Somatic Therapy in Boone
Do You Want To Dive Deeper Than Standard Talk Therapy?
Have you done a lot of work on yourself and your mental health, yet you still feel like something is missing? Are you:
Tired of cognitive approaches to therapy that only scratch the surface of your challenges?
Looking to partner with a therapist who can help you get to the root of your distress?
Maybe you simply feel stuck in your therapeutic journey and want to try something more challenging and thought-provoking. Perhaps you want to better understand the unconscious processes controlling your life and the beliefs and habits getting in the way of your growth. There may be unresolved trauma you’ve been carrying for as long as you can remember, and you sense it’s time to finally heal your mind, body, and spirit together as one.
If any of this sounds familiar, then I invite you to learn more about Hakomi-informed somatic therapy with me. This unique, body-centered, “bottom-up” approach is all about creating the safety and connection necessary to understand what your body is telling you about your beliefs, behaviors, and emotions. It’s about empowering you to dig deep into your unconscious with trust that all your parts are working together and for your best interest.
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How Effective Is Hakomi-Informed Somatic Therapy?
Hakomi is an experiential approach to psychotherapy that seeks to expand awareness of your emotions. It can help you become more in tune with your body, and since your body is the storehouse of your deepest emotions, it can ultimately help you live with a greater mind-body connection. You can become aware of how your body reflects your emotional state—in a rigid posture, a tightness in the chest, a sinking feeling in the gut.
Richard Schwartz, who famously founded Internal Family Systems (IFS), was influenced by Hakomi therapists to integrate a somatic component of his approach to parts work. One of the key concepts of IFS is figuring out where a “part” is located in or around the body, be it an angry part, a defensive part, a depressed part, etc. By asking: “Where in or around your body do you feel this part?”, This somatic approach helps IFS clients zero in on their physical body and understand how old traumas and emotional wounds still affect their lives years later.
In this way, Hakomi as a somatic practice adds an element of mindfulness to other therapeutic interventions. Instead of living in service to old automatic patterns and stress responses, it can help you live more intentionally and less reactively—more in line with your mindful, authentic, and beautiful self.
How Does Hakomi-Informed Somatic Therapy Work?
You can think of it as a doorway to the unconscious. Hakomi is often referred to as an assisted form of self-study or self-exploration, one where you lead the way and your therapist is there to follow your imagination and help you unlock new insights. The sessions are very open-ended—what we’re essentially doing is listening to the body and using it to map out your emotions.
Let’s say that you’ve struggled with anger for as long as you can remember—anger is your default response when things go wrong. In the language of IFS, we’d say that you have an “angry part.” While you might not like this angry part, it’s important to remember that it is not inherently “bad” (there are no bad parts). Your angry part has a job, and its job is to help you deal with an unpredictable and often unfair world.
Digging a little deeper, perhaps we find that this angry part developed when you were young, and you were dealing with bullying, rejection, abuse, or illness. Although anger may have helped you cope as a child, it may have outlived its usefulness. Now, as an adult, it may be holding you back from forming healthy relationships and feeling happy with yourself.
Through the process of getting to know this angry part, we can understand what its intentions are and (most importantly) what role it might serve going forward. After all, a little bit of anger is not a bad thing—but we want to channel it and redirect it so that it’s not sabotaging your life. In this way, IFS helps you interact with your parts in a healthy and constructive way so that they do not control your whole self.
IFS also incorporates somatic principles. When getting to know a part, we go inside our body to find out where in [or around] our body the part resides. For example, if you have an anxiety part, it might live in your chest and you might experience it as your heart beating faster. Connecting with an emotion and knowing where it is in your body can help you get down to a deeper, more subconscious part of your brain. In this way it brings what is unconsciously driving your behaviors to your conscious mind, enabling you to transform old behaviors and habits into more conscious ways of moving in the world.
How Can IFS Therapy Benefit Your Life?
I know the wonders IFS can work because I've experienced them as a client myself. A long time ago, a therapist friend of mine pointed out my hesitation to move forward in my life, saying: “I think you have a part of you that doesn’t believe you can do it.”
This set me on a journey to create a freer and productive career and helped me understand emotions that were holding me back. An unfolding began once I started my IFS journey, and it’s one that had positive ripple effects throughout the rest of my life.
Based on what I’ve seen in my own life and the lives of countless clients, I believe that IFS can help you:
Increase your self-compassion
Decrease feelings of guilt and shame
Trust your gut and your intuition more
Develop healthier coping strategies
Boost your communication skills
Establish healthier boundaries
The greatest part, as an IFS therapist, is simply getting to witness the process of my clients putting aside their judgments and learning to treat their emotions as they would treat a very young child—with gentleness, compassion, and acceptance.