About Somatic Therapy

Two women in a therapy session in a sunlit room with plants and a round mirror.

Somatic therapy in New York ; but what is somatic therapy?

"Somatic" derives from the Greek word 'soma' meaning body. In touch and talk therapy the body is included in the talk aspect of traditional therapy.  In this work the body, mind, emotions and sense of spirit are inseparable so all are addressed - the body is the starting point rather than the thinking mind in order to get us out of our heads and in tune with what you are experiencing. Instead of talking about an emotion, we resource the experience of that emotion and engage it directly. Instead talking about issues, we engage with them in the body and in the present.

So where did this come from? 

It's many things blended together in order to combine touch and talk therapies in a meaningful way.

  • Gestalt Talk Therapy

    Gestalt talk therapy, which is based on the gestalt (whole) of client's present experience. Often times role playing is used in the present to revisit and heal past events. This talk therapy also focuses on Non-Judgmental self awareness and on the client-therapist relationship. Isn't of talking About being a sad child for example, you are encouraged to BE that sad child.

  • Alexander Technique

    Alexander technique, an educational way to move through and past harmful tensions in the body during day to day activities and reconnect ourselves to sensory amnesia we may have created through stressful and dysfusntional holding patterns.

  • Feldenkrais Method

    Feldenkrais method, a system designed to promote bodily and mental well-being by conscious analysis of neuromuscular activity via movements that improve flexibility and coordination and increase ease and range of motion.

  • Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk

    Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator in the area of post-traumatic stress. In the past 3 decades, we have learned an enormous amount about neuropathways and interpersonal attachment systems. Dr. van der Kolk's work is focused on integrating therapy with science, and the mind body connection.

  • The Polyvagal SystemNew List Item

    Dr. Stephen Porges’ research of the 3 major branches of the nervous system and how to work with each of them to return our bodies to homeostasis. Dr. Porges studies of the nervous system also teaches us how trauma responses are living in the body and with that understanding how to disrupt and reconcile trauma responses such as shut down, fight or flight and people please.

  • Sensorimotor Art Therapy

    We instantly respond to safety and threat with our body. Sensorimotor Art Therapy® encourages the awareness of such implicit felt sense experiences; it fosters the expression of these body sensations to enable clients to actively respond to otherwise often overwhelming or inexplicable events. Drawing in rhythmic repetition, or the physical encounter with the resistant clay engages the motor cortex; and simultaneously it stimulates increasingly satisfying sensory feedback.

  • "Touch provides its own language of compassion, a language that is essential to what it means to be human."

    Dacher Keltner

  • "In recent years, a wave of studies has documented some incredible emotional and physical health benefits that come from touch. This research is suggesting that touch is truly fundamental to human communication, bonding, and health."

    New York Times

  • “Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely, physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other.”

    Candace Pert PHD

  • "By incorporating talk with touch the client becomes an active participant in the process. As clients notice what is happening in their bodies, guided by gentle touch, they are invited to express their experience verbally."

    Shelly Meurer and Theresa Pettersen-Chu

  • “The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system… Self-awareness sets us free. The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy”

    The New York Times

  • "My first years in practice revealed that there was a huge emotional component to symptoms, especially pain"

    Toni Luisa D.C.

  • “The degree to which the person with chronic pain feels received, heard, and accepted may be a significant factor, for often as patients, they feel that their bodies have betrayed or failed them, or that they are constantly at war with the enemy body.”

    Pamela M. Pettinati, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.