Embodied Processing / Somatic Therapy

Developing our Felt Sense

Many of us have lost touch with the felt sense of who we are, living mostly in our minds. As Michael Singer says, “The mind is a place the soul goes to escape from the heart.” When life brings big emotions and stress, our nervous system can become overwhelmed, and disconnecting from the body often becomes a way to cope.

More recently, we have started to understand the need of "feeling it to heal it” and that the body keeps the score - as per the title of the best selling book by Bessel Van Der Kolk. This disconnection between our mind and body can lead to us being disconnected from our true selves, our emotions, wants and desires. Our emotions are here to guide us in this life - to tell us when something is out of balance. I believe that guiding people back to being within the body, feeling into our emotions and feeling safe within ourselves is key to our wellbeing.

Getting to the Root of Your Symptoms Through a Nervous System Lens

Embodied Processing (EP) is a trauma-informed approach to resolving painful mental, emotional and relational issues by addressing the root cause in the body.

EP is based on the latest neuroscience. It works via the intelligence of the subconscious mind within the body, building your ability to regulate your nervous system.

Unresolved survival patterns from childhood result in a dysregulated nervous system, repressed emotions and suffering (eg anxiety, pain, sleep problems, addiction, stress). These wounds are held in the body, hence why talking about this trauma often doesn't resolve the problem.

EP helps you to safely get in touch with those core wounds and to process them. The issues on the surface such as anxiety, chronic pain and so on, then tend to resolve themselves. EP works at helping you to feel more resourced, so that our capacity to handle difficult emotions increases and your nervous system becomes more regulated.

Work starts by developing your sense of safety in the body, so you can feel safe, grounded, and present. Once this is established, we start to explore discomfort in the body, increase your capacity to hold space for difficult emotions, so that the stored trauma can be processed.

What happens during a session

We build a resource eg safety/calm within the body so you can safely connect with your body and emotions without retraumatisation.

Using the mind-body and your unconscious mind we uncover the root cause(s) of your suffering.

I guide you to feel fully into these emotions, as you are able to, to fully express and process these feelings.

What is Trauma?

Trauma is what happens in the body when we don’t have the capacity to safely process and recover from a threat. When something is overwhelming, frightening, or deeply distressing and the nervous system doesn’t have the capacity or support to fully process it, the experience can get “stuck” in the body. Instead of moving through a natural stress cycle (like fight, flight, or freeze and then recovery), the nervous system may stay in a state of dysregulation. This can look like:

Hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, hypervigilance, irritability)
Hypoarousal (numbness, depression, disconnection, exhaustion)
A mix of both

In this state, the body continues reacting as if the threat is still present, even long after it’s over. That’s why trauma can show up as physical symptoms, emotional overwhelm, or behavioural patterns that don’t seem to make sense logically.

Depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, chronic pain and so on are manifestations of trauma and a dysregulated nervous system. Talk therapy cannot help resolve these issues as we need to work with the system that created them in the beginning.

Trauma does not have to be something big like sexual, mental or physical abuse. Trauma is not getting your needs met, not being loved unconditionally by a parent, being bullied at school, the death of a pet and so on. Therefore, we all have some amount of trauma.

What does it mean to be Trauma Informed?

To be trauma-informed means to understand that we’re working with our nervous system's survival instinct, and the way these drive us in our lives. We do not choose to react a specific way - our nervous system reacts automatically to different situations and is not a cognitive experience. We therefore work with that system ie the nervous system within the body and NOT with the cognitive mind.