Somatic Therapy

Talk therapy usually goes after your thinking. You change the thoughts, or change your relationship with them, and the feeling shifts. There’s still talking in somatic work, so it won’t feel like a foreign language. What changes is where the attention goes. We go right to your body, to where you’re feeling things, and to a nervous system that may be stuck. Some people are stuck in fight or flight. Others are stuck in shutdown, the collapse where everything goes flat.

The work is teaching that system how to come back to connection, what some people call the green zone. A big part of it is a skill called interoception. You already use it. It’s how you know you’re hungry, or cold, or need a bathroom soon. In somatic work you sharpen that same sense toward emotion. What does happiness feel like in your body? That can be surprisingly unfamiliar. What does sadness feel like? Over time you notice those sensations as clearly as you notice hunger.

Fight, flight, and shutdown are healthy responses. Animals in the wild run, fight, and play dead, and it keeps them alive. The trouble starts when you get stuck up there. So this work doesn’t try to switch off a healthy part of you. It teaches you to notice when you’ve gone up, and gives you the steps to bring yourself back down.

• People who can talk themselves through it and still feel anxious
• Anyone whose nervous system seems stuck on high alert, or stuck in shutdown
• People who’ve found that retelling the story leaves them feeling worse, not better
• Folks who already check in with their bodies, and folks who’d like to learn how
• People carrying trauma who want to approach it slowly, from steadier ground

It’s less of a fit if what you want right now is concrete, thought-focused change. If you need coping skills or better communication, your therapist will bring that in. Our clinicians work integratively, so somatic work gets used when it makes sense, alongside everything else.

A lot of people walk in ready to tell the whole story. Talk therapy can lean that way, and sometimes rehashing what happened drops you right back into the moment. You came in having a decent day and you leave shaken. Somatic work heads another direction. Instead of replaying the hard thing, we might look for a moment when you felt strong, or asked for help against the odds, and notice how that feels in your body right now. Recalling it here, in the present, helps your nervous system settle.

Some sessions are just about being here. If you can get comfortable in this moment, you’re not panicking about the future or chewing on the past, and your body comes down with you.

If you carry a lot of trauma, your body can feel like a dangerous place to be. We go step by step, at your pace. Early on that might only mean orienting to the room and noticing that your shoulders just dropped. Most of the time goes to getting familiar with calmer, stronger states, so that eventually you feel steady enough in your body to approach the harder material.

Available in person or by telehealth.

Our clinicians work integratively, so somatic therapy sits alongside the other tools we use. Some sessions stay with the body. Others turn to coping skills or communication when that’s what you need right now. Underneath all of it is one aim: helping your nervous system come down out of fight or flight. Communicating and coping feel out of reach when you’re stuck up there, and they come more naturally once you’re settled, because people are built for connection.

For Julia Conley, this work started outdoors. She first learned it in wilderness therapy, noticing where feelings lived in the body. It stuck because of her own experience. She can do the mental part. Nobody’s mad at me. I didn’t do anything wrong. And she’s still anxious. Learning to stay with that feeling, and finding she had some say in getting back to a better one, is what changed things for her.

Linzie Ridings does this work too, and she’s been a somatic client herself for about a year and a half. She went after her own talk-based therapy kept getting stuck in cycles. In her first session something opened up, and she felt her way into emotions she’d been talking around for a long time. That’s why pacing matters so much to her. If you’ve been cut off from those sensations for years, reconnecting is intense. So the early work is building enough safety to be with yourself differently, before going anywhere near the hard material. In session she names what she notices and asks rather than tells.