Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is an integrated body-centered approach. When traumatic events are not processed adequately, it may significantly affect the body and nervous system, causing symptoms that appear to have no obvious organic cause. While other talking therapies are very helpful for making sense of our experience, body-centered approaches are designed to work on a deeper level where the core of the trauma is stored.
What is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)?
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a therapeutic approach which enables processing of trauma and attachment issues. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy welcomes the body as an integral source of information which can guide resourcing and the accessing and processing of challenging, traumatic, and developmental experience. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a holistic approach that includes somatic, emotional, and cognitive processing and integration. It enables clients to discover and change habitual physical and psychological patterns that can affect our sense of well-being.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a well-developed approach with decades of success in the treatment of trauma and developmental wounds.
What can Sensorimotor Psychotherapy help with?
SP can bridge the gap when traditional “talk” therapy has not helped. SP can help with trauma and attachment related issues such as:
- Anxiety.
- Having difficulty concentrating due to fear, upsetting thoughts, or unwelcomed physical (body) sensations.
- Intense and disturbing emotional reactions that seem out of place with the present situation.
- Difficulty enjoying life, feeling hopeful, and experiencing pleasure.
- Post-traumatic stress: abuse, attack, accidents, flashbacks, nightmares. Feeling frozen or stuck in familiar circumstances without understanding why.
- Persistent and regular negative thoughts about one’s ability to achieve, be successful and deserving.
- Difficulty maintaining a job, a family, friendships and relationships.
- Feeling detached from one’s self and the world.
How it works..
SP uses a three-phase treatment approach to gently guide the client through the therapeutic process – Safety and Stabilization, Processing, and Integration. We will work in collaboration and, as your therapist, I will pay close attention to you to ensure that you are not overwhelmed by the process while simultaneously engaging my own abilities and capacities for healing.
It is thought that SP strengthens instinctual capacities for survival and assists clients to re-instate or develop resources which were unavailable or missing at the time the trauma or wounding occurred. Once resources are developed and in place, the traumatic event can be processed and as these resources are integrated into the psyche there can be release and an internal spaciousness.