Jennifer Slater

Somatic Trauma Therapy

 

My role as a Somatic Therapist is to assist you in being present for recovery and guide you in resilience for the future. I am a Somatic Counselor (MA), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and specialize in Early Developmental Trauma

You will learn to:

– expand Mind-Body awareness
– ease the Chronic Pain held in the body from trauma
– Reduce Stress and Anxiety
– Resolve and release symptoms of Trauma physical, emotional, and spiritual
– Develop deeper connections with self and others

Here’s how I define trauma differently:

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a short-term naturalistic approach to the resolution and healing of trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine and is supported by research. It is based upon the observation that wild prey animals, though threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized. Animals in the wild utilize innate mechanisms to regulate and discharge the high levels of energy arousal associated with defensive survival behaviors. These mechanisms provide animals with a built-in “immunity’’ to trauma that enables them to return to normal in the aftermath of highly ‘’charged’’ life-threatening experiences.

—SE employs awareness of body sensation to help people “renegotiate” and heal rather than re-live or re-enact trauma.

—SE’s guidance of the bodily “felt sense,” allows the highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.

—SE may employ touch in support of the renegotiation process.

—SE “titrates” experience (breaks down into small, incremental steps), rather than evoking catharsis – which can overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the organism. For more information on Somatic Experiencing, read Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine, PhD. for an introduction.

I am also registered with the United States Association of Body Psychotherapy

How to contact me?  feel free to send me a e mail as I’m usually pretty busy and am not able to answer my phone. But if you leave a message ill get back to you as soon as i can.

What Does a Session Cost?

The cost for a session of an hour length is $ $95-150 (sliding scale) consult sessions of a half hour are $35 it is my invitation for you to place yourself on this scale as benefits your unique financial situation. I do not take any insurance panels and instead offer a sliding scale.
***It is my belief that everybody deserves exceptional health care and services. In negotiating a fee, please keep in mind the value and commitment you are placing on your own growth, change, and transformational process***

Payments are made by check, VENMO, or cash at the time of the session. 24 hour cancelation is required or full payment of session is due.

The Process of Individual Treatment 

• The process of treatment begins with an initial meeting in which I learn about your reasons and objectives for seeking help, your personal history, and current health status. Sometimes a personal history takes more than one session to complete. Some clients prefer to draw or write their own histories as a way of creating their story and letting me get to know them.
• The treatment process is always collaborative. Together we will decide what treatment techniques and what pace work best for you. For some examples of Somatic Psychotherapy techniques. Often, somatic therapy looks like “traditional” talk psychotherapy. Even though we are talking, we are also tracking your reactions on multiple levels: thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. In this way, all aspects of your Self join in our dialogue, in an integrative fashion. Most clients meet with me once a week, but sometimes it is necessary to meet more often for better containment, regulation, or depth work.

I am often asked, “How long will this take?” I do not have a standard answer to that question. Most clients want to work quickly to be relieved of their symptoms, but this is not always possible nor advisable. The body can experience any sudden change, even a change for the better, as a shock, and it will not hold the change over time unless it is gradually prepared for it. Whenever a positive change is introduced, there is always some “negative feedback,” an effort for the old pattern to reassert itself. We work in increments, and most likely you will experience periods of feeling better and expand those over time. Termination occurs when your goals have been met and you feel that you can maintain the progress on your own.

What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy works with the dialogue between mind and body to help healthy patterns reassert themselves. The process uses mindfulness, which invites the observing, non-judging part of us to witness our patterns, perceptions, and reactions with curiosity. The process of engaging a “neutral” part of ourselves in this way uses different parts of the brain than the parts occupied by stuck patterns and faulty perceptions. In and of itself, mindfulness helps the nervous system relearn to make accurate perceptions of its environment. As perceptions change, nervous system regulation and defense responses change as well. Bringing attention to thoughts, images, sensations in the body, and impulses all facilitate this new dialogue between mind, body, and emotions.

How is Somatic therapy different from other psychotherapy?

Most talk-therapy does not engage the body, especially at the sensational and sensorimotor level. Somatic therapy is a term for several treatment techniques that pay equal attention to physical responses, moving between the levels of thought, feeling, and sensation. When we feel “stuck” with a behavior or symptom, even though we understand it, somatic psychotherapy can move it. This is especially important in dealing with trauma responses.

Different from Cognitive Approaches? 

Somatic therapy differs from other approaches in its value of the body mind connection, its conscious use of psychobiological regulation, as well as its invitation to both the client and therapist to mindfully observe the organization of experience in the present moment from a place of curiosity and nonjudgmental. This philosophy, more than any particular technique, fosters dialogue between the parts of the brain that have been out of touch following experiences of trauma and overwhelm in the past. The ability to perceive the internal and external environment grows out of this personal study, and helps retrain the nervous system to oscillate and cycle with patterns that promote rest, creativity, growth, and learning.

What is Somatic Experiencing and How is it an Effective Therapy for Trauma?
One important part of working with the mind-body partnership is to pay attention to trauma. Over our life span, we encounter many situations that challenge our bodies to survive threat. What we learn from each experience becomes our blueprint for future self-projection and protection.
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that trauma resolution must include the body as an essential part of the healing process. In Somatic Experiencing, a profoundly freeing modality developed by Dr. Peter Levine, trauma is understood to be held in the present nervous system, rather than the past event. Healing accelerates when energy trapped in the nervous system has an opportunity to discharge, renegotiate, and reorganize its locked-in fight, flight, and freeze responses that have remained in the body after the original traumatic incidents occurred. Somatic Experiencing frees us to live in the present, bringing our bodies up to date, and also promotes the lost capacity to self-regulate, and the ability to spontaneously move from activation to relaxation. Because of the inherent blueprint for health that resides at the core of the mind-body being, the slow, careful pace of Somatic Experiencing offers you an opportunity to invite and allow the wisdom of your body to do the work of healing.

SOMATIC EXPERIENCING

Somatic Experiencing is a naturalistic approach to resolving and healing trauma developed by Peter Levine, PhD. Based on his observations that highly stressed animals recover from life-threatening situations through the completion of the “Fight or Flight” response without any remaining trauma symptoms, Dr. Levine noted the same capacity in people.

“Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the event itself. They arise when the activation, mobilized to meet an extreme or life threatening event, is not fully discharged and integrated. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and our minds.”
-Peter A. Levine

Humans have this same innate mechanism for completing the “Fight or Flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system and eliciting the relaxation response for rest and recovery through the parasympathetic nervous system. Unfortunately, when we experience traumatic or overwhelming events, this healthy process is thwarted by social circumstances or the rational, thinking brain that suppresses helpful reactions as uncomfortable. This undischarged energy is held in the body as somatic memory and can appear as physical symptoms. With repeated unresolved trauma, syndromes can develop.

Through proper attention and support, Somatic Experiencing directs awareness to resourced (healing) states, initiating “pendulation” between resourced and unresourced states. Trauma “re-experienced” in this way is usually very tolerable to the client, as it is done in small doses, called “titrations. ” Titrations are expanded and deepened only as the client’s capacity expands. For this reason, trauma work often proceeds at a slow pace, and relief is experienced in increments. Nonetheless, changes that occur this way are more significant for their impact, long lasting, and promote overall health.

What does Trauma Look Like in the Body?
Trauma overwhelms our ability to cope, and disorganizes our nervous systems, leaving broken zones where we seem to have very limited choices. Although our psychological patterning must eventually be understood through the story line of our early lives, neither talking nor emoting can restore balance to our deep brain structures, where the raw experience of trauma is encoded in our protoplasm. If we are able to reorganize this fundamental level of our biology, our access to free awareness can grow. With appropriate support, we can clarify this awareness as our own true nature, and integrate that awakening throughout our existence.

This path of conscious embodiment permits a deep healing of trauma and chronic pain. I have found enormous support for that process through Somatic Experiencing. As we work together, I’ll introduce you to some of the basic tools and language of this elegant, gentle approach that can help you release hyperarousal, physical pain, and reclaim your native wellbeing.

Our Body’s “Fight or Flight” Response & Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Fear triggers our brain to produce chemicals that make it more difficult for us to relax. In fact, mere emotions and thoughts (both conscious and unconscious) can trigger this chemical reaction placing us in the “fight or flight” response. When the body goes into this mode, it is an evolutionary protective response, as if there was a dangerous lion in the room. This “fight or flight” response causes muscle spasm (to give you strength to fight or run away), increased heart rate, dilated pupils, shallow breathing, and other autonomic nervous system responses, such as dry mouth, slower immune response, and inhibited digestion. The brain then seeks more feedback from the body to know more about what’s happening, increasing the sensitivity in the nervous system. Our brain “turns the volume up” on our nervous system. Regretfully, this means that our physical sensations increase and consequently we feel more pain. In other words, when it comes to pain, the more we fear it, the more we feel it.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is when our body stays in this “fight or flight” mode due to traumas in our life. These traumas can consist of physical, emotional, psychological, or social traumas. Sometimes, we experience a physical trauma we don’t mind too much, such as injuries resulting from athletic activity or play. We can also experience trauma that we do not want, such as car accidents, abuse, and falls. Our bodies can also experience trauma from persistent stress in our life stemming from work, family, finances, and other life events. PTSD adds to chronic pain because it keeps our body in the “fight or flight” mode, which maintains the nervous system to operate on a “high volume” level of functioning. Consequently, smaller stimulus can equal greater amounts of pain.

TOUCH THERAPY

A aspect of the Somatic Experiencing training that Jennifer has received involves the use of SE Touch, a bodywork modality that works directly with the physiology to bring about nervous system regulation and healing.

Traditional psychotherapy does not involve touch between the therapist and client, except as a way of greeting or saying goodbye. This is an important way of keeping clear boundaries between client and therapist.

Touch in somatic therapy is not bodywork, nor does it directly manipulate body parts or tissues. Touch can be done by the client placing his or her hand on a part of the body, or by the therapist placing his or her hands on a particular area for the same purpose. Touch in somatic therapy is never sexual in nature.

Some examples of times when touch can be helpful are:
Identifying an area of the body for focus and tracking internal reactions.
Supporting an area of the body to relax.
Engaging a reflexive action or defense.
Resourcing an individual with positive sensation or a healthy body function. For example, pressure on the feet can enhance a sense of grounding.
Calming an anxiety response, by supporting the brain stem or the kidney/adrenal area.
Connecting with tissue memory.

As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I am an Advanced Level Somatic Experiencing Touch Training practitioner trained by Kathy Kain through the Foundation for Human Enrichment.
http://www.traumahealing.com/

In somatic therapy sometimes it is helpful and necessary for an individual to be supported by touch in order to bring awareness to areas of the body and to facilitate the process of releasing the effects of traumatic experience. The human experience includes both conscious and unconscious memory, the latter of which is held in the body in the form of somatic memory. We can experience somatic memory as vague physical complaints and symptoms, and habitual patterns and reactions whose origins we can’t trace. Touching an area can help us focus and sense what is going on by noticing our internal reactions, either through emotions, thoughts, or sensations.
Even with touch, appropriate and comfortable boundaries are maintained in somatic therapy. It is only done with the client’s consent and for a clear clinical purpose. If a client says he or she is not comfortable with a proposed plan, the therapist will not be offended and alternative ways will be found to get to the problem. In fact, saying “no” may be a very empowering and important part of the therapy for clients who have been abused through touch.

SKILLS & CAPACITIES DEVELOPED THROUGH SOMATIC THERAPY

In addition to the ego strengths developed in psychotherapy (such as affect tolerance, reality testing, impulse control, delayed gratification, etc.), somatic psychotherapies focus on body-based strengths.

Affect Tolerance – the ability to experience negative emotions without acting out, hurting oneself or others, splitting off aspects of experience, or dissociation. We begin with the smallest levels of exposure to negative experience and develop the capacity to tolerate larger amounts over time.

Boundaries – in ego psychology, the ability to set limits with others and to recognize the limits set by others. In Somatic Psychotherapy, boundaries are also the ability to sense the difference between oneself and the environment, including other people, and to differentiate between internal and external stimuli.

Breath Work – the use of breath and breathing patterns to affect positive physiological and emotional changes, such as calming and centering; containment and affect tolerance, etc.

Containment – the ability to tolerate negative sensations, energy states and emotions without acting out, dissociating, or self-medicating. Also, the sense of being held by the body and its boundaries.

Centering – the sensation of the core of the body self.

Cognitive Restructuring – the ability to recognize negative thoughts as distortions and to reframe them into more positive and adaptive thoughts. Our thoughts inform our attitudes and positions towards life.

Coherence – the natural synchronization between various body systems in a healthy or relaxed state, such as coherence between breath and heart beat; between different diaphragms, etc.

Connection – the ability to be in relationship to others.

Defenses – In psychotherapy, ego defenses are unconscious processes that protect the self from distress or conflict (eg., denial, repression, sublimation, intellectualization, displacement, splitting, projection, etc). Over time, rigid ego defenses stunt emotional growth and lead to dysfunction and symptoms. An important function of psychotherapy is to recognize these defenses and to create sufficient security to reach the unconscious material they hide. Once this material is exposed and integrated, the defenses are unnecessary.

Somatic psychotherapy also focuses on the restoration of appropriate physical defenses and reflexes that were thwarted during developmental or shock trauma (eg., psychomotor movements; muscle activation). Successful completion of a defensive response leads to a sense of competence and security in the body, and reduced trauma symptoms.

Grounding – the sensation of the connection with the ground. Usually sensed in the feet and legs; awareness of support from the lower body.

Health – “wholeness”: balance between body, mind, emotions, and spirit.

Mindfulness – the non-judgmental awareness of the here and now, enhanced through sensory perceptions, rather than replaying negative events in the past or anticipating and rehearsing possible events in the future.

Orientation – In Ego Psychology, the awareness of time, place, and person. In somatic therapy, the awareness of oneself in place; a primary defensive response to a threat.

Pendulation – the natural rhythm of movement between constriction and release inherent to all physical systems. In Somatic Experiencing, pendulation is also the movement between past events (unresourced state, the “trauma vortex”) and the present (resourced state, the “healing vortex”).

Relaxation Response – the body’s inherent capacity to relax and recover from internal alarm reactions. Facilitated by the parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response is the natural antidote to the stress response (“Fight or Flight”) facilitated by the sympathetic nervous system. The natural occurrence of the relaxation response is also a sign that the stress response as a trauma reaction has been successfully completed. In Mind/Body Medicine, the relaxation response is elicited by techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, breath work, meditation, guided imagery, etc. In Somatic Experiencing, the relaxation response is elicited through pendulation and the completion of the stress response.

Resilience – the ability to manage difficult or traumatic experiences without long term negative effects.

Resonance – the ability to sense in one body the physical energy and sensations of another. This unconscious process is one way that humans affect one another, especially when they are in close relationship (such as mother and infant; couple or family; therapist and client, etc).
Resourcing – the ability to identify and use positive coping skills for self-regulation. Resources may include positive memories, images of helpful people, calming thoughts, “a safe place”, stress-free areas of the body, physical support, etc. The body also has inherent internal resources that assist in defensive reactions: grounding, centering, balance, boundaries, orientation, etc.

Self Regulation – the ability to process difficult or negative experience using the body’s inherent mechanisms, such as pendulation and discharge. Effective self-regulation decreases negative coping, such as alcohol, nicotine, drugs, excessive spending, gambling, etc., and increases the capacity to manage trauma effectively.

Somatic Memory – the body’s ability to hold the physical sensations and disruptive energy patterns of past trauma, even in the absence of a clear narrative or a conscious association between the initial cause and current symptom. When somatic memories are engaged in a clinical setting, they can be resolved.

Somatic Symptom Relief – the resolution and disappearance of physical complaints as the trauma response is completed and energy is released back into the system. Numerous symptoms that can be relieved in this manner, including head aches, digestive problems, pain syndromes, etc.

Stress Response – the body’s innate alarm system in response to a perceived danger, also called the “Fight or Flight” response. The Stress response was first noted by Hans Selye, a Canadian researcher, who described it in three stages: Alarm (when danger is perceived); Resistance (when the body’s defenses engage); Exhaustion (when the body rests and recovers). The Stress Response is highly adaptive to danger and human survival when threats are physical, but less so when threats are emotional, psychological, or imaginary. It is also very debilitating when stress is chronic.
Tracking – The ability to identify, follow, and report changes in physical sensation throughout the body, and to connect these changes to thoughts, emotions, and the release of trauma responses

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