Existential-Somatic Psychotherapy
Reconnect with you Aliveness, Authenticity, Embodied Freedom, and Sense of Purpose.
Somatic-Existential Psychotherapy is an innovative approach to therapy that integrates body-centered awareness practices and spiritual counseling within the context of psychotherapy.
“Hope is not found in way out but in a way through”
Somatic-Existential Psychotherapy can help with:
Depression
Complex and Attachment Trauma
Life Transitions
Grief/Loss
Stress and Burnout
Feeling of Despair and Hopelessness
Loss of a sense of Meaning and Direction
Depersonalization / Derealization
Addiction and Unhealthy Coping Behaviors
Unhealthy Relationships and Loneliness
Identity and LGBTQ+ support
Personal Growth and Empowerment
Existential/Spiritual Crises
Death, Dying, and Recent Diagnoses
What is Existential Psychotherapy?
Existential Psychotherapy is an approach to therapy which emphasizes the importance of the fundamental givens of the human experience in understanding the roots of problems and in finding ways of living life with authenticity and meaning.
What Existential Psychotherapy is NOT: abstract philosophical discussions or pointless intellectual musings.
“There is only one way and that is your way. There is only one salvation and that is your salvation {…}.
What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself.
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you.
You must fulfill the way that is in you”
Irvin Yalom, the psychotherapist who first formulated a systematic paradigm for Existential Psychotherapy, identified four primary concerns inherent in being a human in this world:
DEATH AND IMPERMANENCE: Everything we love we will eventually lose, and everything we do in life will ultimately arrive at a completion through our death. Loss and grief are a natural part of life even though most of us have never been taught how to process these big emotions. Especially in a culture such as the Western world, we frequently experience a lack of support around how to process impermanence, aging, and any kind of change or transition in our lives. These suppressed feelings of grief can paralyze us and provoke experiences of extreme anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors.
Existential Psychotherapy honors the reality of impermanence in our lives and provides you with a space to explore and work through deep feelings of grief so that you can move through your loss and reconnect with your deeper aliveness.FREEDOM AND MAKING CHOICES: Each time we are faced with a choice, especially when it is about an important change in our lives, we can easily fall prey to a paralyzing anxiety: “What if I make the wrong choice?” Sometimes it becomes easier to internally limit our own freedom and live a life strangled by “should’s,” hypnotizing ourselves with the mantra that “I have no choice here!” But in the end, avoiding the anxiety of ultimate freedom brings us to burnout, frustration, depression, and a deep sense of hopelessness.
Existential Psychotherapy supports you in identifying where you have been keeping yourself stuck and how to own and process your fear so you can really engage with life, reclaim your truth, and no longer experience the existential guilt of not having fully lived.LIFE-MEANING: The need to create meaning in our lives is natural and necessary to the human experience. For much of our human history, people have found meaning in their religious and cultural structures, often living in a connection with community and nature that made life inherently meaningful and creative. But today in our industrialized society, where disconnection, loneliness, and ideological chaos abound, it has become increasingly difficult to move through life while deeply connected to our truth and to what brings our lives meaning.
Existential Psychotherapy focuses specifically on the idea of life-meaning to help clients uncover their personal values to create a life worth living.AUTHENTIC CONNECTION: In many ways we are fundamentally alone: we are born, die, make choices, and say no all from a state of aloneness and personal responsibility. A healthy interpersonal life is a pulsation between being with ourselves and being in connection with others, but when we do not know who we are, it becomes impossible to have a real relationship with others. In our desperation and loneliness we frequently project our stories onto others and exacerbate this feeling of alienation.
Existential Psychotherapy can help you to process feelings of loneliness and disconnection so that you can reconnect with your true self and connect with others from your Truth.
What is Somatic (Body-Centered) Psychotherapy?
Somatic Psychotherapy is an approach to psychotherapy that acknowledges that mind and body are not separate but that their health and illness are inextricably related. Somatic Psychotherapy utilizes mindful body awareness and movement (when appropriate) as interventions to facilitate the client’s healing and to re-wire nervous system responses that have become stuck due to past experiences.
What Somatic Psychotherapy is NOT: Somatic (Body-centered) psychotherapy is not dance, yoga, or massage.
Early on in the development of the psycho-therapeutic field, clinicians were uniquely concerned with healing the mind—helping clients arrive at cognitive insights and think their way though their problems. But after decades of practice and research we now know that what happens to us affects our bodies on a deep level and that how our body is moving and functioning affects the way we are able to think and process emotions.
Somatic Psychotherapy supports you in reconnecting with the wisdom of your body so that you can process your emotions more effectively, heal the lasting effects of psychological trauma, and reclaiming your sense of aliveness and freedom in your body.
Anything that happens to us in life, every small or larger trauma, any experience of boundary violation and oppression, as well as any emotion that we feel and any connection with anything outside of ourselves (yes, pretty much anything at all!) involves our physical body and our embodied experience of living in a body. Moreover, the nervous system, and its thwarted responses, is not simply located inside the brain but innervates the whole body—something that becomes especially visible in the ways we may unconsciously alter our breathing or create “protective” tension in our muscles.
Modern somatic therapies integrate mindfulness and neuroscience to help clients release stress, develop a capacity to stay in the present moment, fully feel their feelings without becoming overwhelmed, and choose new ways of moving forward.
What Does Somatic Psychotherapy Look Like?
Somatic psychotherapy is a large umbrella, with many practitioners specializing in different techniques that aim at healing and supporting the mind-body connection in different ways.
At its most basic level, a Somatic Psychotherapy session will look a lot like a regular talk-therapy session, with the counselor frequently bringing the client’s awareness to his/hers/their body sensations in order to deepen the process of exploration. Movement may be involved in a session, if appropriate to the client’s needs and preferences, to explore and sequence underling physical responses that may have remained stuck in past traumatic experiences. Embodied practices may also be utilized to help clients expand their capacity to feel and process their emotions and experiment with new ways of moving in the world with more confidence and receptivity.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
We generally meet in person, at my office or outside in nature if that is appropriate.
I offer 50m, 90m, and multi-hour sessions.
Most people prefer 90m sessions which allow us to have a spacious container for deeper work and to incorporate MyoFascia Release (integrative energy bodywork), Nature-Based therapy, and/or Authentic Movement sessions.
Each session is uniquely tailored to you and your needs in the present moment and may involve traditional talk therapy (Gestalt, Internal Family Systems/Parts Work, ACT), somatic and mindfulness practices, art-therapy, relationship coaching, narrative restructuring, and symbolic ritual among other things. -
The basic fee for a 50m session is $185. However, since I deeply believe in the benefits of longer sessions I offer a significant hourly rate discount for sessions longer than 1 hour ($150 x hour).
The most common choice for clients is 90m sessions (1h 20m) which allows for more spaciousness and depth of work.
I also offer longer sessions such as day-long therapeutic intensives (see our page on intensives for more info).
I do not take insurance directly. However I can provide you a superbill to submit to your insurance and many of my clients receive partial or full reimbursement on their sessions (depends on your plan)
-
It depends on your goals and the current baseline of your life at this moment.
I have many clients who choose to continue therapy for years after resolving the initial issues which brought them to seek help in the first place. This can be an on-going path of expanding into deeper and deeper layers of liberation.And some clients come and go for short tune-ups and for support in dealing with specific chapters of their lives.
Length of work is always up to you - I trust your inner wisdom.
-
Yes!
I am both a licensed somatic therapists and a trained Myofascia Release (MFR) practitioner and this is one of my favorite ways of incorporating the body, mind, and spirit in the healing work we do together.Most commonly we would be scheduling 90m or 120m sessions and begin with an hour of psychotherapy followed by 20m or 45m of MFR to integrate the material and repattern the nervous system.
-
You are welcome to schedule a free phone consult by clicking the button at the top of this page and/or by sending me an email through our contact page.
During our consult we will get a sense of what support may be best for you and decide together if this is a good fit at this time.
Please note I sometimes have a waitlist.