Somatic therapy
Online in California & Bay Area
Healing through integrating and strengthening the mind-body connection
What is Somatic Therapy?
Your body is not the problem. Every response you've developed, the vigilance, the shutdown, the bracing, made sense given what you were moving through. In many cases it still makes sense, because the conditions that shaped those responses haven't gone away. Systemic harm is ongoing. Your nervous system knows that, even when other people act like it shouldn't.
Somatic therapy doesn't ask you to feel calm in conditions that warrant something other than calm. It doesn't ask your body to behave as though the world is safer than it is. What it does is work toward expanding your capacity: to be present to your own experience, to stay in contact with yourself and the people who matter to you, and to move with more choice even in conditions you didn't choose and can't single-handedly change.
Why Talk Therapy Often Isn't Enough
Many people who find their way to somatic therapy have already done significant work in traditional talk therapy. They've developed real insight. They understand their patterns, where they came from, what they're about. And they're still stuck.
This isn't a failure of insight or effort. Talk therapy, at its best, works at the level of meaning and narrative. What it often can't reach are the patterns that live below thought: in the body, in the nervous system, in the relational templates we developed before we had language for any of it. It also tends to locate the problem inside the individual, when a lot of what people are carrying developed in relational and collective contexts and needs relational context to shift.
Somatic therapy works at both levels simultaneously.
Many of the people I work with have done their fair share of traditional talk therapy and find themselves stuck in deep intellectualizing patterns. They may have a strong understanding of why they experience what challenges them, but still find themselves in a repeating loop. This is because sometimes we can't think our way through healing.
This is not work we do alone, and safety is not something we build entirely from the inside out. It has always been relational, co-created, contingent on the conditions around us. What we do in here is begin to expand what feels possible, in relationship, so that capacity can extend outward.
This is also why somatic work is inherently relational. Your nervous system didn't develop in isolation. It learned what it knows in relationship, oriented toward other people for cues about safety and danger, and settled in the presence of others long before it could settle on its own. Co-regulation isn't a workaround for people who can't self-regulate yet. It's how nervous systems have always worked. The therapeutic relationship isn't just the backdrop for this work. It's part of the mechanism.
Through nervous system awareness and flexibility tools, grounding practices, and finding channels to be in contact with emotional experience rather than managed or overridden by it, talk therapy can actually become more effective. Many people experiencing chronic pain, anxiety, trauma, and OCD symptoms may feel like the last place they want to be is more in their body. Together, we can collaborate to make the work accessible and paced to meet you exactly where you are. This isn't about forcing presence. It's about gradually, relationally, expanding what feels possible.
Read more: You've Been in Therapy for Years. Why Do You Still Feel Stuck?
Examples of Somatic Practice
-
These are somatic tools to orient your body towards safety. Working together, you will have the opportunity to learn how to activate your parasympathetic nervous system through things like sensory detail, breathwork, and a variety of grounding tools
-
Sometimes we avoid feeling our feelings because they seem daunting. Somatic practice can orient your body toward new pathways to release and move with your emotions. This can look like movement sequences or EMDR that employs bilateral stimulation.
-
While our work together may at times focus on working through stress and discomfort, your body is also a vessel for connection to joy, relaxation, and liberation. Mindfulness tools support not only processing but also creating more intentional connection to what feels good in your life and body.
You've spent long enough at war with a body that was only ever trying to protect you.
This work isn't about fixing your responses. With the right support, it's about coming into relationship with them, so you can move through the world with more choice than you have right now. And you don't have to do that alone.
