Somatic Experiencing Therapy
A mind-body connection approach to therapy
Bridging the gap between your mind, body, and emotions.
- Do you sometimes shut down when a situation feels overwhelming?
- Is it difficult for you to find the energy to motivate yourself?
- Do you act on impulse and then wish you had made a different call?
- Does it feel impossible to slow down your thoughts and find a sense of calm?
If you’ve tried different therapy approaches in or around Miami to achieve change but always end up back where you started, you know how hard enduring emotional and behavioral change can be to attain.
The good news is that there is hope. You can change and heal, especially when you incorporate the mind/body connection into your life. Somatic Experiencing® Therapy is an approach, near you, that supports the process and integration of the mind, body, and emotions. Only through listening on these many levels can you begin to know yourself more, experience your life instead of just thinking about it, and feel a sense of peace and wisdom throughout the healing process.
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic Experiencing® (SE®) is a body-awareness approach to therapy used to alleviate and reduce the effects of stress, tension, depression, anxiety, and trauma that affect individuals daily.
Understanding the natural response to threatening or overwhelming situations, the techniques of Somatic Experiencing® Therapy create the therapeutic conditions necessary for individuals to discharge energy “stuck” in the nervous system from past incomplete survival responses to real or perceived threat.
In completing the discharge of this activation, the awareness of new responses becomes integrated and available to us in the present. After a while, individuals can develop a natural capacity for emotional self-regulation, which gives us the ability to bring our system back into balance emotionally, mentally, and physically.
How it works
Somatic Experiencing® works with the awareness of body sensations to help people “renegotiate” and heal rather than recycle stress or reenact unresolved trauma. Working on a sensory level allows the highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.
Discharging the energy of high activation through the felt sense allows the body to metabolize energy by breaking it down to incremental steps so you do not feel overwhelmed.
Somatic Experiencing® has been used effectively with those who suffer from anxiety, depression, and overt traumatic events (including combat veterans, rape survivors, Holocaust survivors, automobile accident survivors, those who recently underwent surgery, and chronic pain sufferers).
SE® has touched the lives of many thousands by restoring self-regulation and returning a sense of aliveness, relaxation, and wholeness in a wide range of clients. Taught throughout the world, this can even be integrated into the process of psychotherapy with a licensed Somatic Experiencing® practitioner or therapist.
What to expect
During a session, you and your somatic therapist will work together to identify how you respond in certain situations and how your body reacts during the fight, flight and/or freeze mode. As I track what’s happening in your body through sensation, your body will inform us about how it wants to release this energy naturally and comfortably.
Instead of working with the “thinking” part of the brain known as the neocortex, I will focus on the hindbrain where all sensory information is processed and felt. When this happens, information can arrive to you through insight and realizations. You will have the chance to gain deep knowledge about your body, which informs how you think, instead of your thought patterns informing you of how you feel. As Einstein says, “You can’t think of solving the problem with the same process you used to create it.”
I have 25 years of experience and extensive training as a psychotherapist , somatic therapist, and body worker. My unique gift to intuitively work on the sensory level helps me better identify my clients’ needs and potential solutions to their pain. I have supported many struggling with their mental health and have witnessed how powerful the mind/body connection is in the healing process.
Somatic Therapy for Trauma
Many people struggle with the difficult effects of trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life threat or an accumulation of stress from a series of events. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function emotionally, mentally, and physically. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the ongoing stressors of fear and conflict.
Many adults with a history of trauma take the blame for their unhappiness and often struggle to feel secure in their relationships and within themselves.
The good news is that Somatic Experiencing® can be effective for overcoming many challenges and is a highly effective approach to treating trauma.
Somatic Experiencing is a form of trauma therapy that can provide the help and support you need to better understand your painful memories, resolve them and move forward with your life. It is a body-awareness approach to therapy that has been proven to alleviate and reduce the daily effects of stress, tension, depression, anxiety, and trauma.
My Somatic Practices
In Somatic Experiencing® sessions, you and I will gain a deeper understanding of how your body reacted under previous circumstances that created dysregulation. I will track what is happening in your body through sensation and support the release of nervous system activation and bound-up survival energies that contribute to negative symptoms.
Somatic trauma therapy does not require an individual to re-tell or re-live the traumatic event. Instead, it offers the opportunity to engage, complete, and resolve—in a slow and supported way—the body’s instinctual fight, flight, and freeze responses. This ultimately resets the nervous system, restores inner balance, enhances resilience to stress, and increases one’s vitality, equanimity, and capacity to actively engage in life.
Contact Us Today
Here at The Therapy Space, I can provide my therapy services to Miami, FL, and the surrounding areas. If you need more information about my Somatic Experiencing® therapy near you, contact me today. I would love to help you!
