Somatic Therapy in Petaluma and Online
The body knows things your thinking hasn't caught up to yet.
Maybe you don't fully know why you're upset. You can feel something is off, but the words you reach for don't quite land, or you escalate before you have any real sense of choosing to. Usually this points to a gap in the scaffolding for emotional experience itself. An absence of the structures that let a feeling become nameable and workable instead of just erupting. That gap tends to involve the body, and the primary place we can develop that scaffolding is through skillful attunement to our embodied experience.
A lot of what passes for insight in therapy is actually just interpretation, a story about why you are the way you are. While that can be useful, it doesn’t necessarily predict any change in your experience. Insight, in the sense I mean it, isn't a conclusion you arrive at. It’s not a clever thought. Rather, it’s when a pattern becomes self-evident through being seen clearly, felt deeply, and confirmed by our bodily experience. Once those things come together, you can't unsee it.
What It’s Like to Work Together
This isn't about pushing through or forcing change. That’s not really possible anyways, and will just generate more pressure inside of you.
Some sessions, we will stay close to the body: what's tight, what's moving, what a sensation wants to do if it's not interrupted. Other sessions, we follow a dream, or sit with an image that showed up without explanation, and let it unfold - trusting that it is conveying something deeply held by our emotional minds. Different doors, same house. What we're after is what's true beneath the default cognitive patterns… we learn to translate the language of the right brain.
The pace matters. I'm not trying to get you to feel things faster than you can metabolize them. Most often we need to build our capacity to stay with what's real, to develop confidence that we can be with our challenging experiences as they shift and move through our bodies. Most people find this feels different from the kind of therapy where you're trying to figure things out or arrive somewhere. It’s more organic.
Over time, what was automatic starts to have some space around it. This means we are starting to have more of that scaffolding. We might still react strongly, but we start to meet ourselves in new ways, and express ourselves in ways that previously we thought may have been impossible.
This Might Be a Good Fit
This work tends to resonate if:
Your body rarely fully settles, there’s a constant low level of tension, alertness, or pressure, even when things are okay
You understand your patterns, sometimes very clearly, but they don’t shift in the moments that matter
You’ve done therapy before, or worked through things cognitively, and something deeper still feels unresolved
You have tried to “figure it out” to no avail, and just end up overthinking
Your reactions feel automatic, like something in your system responds before you have a choice
You have a sense your body is holding onto something you can’t quite access through thinking alone
You suspect earlier experiences may still be shaping how your system responds, even if you don’t think of it as “trauma”
You don’t need to check all of these. If some part of this feels familiar, it may be worth exploring.
What Happens Next
If you reach out, I’ll get back to you within 1–2 business days.
From there, we can schedule a brief consultation to get a sense of what’s going on and whether this feels like a good fit.
Alternatively, you can schedule a consultation directly on my calendar.
There’s no pressure to move forward if you schedule a consultation. It’s simply a chance to connect and see if this kind of work makes sense for you. It’s also an opportunity for you to ask me questions about therapy or working with me.
About Me
My training doesn't come from one somatic model, and I'd be misrepresenting it if I named just one. It's built from years of including the body in therapy, through guided process, dreams and imagery coupled with deep contemplative practice. I believe that somatic work is based on fundamental principals of psychology stemming from psychodynamic theory and praxis and informed by modern research on interpersonal neurobiology.
Somatic Therapy FAQ
What is somatic therapy, in simple terms?
It means the body isn't just where symptoms show up, it's where a lot of the actual work happens. In my practice that extends to dreams and imagery too: other places where something true is being expressed outside of ordinary thinking. We work with what's underneath the thoughts, not just the thoughts themselves.
Is this different from regular talk therapy?
Yes. We still talk. But talking isn't where the work stops. We also work with what's happening in your body in real time, and sometimes with a dream or an image that's carrying more than it first appears to, which tends to move things that talking alone hasn't.
Will I have to do anything uncomfortable?
There is some discomfort whenever we talk about difficult feelings. However, it is important that we go at a pace that feels manageable for you.
The goal isn’t to overwhelm you, but to gradually build your ability to stay present with your experience in a way that feels safe and supportive.
How do I know if this is a good fit for me?
If you've done the work and still feel stuck, or you're looking for something with more depth than you've found so far, this is probably worth exploring. We can also just talk it through in a consultation.