My Therapeutic Approach
Regardless of how we are working, each session begins creating a field between my client and myself where presence and healing can exist. These practices include breath work, grounding while centering in our bodies, and orienting to the space around us. Trauma disconnects people from their bodies. These practices reconnect you directly with resources naturally available in your own body and are taught so that you can also use them at home and wherever you go.
While my original training was steeped in psychodynamic psychotherapies, the following briefly highlights aspects of the somatic psychotherapy treatments I am highly trained in and now use everyday in my practice. The assessment process includes making recommendations about how to proceed clinically. Ultimately, we make this decision together and as the work unfolds another protocol may be introduced.
SOMATIC EXPERIENCING®
Trying to describe a Somatic Experiencing® session is like trying to describe chocolate ice cream. You will know about chocolate ice cream but did you actually taste it? Still, there are certain ingredients that make up a Somatic Experiencing® session and they are explained here. These elements may appear in different sequences, depending on individual needs and conditions. The following three elements are part of most SE sessions and now are often feature of other somatic psychotherapies as well; tracking, titration, pendulation.
1. Tracking. In tracking, you become mindful of your body sensations, images, behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. Tracking encourages a heightened state of body awareness, allowing you to become conscious of previously hidden instinctual responses. Tracking can be done alone, but since safety is important, it is best undertaken with a therapist, trusted friend, or family member.
2. Titration. Moving towards issues slowly and in small, sometimes tiny doses while building up physiological capacity avoids overwhelm. Feelings of complete helplessness, defeat, and overwhelm constitute the psychological experience of the immobility response. These feelings may arise again as part of reexperiencing some aspects of the original event and are carefully monitored —however, you will not actually relive the trauma. As this would not be helpful, overexposure processes are carefully avoided.
3. Pendulating. As you become resourced, you will find a natural rhythm that guides you back and forth between the past (unresourced) defeat and the present (resourced) experience, allowing for the formation of a new experience.
TRANSFORMING SOMATIC TOUCH
Transforming Somatic Touch is an attachment focused neurophysiological method of either hands on or distant intentional touch. As a Somatic Psychotherapist I have extensive special hands on training in touch to more directly intervene with my client's nervous system. It is neither Reiki nor massage. My clients remains fully clothed in all venues and in control of the process. Transforming Somatic Touch may include direct touch, self touch and/or intentional touch and regardless of the approach, makes contact with the deeper layers of the body including the fascia, tissues, organs and bone.
Transforming Somatic Touch can be beneficial for treating all kinds of trauma. It’s particular helpful when trauma occurred before we developed language skills, often is referred to as proverbial trauma. These times in our lives can include when we were babies, when our moms were pregnant, difficult birth experience, or even traumas that happened in earlier generations.
Trauma is held in a part of the nervous system that is not cognitive, so working with the body through supportive touch is beneficial for healing from developmental trauma. Developmental trauma can also be thought of as the hard things that happened to us as children without our receiving enough protection or support to heal from them.
COMPREHENSIVE RESOURCE MODEL®
The Comprehensive Resource Model® (CRM) is a neuro-biologically based, affect-focused trauma treatment model which facilitates targeting of traumatic experiences by bridging the most primitive aspects of the person and their brain (midbrain/brainstem), to their purest, healthiest parts of the self. This bridge catalyzes the mind and body to access all forms of emotional trauma and stress by utilizing layers of internal resources such as attachment neurobiology, breathwork skills, somatic resources, our connection to the natural world, toning and sacred geometry, and one’s relationship with self, our intuition, and higher consciousness. The sequencing and combination of these resources, and the eye positions that anchor them, provide the opportunity for unbearable emotions and pain to be stepped into and felt fully while the client is fully present and aware moment to moment which changes how the memories affect the person.
CRM uniquely accesses and clears the origin of the split second moments of intolerable affect that result in defense responses which lead to life-interfering symptoms, addictions, and disconnection from self and others. The potential for clearing neurobiological debris from the nervous system clears the way for positive neuro-plasticity and personal expansion whether that is seen as spiritual or otherwise, and which is separate from one’s history of pain and woundedness.
Work is done from the time of conception through the present and includes methods for working with generational trauma out of the realm of the client’s conscious knowledge. This is a heart-centered approach in which clients are guided to re-member who they really are and to learn to embody their true authentic self in their day to day lives. (Extracted from CRM website