Somatic Body Centered Therapies

There is growing evidence that shows the importance of touch in healing from shock trauma and developmental trauma.

Touch gives a child the physical feedback of its existence and healthy physical contact supports healthy emotional connection for lifelong healthy attachment and bonding. When disrupted by developmental wounding, illness or shock trauma, or when insufficient for healthy bonding, an infant can grow into a child, adolescent and adult in physical and/or relational freeze. Touch also supports and promotes healing of physical structures in the anatomy that impact a person’s life because of pain and/or movement difficulties.

The body is where we live. Psychological processes and emotions are physiological states expressed through the structures of the body. Through sensory feedback, bones, muscles, fascia and organs/viscera give information about our state of being: safe, threatened, relaxed, anxious, aroused, etc. If the body is sending sensory information registered as discomfort, pain or stress, a person will perpetuate a heightened state of arousal or activation. This can become a self-maintaining positive feedback loop resulting in negative feelings—emotionally and physically.

Somatic body centered therapies used at GCCS involves clients either being on a table or in a chair and allowing for the healing to occur by working directly with hands-on or hands-off work to facilitate and allow change of dysregulation in body tissues, muscles, organs and structures and through somatic education, learning from the inside through kinesthetic sense of self.

Body centered therapies offered at GCCS include:

Bodywork and Somatic Education™ (BASE™), utilizes hands-on work to facilitate and support clients moving out of freeze globally and in local physical structures (e.g., kidneys, fascia, esophagus, bone) to allow more ease and resilience, less physical and emotional pain, greater expansion and possibility for growth in their lives. Founder: Dave Berger, PT, MFT, SEP

Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP) allows for more growth with clients who have experienced difficult emotions as a result of trauma. It provides tools to assist clients with the embodiment of emotions which results in movement of negative energy patterns in the persons whole system. ISP works with the physiological and energetic defenses in the body and brain physiology against emotions so as to expand and regulate emotional experiences in as much of the body as possible. Followed by integration to further stabilize the process of embodying emotions and to facilitate deeper healing in the body and psyche. Founder: Raja Selvam, Ph.D

Somatic Resilience & Regulation (SRR) Somatic Resilience and Regulation focuses on understanding the effects of early nonverbal developmental trauma and utilizes various touch methods to assist with establishing co-regulation that may not have been there in early development. This cutting edge program opens the door to working in the milieu of nonverbal early childhood trauma that our adult clients seem to know something occurred in their early life, but don’t have a cognitive memory or image. By understanding the neurochemistry of early trauma, and rebuilding developmental platforms through co-regulation with the practitioner, clients begin to move from dysregulation to their own ability to regulate their system. Developers: Kathy Kain Ph.D and Stephen Terrell, Psy.D