This is a skill building group, not a process group. A process group involves frequent interaction amongst group members. This group is part lecture and psychoeducation and part skill building. There will be some sharing of stories but I am very intentional about limiting that or very intentionally using the stories of others to teach a lesson. You will hear others' stories to some degree when they participate in experientials with me in front of the group but the beautiful thing about somatic work is we don't need a lot of the story to work deeply. You'll notice this feels very different than most talk therapy groups that often retraumatize or overly activate/trigger people. 

That can be okay as long as you watch the recordings. I recommend at least trying to make the somatic skill building calls live if you can. And that being said, if you can't it's okay and you can still gain so much. If you find yourself getting activated by working on things on your own, please reach out to me or my team and we will work with you. 

The group container is a highly effective space to learn the somatic skills I'd be teaching you anyway if you were working with me 1:1. The group will save you a ton of time and money and will prepare you to work with me much more effectively. Because I take such a unique approach to healing, there is a lot of education that I need to provide you with so you can understand what and why we're doing what we're doing. 

I've also seen folks who struggled to access themselves somatically 1:1 with me flourish in the group setting and then come back to 1:1 work and have even more success. There's something about the collective consciousness that creates the wind in the sails of your system that will allow deep change to happen. 

My experience is that it takes clients four to six months to learn the skills I need you to have to do highly effective stress and trauma work with me. I designed the curriculum to be six months long as a result. I ask that you commit to the full six months to fully learn and practice the skills I'm teaching. The body and nervous system processes things at a significantly slower rate than the mind but once it does, the benefits will snowball incredibly quickly in your life once you get the hang of it. We go slow to go fast. The changes are extremely subtle, gentle and from the bottom up. 

For most people, no. The majority of people feel a deep sense of relief right away from this work.

However, this depends on how much work you've done and how much trauma you've experienced. If you have a history of dissociation or disconnection from your body, as you come out of that freeze response, you will come back down into the survival energy activation that was bound up in the freeze to begin with because it wasn't safely completed or metabolized. This can result in you experiencing an increase in anxiety or anger until you can also process those from your body. So some people can feel like they're getting "worse" before they get better but if you stick with it, you will feel better than you ever have in your life. Most people have never felt the kind of settled, awake, aware ease they experience after working with me. 

All that being said, if you are feeling highly dysregulated from the work, please reach out to my team and we can schedule a 1:1 session to help you process the work. All 1:1 sessions are at my current fee of $250. 

You're my favorite kind of client! 

This is not your traditional talk therapy. As a specialist in trauma and other stress disorders, I take an innovative, holistic approach to therapy and trauma resolution. As an Assistant for the Somatic Experiencing Institute, I teach other clinicians how to bring effective trauma treatment into their own practices.

As a licensed psychotherapist trained in Somatic Experiencing, NARM, EMDR and Brainspotting, I’m not interested in putting band-aids on things – I work with you to get to the root of the issue – for good. We only go as fast as you want to go to get there. From there, I help you go from surviving to thriving, living life with passion and purpose.

My clients struggle like you do. Despite being committed to growth, they’ve been in traditional talk therapy before and life is still harder than it needs to be. They can’t seem to find a way out of their struggles despite having seen countless specialists, doctors, and experts. They’ve tried medication and spent years in therapy, or in different trauma treatments.

I have spent over a decade treating people with complex issues that most treatment providers haven't been able to figure out. If you have a lot of awareness of your issues but are struggling to create deep change, this is the group for you. 

No. I am trained in both EMDR and brainspotting. EMDR and brainspotting are not somatic approaches, despite popular belief. There is no clear evidence that they affect the natural physiological defensive responses that get blocked in the body and nervous system that then create trauma symptoms. They are exposure-based methods that expose you to the hardest part of the trauma which can be deeply stressful for many people. EMDR and brainspotting are like a solvent or a bulldozer for trauma- they tend to be very intense for people and can break things open and distance people from the stressor. EMDR does a good job at dissociating people from the trauma which makes people think they're feeling or doing better but there's no clear evidence that it deeply integrates the trauma through and out of your body.

Somatic Experiencing and my approach to trauma is like a gentle fine-tooth comb or a glue that helps people feel settled, at ease and present in their lives for the long run. I have extensive experience treating clients for whom EMDR, brainspotting and talk therapy were either minimally helpful or even harmful. 

I am also a yoga teacher at the 800 hour level and have extensive experience teaching mindfulness. There is clear research coming out of Brown University that mindfulness is often not appropriate and can be harmful for trauma survivors until they can safely inhabit their bodies. The trauma-informed mindfulness I teach takes this into deep consideration and I am sure to teach methods that promote safe, gentle embodiment not dissociative bypassing. 

I have speciality in working with people in a much deeper way, especially if they've spent years engaging in other treatment and self help modalities but aren't fully feeling their vitality in life, have stuck patterns, have to do those self help modalities ad nauseam to feel okay, etc. 

You Don’t Have to Re-live It to Heal It

In the Somatic Experiencing approach, the traumatic event isn’t what caused the trauma, it is the body and brain’s overwhelmed response to a perceived life threat that creates an imbalanced nervous system. We will work together to help you access the body memory of the event, not the story. Simply put, we don’t have to talk about what happened if you don’t want to.

Cognitive-only (Talk) Therapies are Only Partially Effective

This is because the parts of the brain that are targeted in talk therapy and the parts of the brain and body involved in stress and trauma patterns are different. Accessing the parts of the brain involved in stress and trauma requires an innovative, bottom-up approach. Through research done on animals, Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, discovered that animals are constantly under life-threatening stress yet show no signs of trauma. Humans have the same responses as other animals but it can get stuck in our bodies due to our powerful brains.

We Go Slow to Go Fast

We slowly release the energy, at a pace you are comfortable with and at a level you can handle. Through a gentle yet effective and rhythmic internal process, you will develop a greater capacity to handle stress and stay in the present moment. You will experience a sense of flow and ease in your life, often never before experienced.

I help you heal from an array of traumatic and stressful experiences including but not limited to:

• pre and perinatal trauma
• near death experiences
• medical and surgical trauma, anesthesia, high fevers
• concussions and traumatic brain injuries
• car accidents, physical injuries
• sexual and physical assault
• relational and emotional stressors
• developmental and pre-verbal trauma (cPTSD)
• falls – major and minor, physical accidents
• suffocation, choking, near-drowning
• natural disasters, horror, war
• dissociative identity disorder (DID) and other dissociative disorders

As of fall 2023, the call schedule is as follows:

• Wednesdays 9 am PT trauma-informed yoga 50 min
• Wednesdays 10 am somatic skill building call 50 min
• Fridays 1 pm PT trauma-informed mindfulness ~15-20 min

All calls are recorded and uploaded to your group portal within about 48 hours. You will also have an app that allows you to listen to all content and catch up on the go. 

If there's enough demand for a certain time frame that's different than what's listed, I'm open to starting another time slot. Please reach out to me with your time frame of interest if this is of interest to you. 

I want 1:1 time with you too! And I want to help you learn and build the skills in your nervous system to make that 1:1 time even more successful. 

I do require a 50 minute 1:1 session at my normal rate of $250 before you start the group to make sure you're a good clinical fit for the group. If I decide that you aren't, I will refund you the cost of the group but not the 1:1 session. 

Also, there will be biweekly checkins for you to complete in your member portal - these are very important for me to be able to track how you're doing. 

You need access to ALL parts of your nervous system and body to be able to have a healthy sex life, a healthy connection to your body and life and to experience vibrant health. 

While I can never guarantee results and you need to put the work in to change your life, somatic work has been shown to help with myriad health issues. 

According to the largest study on trauma to date, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study at Kaiser, half of the leading causes of death are associated with ACEs. 

They started studying this because a number of people were dropping out of weight loss groups. The people that dropped out had the highest ACEs scores and said that the way they felt when they lost the weight was unbearable. Translation: they were keeping weight on to protect themselves from the deeper feelings that were buried underneath from their childhood trauma.

The study went on to clearly indicate that those who experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences had an increased risk of smoking, alcoholism and substance abuse and addiction, increased risk for depression and suicidality, poor health, having 50 or more sexual partners, a greater propensity to contract a sexually transmitted disease and become severely obese. 

In a follow up sample of 17,337 patients, additional findings show that the ACEs score is associated with: 

• Increased risk of suicide attempts across the lifespan 

• Increased risk for broken bones 

• Heart disease 

• Lung disease 

• Liver disease

• Multiple types of cancer 

An ACEs score is also associated with impaired job functioning, under-earning financially, homelessness and criminal justice involvement. One in six adults have experienced four or more types of ACEs.

Preventing ACEs can reduce rates of depression by 44%.

Toxic stress from ACEs changes brain development. Trauma increases amygdala size (threat response center) and reduces hippocampal size (memory center).

ACEs are common and their effects add up over time. When researchers interviewed medical providers at Kaiser where the study was conducted, most of them hadn’t even heard of the study! The care providers at Kaiser itself didn’t know what the study was, let alone how to support people with it. They still don’t and they definitely don’t apply this knowledge to their care of patients.

You can read more about my stance on this and other mental health disorders in my article here. 

Being embodied is one of the best ways to remove the added stressors of trauma on your body. Trauma creates at minimum low grade inflammation in all your cells and tissues even if you can't feel it. The more you can remove that added inflammation and chronic stress, the easier it will be to treat other health issues with your medical team. People who are embodied have healthier sex lives, better relationships to themselves and their bodies and better health or they can reduce the impact of chronic health issues over the long run. Again, I'm not claiming I can cure you of anything health related but the results I've seen in this field have been astounding.