Somatic Therapy

Whether it’s past trauma, stress, or a core belief, when you try to solve everything with just the intellectual brain, you get stuck, because that’s not where all the information is. To move forward, you have to connect those thoughts back to what’s happening in the body, the gut, the heart, the sensations, because that’s where the information about what you’re really feeling and needing actually lives.

Somatic work is learning to notice that in real time. It can be a big shift for people who’ve spent their lives disconnected from it, and it has to be gradual and gentle, because if you’ve been cut off from those sensations, reconnecting can be intense. There’s a useful image from Peter Levine of a slinky: yank it open too fast and it snaps back. So we build safety slowly, learning to sit with the body in a different kind of way.

• Stress or anxiety that shows up physically before you notice it mentally
• Trauma that talk therapy has circled without moving
• Feeling disconnected from your body, or numb to what it’s telling you
• Chronic tension, clenching, or a stomach that reacts before you do
• Panic that arrives without a thought attached to it
• Knowing exactly why you do something and doing it anyway
• Trouble naming what you feel, or feeling it only after the fact
• Core beliefs that hold even after you’ve intellectually dismantled them

Not to redirect the conversation, but because something happened in your body while you were speaking. Your fingers went tight, your shoulders came up, your hands started to shake. The invitation is to stop and notice that in real time, which sounds simple and is not, especially if you’ve spent your life above the neck. Most people ask what connecting to your body is even supposed to mean, and the honest answer is that you understand it by doing it rather than by having it explained. This work goes slowly on purpose. Peter Levine’s image is a slinky, and pulling one open too fast just makes it snap shut.

Available in person or by telehealth.

Linzie Ridings does this work and has been a client of it herself for about a year and a half, after her own talk-based therapy kept getting stuck in cycles. She describes the first session as something unlocking, feeling her way into emotions she’d been talking around. That’s why the pacing matters so much to her.

If you’ve been cut off from those sensations for years, reconnecting is intense, and the work is building enough safety to sit with yourself differently before going anywhere near the hard material. She’ll name what she notices and ask rather than tell.