional awareness, regulation, and a felt sense of embodied presence. You do not need any dance experience — this work meets you exactly where you are.
Expressive Arts & Art Therapy
Expressive arts and art-based approaches offer another language for what lives beneath words. Through drawing, imagery, or creative expression, we access material that verbal processing alone may not reach — supporting integration, emotional expression, and a deepened relationship with your inner world.
Mindfulness & Compassion-Based Approaches
I integrate mindfulness and compassion-focused practices to help you observe your internal experience without judgment . This includes grounding, breathwork, somatic resourcing, and self-compassion practices — tools that 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, and a deepening connection to self and others.
What Happens in a Somatic Therapy Session?
Every session is tailored to your unique needs and comfort level. Some clients begin primarily through verbal reflection — exploring thoughts, emotions, and experiences in conversation. As trust deepens, we may work more directly with unconscious beliefs or body-held patterns through somatic, movement-based, or creative approaches.
For those navigating intense emotions or overwhelming sensations, I introduce grounding techniques, mindfulness practices, and somatic resourcing tools to support nervous system regulation and help you feel safe and present. Working within your window of tolerance — the zone where processing is possible without becoming overwhelmed — is central to how I pace our work. Sessions may also include inner child work, guided imagery, expressive arts, or relational attunement practices — depending on what resonates with you in the moment.