Somatic therapy and parts work

If you've done talk therapy and hit a ceiling, this is often what was missing. You can describe your patterns accurately, you understand where they came from, and something still runs the show when it matters.

What is somatic therapy?

Somatic therapy treats the body as a source of information, not as something your mind is hauling around.

In practice that means noticing what's happening physically while we talk. Where you tighten. When your breath changes. What you do when a subject gets close. Those shifts usually arrive before the words do, and we slow down enough to follow them.

It isn't massage or bodywork, and I don't touch anyone. In telehealth it's entirely about your own attention to your own body, guided.

What is parts work?

Parts work starts from something most people already know about themselves, which is that they're not one thing. Some part of you wants to leave the job and another needs the security. One wants closeness and another is already planning the exit.

We don't pick a side. We get curious about each of them. Usually the part you like least is protecting you from something, and it's been doing that job a long time, badly, without much thanks. It tends to relax when it stops being fought.

My work is informed by Internal Family Systems.

What a session actually looks like

Mostly it looks like conversation, with pauses. I'll ask what you notice in your body, or which part of you is talking right now. Sometimes we stay with something small for a while. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens and that's fine.

You stay in charge of the pace. You can say no to anything, and if you do, I take that as information rather than something to work around.

Why the relationship comes first

This work asks more of you than talking does. Turning attention toward your own body, or toward a part of yourself you've been at war with, is more exposing than describing your week.

That's why we build the relationship before we go there.

Practical: 60-minute telehealth sessions, Ohio and Colorado. Sliding scale. English or Spanish.