Somatic Therapy:
Nervous System Work with Brainspotting
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy works from the body upward. The nervous system can hold stress, threat, and emotional experience even when the thinking mind fully understands what's happening, and that's where talk therapy alone reaches its limit.
When patterns stay stuck despite insight, it's usually not a failure of understanding. It's the body holding something the mind hasn't been able to reach.
Somatic therapy brings the body back into the process. Rather than focusing only on what happened, we track how your system responds in real time: what activates, what softens, what wants to move.
How I Work
The primary somatic method I use is Brainspotting, a neurobiological approach that works by locating points in your visual field that correspond to deeper neural and emotional activation. These points give us access to experiences held beneath verbal awareness: trauma, chronic stress, patterns that feel stuck regardless of how much you've processed them in words.
Brainspotting sessions are paced and collaborative. We follow your eye position, body sensations, and internal shifts rather than directing where you should go or what you should feel. Clients often describe it as grounding, a way for the body to process without forcing or retelling painful stories.
Alongside Brainspotting, I draw on relational psychotherapy, parts-based work, PSYCH-K, and somatic principles more broadly, integrated intuitively based on what your system needs in a given moment. The work is depth-oriented, which means we're not managing symptoms so much as moving underneath them.
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What Somatic Therapy Can Help With
Somatic work tends to be particularly useful when you:
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feel stuck despite knowing why you're struggling
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find talk therapy helpful but incomplete
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live with persistent anxiety, shutdown, or emotional fatigue
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carry tension or activation in the body that doesn't resolve
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are neurodivergent and find verbal processing exhausting or insufficient
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have hit a plateau and want to work at a deeper level
The Science, Briefly
Somatic therapies are grounded in research across neuroscience, trauma studies, and developmental psychology. Trauma and chronic stress dysregulate the autonomic nervous system, creating patterns of fight, flight, freeze, and collapse that persist in the body even after the original event has passed. Somatic work addresses these patterns directly rather than talking around them.
The body encodes emotional experience. Somatic therapies work with those encodings, releasing stored activation, restoring regulation, and expanding your capacity to feel present rather than perpetually braced.
Safe relational attunement, the therapist's ability to track your system without urgency, is one of the most consistent findings in trauma research. That quality of presence is something I bring to every session, regardless of modality.
What Sessions Look Like
We might track where sensation shows up in the body, notice what shifts as we follow your eye position, work with a part of you that feels protective or overwhelmed, or simply stay with what's present without pushing it anywhere. The pace is yours. Nothing is forced.
This is not about reliving trauma or performing emotional expression. It's about supporting your system in finding safety and coherence at a pace it can actually sustain.
Is Somatic Therapy Right for You?
If you've done significant talk therapy and still feel like something isn't shifting, or if you've always sensed that what you're carrying lives in the body more than the mind, somatic work may be what's been missing.
If you're not sure whether this approach fits, we can explore that together in a free consultation.
Why Somatic Therapy Matters
Many people come to somatic work after noticing that insight alone hasn’t solved their symptoms. This often reflects the nervous system needing a different kind of support.