My Approach
Somatic Experiencing
Brainspotting
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy is a unique approach to healing trauma by focusing on the body's natural ability to regulate and recover from overwhelming experiences. Unlike traditional talk therapies, SE recognizes that trauma is stored not just in the mind, but also in the body. Levine emphasizes that traumatic events can disrupt the body's innate ability to process and release stress, leading to symptoms like anxiety, tension, and hypervigilance.
In Somatic Experiencing, therapists guide clients to pay attention to bodily sensations, helping them gradually release trapped energy and tension associated with trauma. Through a gentle and mindful exploration of physical sensations, SE aims to complete the body's natural self-regulation process, allowing individuals to recover a sense of safety and resilience. The goal is to empower individuals to renegotiate traumatic experiences and restore balance in the nervous system, promoting overall well-being.
Brainspotting is a powerful, yet gentle treatment for survivors of trauma and abuse. It is also helpful in the treatment of anxiety, depression, addictions, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and somatic pain. Musicians, writers, actors, athletes, and public speakers find it extremely helpful for performance enhancement and reducing performance anxiety.
Brainspotting is a neuroscience-informed treatment which targets the brain’s natural healing mechanisms, using specific eye positions and focused mindfulness, resulting in reduced emotional distress, new insights, and deeper or new feelings of safety within the self, relationships and world.
The mind can often heal itself naturally, similarly to how our bodies do, given the right supports for healing. Much of this natural coping mechanism occurs during the REM stage of sleep. Francine Shapiro developed Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in 1987, utilizing this natural process in order to successfully treat Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Since then, EMDR has been used to effectively treat a wide range of mental health problems such as anxiety, panic attacks, grief and loss, depression, PTSD, addictions, anger, performance anxiety, sleep problems, and feelings of worthlessness or low self-esteem.
Most of the time, your body routinely manages new information and experiences without you being aware of it. However, when something out of the ordinary occurs and you are traumatized by an overwhelming event such as a car accident or by being repeatedly subjected to distress such as childhood neglect or abuse. your natural coping mechanism can become overloaded. This overloading can result in disturbing experiences remaining frozen in your brain or being "unprocessed". Such unprocessed memories and feelings are stored in the limbic system of your brain in a "raw" and emotional form, rather than in a verbal “story” mode. This limbic system maintains traumatic memories in an isolated memory network that is associated with emotions and physical sensations, which are disconnected from the brain’s cortex where we use language to store memories. The limbic system’s traumatic memories can be continually triggered when you experience events similar to the difficult experiences you have been through. Often the memory itself is long forgotten, but the painful feelings such as anxiety, panic, anger or despair are continually triggered in the present. Your ability to live in the present and learn from new experiences can therefore become inhibited. EMDR helps create the connections between your brain’s memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a very natural way.
With repeated sets of eye movements, Other associated memories may also heal at the same time. This linking of related memories can lead to a dramatic and rapid improvement in many aspects of your life
EMDR can accelerate therapy by resolving the impact of your past traumas and allowing you to live more fully in the present. Throughout the course of treatment, traumatic memories tend to change in such a way that they lose their painful intensity and simply become a neutral memory of an event in the past.
EMDR is an innovative clinical treatment which has successfully helped over a million individuals. The validity and reliability of EMDR has been established by rigorous research.