Somatic Therapy

Reconnect with your body

Somatic therapy is body-based mental health care.

Do you feel out of touch or disconnected from your body?

Do you have trouble noticing your body’s cues about pain, hunger, or discomfort until they’re too strong to ignore?

Do you feel stuck in fight, flight, or freeze?

Do you forget what it’s like to feel safe?

Do you feel overwhelmed by your own brain?

Have you been through trauma - experiences that were too much and too fast for your nervous system to manage?

Have you found that talking isn’t enough - you want to include your body in your healing?

Somatic therapy can help.

Learn to listen your body and trust your body’s messages, so you can live more sustainably.

Remember what it feels like to feel safe, so you can focus on the present moment.

Release traumatic energy stuck in your body, so you can access your body’s capacity to heal.

Expand your resiliency, so you can cope with the challenges the world throws at you.

Understand your nervous system, so you can stay regulated when you’re stressed.

Begin healing your whole self, starting with your body

white fat person walking down a forest path
Black person hugging self

Who benefits from somatic therapy:

  • People with chronic illness or chronic pain

  • People who have been through medical trauma, including surgeries

  • Trauma survivors of all types

  • People living with oppression or marginalization - I particularly enjoy working with people who are LGBTQ+, trans or gender nonconforming, BIPOC, fat or living in larger bodies, and/or neurodivergent.

  • People who struggle with body acceptance and dysphoria.

  • Anyone who wants to build their resilience, feel more regulated, and heal themselves starting with their body.

As a licensed occupational therapist, I offer various modalities to support your healing, including:

  • Stream with a whirlpool surrounded by birch trees

    Somatic Experiencing

    Body based trauma therapy as created by Dr Peter Levine

  • solar panel at sunset

    Pacing

    Get out of the cycle of collapsing after pushing too hard

  • train track through the woods

    Co-creating supportive systems

    Problem-solve strategies and routines that work for you, to support your life and your brain

  • mountains reflected in calm water

    Mindfulness

    Notice what’s happening in the present moment, so you can choose your response

  • field of lavender plants

    Lymphatic massage

    Gentle touch to encourage lymphatic flow, reduce pain, and manage stress

Somatic therapy for medical trauma or chronic illness

Living with medical trauma or chronic illness isn’t easy.

  • Chronic pain can make it hard to get anything done.

  • Chronic fatigue and exhaustion can get overwhelming.

  • Unpredictable abilities day to day can make it hard to trust your body.

  • Brain fog and executive function problems can make you feel unreliable.

  • A medical system built to fix short-term problems can make finding the right care feel impossible.

  • Doctor after doctor dismissing your pain can make you feel gaslit and unsupported.

  • Medical trauma can make it retraumatizing to seek medical care.

  • Capitalism can make it exhausting to survive.

What you’re experiencing is real, and I believe you.

Let’s work on it together.

Chronic conditions I work with include, but are not limited to:

  • Long COVID

  • Chronic fatigue syndrome

  • Fibromyalgia

  • Ehlers-Danlos syndrome

  • POTS

  • Autoimmune conditions

  • Multiple Sclerosis

  • Rheumatoid arthritis

  • Cancer

  • Lipedema

  • Lymphedema

  • ADD / ADHD

Causes of medical trauma can include:

  • Surgeries / Anesthesia

  • Hospitalization

  • Giving birth

  • Living with chronic pain

  • Inadequate pain control

  • Life-threatening medical conditions or situations

  • Bad experiences with medical providers, including gaslighting or ignoring symptoms

  • Racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or other oppression in a medical setting

Somatic therapy for body acceptance

All bodies are good.

All bodies are enough.

All bodies are worthy of care.

All bodies deserve full access to the world.

From the time we’re born, we’re told the opposite - that no matter what our body looks like, we should probably be smaller, more attractive, and fitting even more closely to an impossible standard of perfection.

These messages are everywhere, and get programmed into us without our choosing to believe them.

You deserve better.

Learn to embrace your body as it is right now. It’s not necessary to love your body (although it’s wonderful when we can), but developing a sense of neutrality and acceptance for our bodies can make it easier to find joy in other parts of our lives.

Heal your relationship with fat and your body, so you can spread healing to those around you and the next generation.

Somatic therapy and oppression

The world is scary, and getting scarier.

It’s hard to access a sense of safety when there are very real threats to our existence.

I get it - and yet, feeling safe is essential for healing. We need to find pockets of safety, community, joy, and comfort so we have the strength to survive in this world.

One of the goals in somatic therapy is finding those pockets. We learn to access the supports we need, and allow our nervous system opportunities to heal from constant onslaught around us.

People living with all types of oppression and marginalization are welcome.

Somatic therapy and Trauma

Trauma comes from overwhelming experiences - anything that's too much and too fast for your nervous system to process. Experiences that traumatize one person’s system might not result in trauma for someone else, and vice versa. Whether or not we feel like something “should” be traumatizing, we can still suffer its effects.

Trauma aftermath lives in the body, and full healing requires moving those unresolved energies through and out of our bodies.

A somatic experiencing approach can help us process and resolve trauma without getting retraumatized in the process.

What happens in somatic therapy

  • Catch your breath, get grounded, and notice what’s around you.

  • Notice what’s happening inside the body

  • Each session will be different, as we work with the feelings and sensations that come up

  • Complete stress response cycles that couldn’t be completed earlier

  • Identify what helps during sessions, and strategies that may be useful between sessions

Mara listening in somatic therapy

Logistics

Somatic occupational therapy is $180 per session online and $195 in person.

A limited number of sliding scale appointments are available.

Insurance is not accepted, but a superbill can be provided if arranged in advance.

In person sessions are in downtown Silver Spring, MD.

Clients must be physically located in DC, MD, or VA during online sessions.