Somatic-informed therapy

When there is perceived threat, your nervous system automatically mobilizes to protect you, preparing you to fight and flee. When the completion of either mobilized actions isn’t safe or possible, the system slams on the breaks alongside the gas, resulting in the activation being frozen. Finally, when holding the charge of mobilization in a frozen state is no longer sustainable, the body collapses into a numbed, dissociated, or unconscious state. These responses are built-in reflexes designed to keep you alive.

When the body can’t complete what it instinctively needs to—because of being trapped, overpowered, or the need to continually appease and stay vigilant to stay safe—your system learns to stay organized around protection after the threat is gone.

Somatic therapy works directly with these patterns of activation. Through curiosity and attention to sensation, movement, and the micro-shifts of your physiology, your body can complete interrupted responses and return to a more flexible baseline. This is about restoring your capacity to move between states without getting stuck in survival mode.

Over time, the process of completing cycles of activation and threat responses creates more embodied awareness, presence, and a sense of agency to choose how you want to respond to your day-to-day.

Sessions move at a pace your system can actually work with—which sometimes feels grounding, and sometimes feels annoyingly slow if you’re used to sprinting through life. We start by helping you arrive: noticing the room, your breath, and how your body is meeting the couch. From there, we track what’s happening in the moment rather than plunging straight through your story. Maybe there’s tightness, heat, restlessness, blankness, or a “can we just get on with it?” energy. Whatever shows up becomes information, not a problem.

We work in small, manageable doses—touching what’s activated, then returning to what feels steadier or more neutral. Sometimes that looks like a micro-movement your body wants to make, a protective part bracing, or a tiny pocket of ease surfacing where you didn’t expect it.

This somatic work blends naturally with other therapy approaches. As your body shifts, different parts of you tend to reveal themselves: the one who handles everything, the one who wants out, the one who’s bone-tired. We make room for each without letting any single one take the wheel.

Over time, the intention is that these small shifts build capacity—less stuck-on, less shut-down, and a clearer, more trustworthy sense of yourself from the inside out.

Somatic work is intended to help you understand your reactions and help you expand your window of tolerance for activation and emotional experiences.

Rather than fighting your body’s alarms, many people find that they begin to notice why these responses fire—what they’re protecting, beliefs and perceptions, and where there might be room to soften. Over time, this can create more space between sensation and spiraling, between activation explosion, avoidance, or shutdown—and gently expand your capacity to feel and respond differently.

Clients often notice they can stay present a little longer in conversations that once felt overwhelming, or catch early signs of stress before it escalates. Patterns like bracing, collapsing, overthinking, or over-functioning may become easier to recognize and work with.

For many, the real shift is capacity:

• to feel without drowning,

• to rest without guilt tugging at you,

• to speak honestly without abandoning yourself,

• to navigate uncertainty without scanning for catastrophe.

Somatic work doesn’t erase history. Its purpose is to help your body update expectations so you’re not living as though the past is still happening—and to allow more of adult present-day you to show up, steadier, clearer, and closer to the life you’ve been circling for years.