Together, we create a space for the body to tell its part of the story.
Trauma describes how our systems of self respond to overwhelming events. In the best of cases, when something happens to us, our system is able to heal itself without any outside intervention: we stub our toe, it hurts for a few days, and then is back to normal. Or someone says something unkind to us, we fume over it for a few hours, and then forget about it and move on with our day. But when events are too big, too scary, too injurious, or just too much for us to handle, our system intelligently creates patterns to stabilize the injury: this is what we refer to as “trauma,” or “trauma responses,” or “traumatic patterns.” We can’t change the event itself, but we can change how our system is responding to the event.
And this is happening not only in the mind, it is happening in every system of your self, and especially in the body. All of the systems that make up the physical body—the nervous, muscular, skeletal, and organic systems—can be affected by these traumatic holding patterns. This is why traditional talk therapy methods have a difficult time getting to our deepest injuries: we must create a space that allows the body—the soma—to tell its part of the story.
Pre- and peri-natal, Ancestral, and Soul Level Work
Many of our deepest wounds happened in the very earliest part of our lives: during our time in the womb, during birth, or in the months and years after our birth before we have memories (in the way we usually think of memories). Or we are carrying the burden for something that happened to another person or collection of people in our ancestry or in the lifetime of our soul. These kinds of trauma patterns operate differently than traumas that happen later on in life, both because we have no conscious memory of them happening, and because they feel like they have been happening forever, like there has never been any other experience. Which is true: as far as you are consciously aware, there was never a time where these patterns were not at play. These patterns live on in the soma, and can be worked with in a variety of ways. I do some of the work that can be done with only two people, including both bodywork and talking techniques, and also work to help release projections, and energetic contracts and vows. However, some of the larger patterns that exist in our systems are best worked with in groups. If something large like that appears in session, I can make referrals to other practitioners skilled in that work.