Somatic
Psychotherapy
“The body never lies.”
— Martha Graham
Somatic (body-centered) Psychotherapy is a way to help you process your experience through your body. It aims at creating change within the deepest parts of your being.
Have you talked about your problems over and over and not experienced any change in your life?
Do you keep getting stuck in the same old patterns and can’t find your way out?
Do you, deep down, know that more is possible in your life?
There are many different types of therapy that each have benefits in their own way. Most of the popular forms of therapy involve talking about your issues and possibly finding ways to cope better with situations in your life or to shift behaviors and thought patterns. While these forms of therapy can be very effective for some issues, they are limited to working with your issues from a cognitive perspective. There is so much more to us. Many limiting patterns and negative belief systems are held in the unconscious parts of ourselves, including our physical bodies. Our bodies hold our stories – literally in our tissues, our emotional body, our nervous system, our dream world.
Body-centered Psychotherapy bypasses the rational, analytical mind and lets you connect to the direct experience in your body and emotions. It does not focus on your story as much and analyzing the past, but works with the way your past shows up in you in this very moment. Right now – what becomes possible when you become present to your experience.
Your entire history has shaped the the make-up of your body, your emotions, your belief systems, your relationship to the world and to others. Your unconscious patterns were often learned long ago during childhood, sometimes even during pre-verbal times. These early experiences have left deep imprints in your nervous system, emotional system and belief system. And they often still organize your experience once you are an adult.
Often, these unconscious patterns are hard to access through the thinking, rational mind. You probably don’t even remember what has formed them. Emotions that were “repressed” long ago need to be accessed and felt and processed in a safe container in order to be metabolized and healed. They do not get metabolized at a core level by talking about them.
Through working with the way that history has molded your body, limiting patterns and held emotions can be processed directly on a body level and discharged from the cells and the nervous system. Releasing patterns from that core level allows your entire being to re-organize.
My approach to body-centered psychotherapy has been mostly influenced by Hakomi Therapy (see below), body-centered trauma therapy and Internal Family Systems -IFS (see below). All those approaches place trust in the body’s ( and mind’s) ability to heal and re-organize through it’s natural intelligence when enough support and presence are available. This natural intelligence involves becoming aware of what is stored in the body from experiences from long ago and feeling the sometimes difficult emotions that were part of it. This is how our emotional system is designed by nature to process our experience and let it go.
Once we release the old patterns held in the body, then new choices become available for our present life.
"I have done years of therapy, but through working with Ines I have been able to safely explore and experience emotions I had not given any consideration before. While I was able to understand what happened during my childhood, I’ve discovered I did not truly understand the role the other family members played throughout my development from toddler to teen. Through Ines’s encouragement and guidance to explore and experience complex emotions, I realizing I was stuck in my own survival mode of emotions. I got a whole new perspective of my live within my household from childhood on through my current stage of life. I have much more awareness now, of the dynamics in my family and the role I played and of the patterns I have continued relying on even though I no longer needed them. Ines helped me layout and actually look at where I am currently and how I got here. I feel more enlightened about myself now and believe in my own capability to handle challenging situations now. I highly recommend working with Ines. You will not regret a moment of it. “
K.H.
Hakomi Therapy
Hakomi is a gentle yet powerful form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness and somatic interventions to heal attachment wounds and developmental trauma. It is highly experiential in nature, guiding you to study and become present to your own inner experience, discovering more about how your experience is organized. We all have patterns in our body, emotional experience and mind that formed long ago, usually mostly during childhood. We often don’t remember how these patterns formed or why and they are deeply unconscious. By studying them and finding out more about them, we are bringing the unconscious patterns into consciousness where we can work with them and transform them.
Hakomi was created by Ron Kurtz (1934-2011), an internationally renowned therapist and author and draws from General Systems Theory and body-centered therapies. Other influences come from Reichian work, Bioenergetics, Gestalt, Psychomotor, Feldenkrais, Structural Bodywork, Ericksonian Hypnosis, Focusing, Neurolinguistic Programming, Buddhism, and Taoism.
Find out more about Hakomi here.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call if fate.”
- Carl Jung
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is a brilliant transformative system that allows us to get to know and explore and heal different wounded parts inside of us. It recognizes that everybody has many parts inside that often want different things. Some of these parts might be of a protective nature and some might be more wounded and vulnerable. But we all have them in some shape and form. Often, these parts were formed when we were very young and they helped us to deal with our circumstance during our childhood.
And yet, even once we are adults these parts often still feel that they need to do their job, because they have not learned how to do something else. They live in our unconscious and from there influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Unless we make them conscious we don’t get a chance to allow them to heal and integrate them into our adult self.
No Bad Parts
Working through the IFS methodology helps to bring those parts into our conscious awareness. Then we can get to know them, befriend them and see what they need in order to change. As Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, says in his aptly named book “No bad parts”, there are literally no bad parts. Even those parts that create difficult patterns or behaviors , like addictions and acting out behaviors, have a reason to do so. Once we can find out more about those reasons and how we can work with theses parts, they can learn to take on a different role.
The SELF
The other important aspect of the system of IFS is the understanding that we all have a core SELF, that is different from any of our “parts”. Our SELF is the aspect of us that is always whole and that knows how to heal. When we learn to access that core aspect of ourselves we can lead our lives more from there rather than letting ourselves be run by our non-integrated parts.
Somatic IFS
IFS can be used in a very somatic, meaning body-centered way, which is how I integrate it into my practice. We can explore where the different parts live in your body and get to know them from an embodied understanding. In my opinion, that brings another dimension to the exploration of these parts.
How I work
I often integrate the different tools of body-centered psychotherapy, IFS and body-centered-trauma therapy with hands-on bodywork. Not always - sometimes I might just guide you through getting in touch with your inner experience and sometimes I might use touch to support the process. We might work on the bodywork table or in the chair. We might also incorporate movement and breathing practices into our work.
During in-person sessions in my office I am able to use body-centered psychotherapy in conjunction with hands-on bodywork. That combination has the potential for very powerful transformation to occur, because we are working very directly with different aspects of the organization of your body for the most effective results. Often, when the body releases a structural pattern, there will be shifts in the emotional body and the belief system that might have been held in the physical pattern.
And yet, body-centered therapy is also very effective in zoom sessions. We are still working through the body, since I will be guiding you to connect with your internal experience and then work with that experience. Touch is not essential to achieve successful transformation.