What is Somatic Counseling?

 

Like other body-oriented, somatic counseling and therapy practices such as Radix, Bioenergetics, Hakomi, Core Energetics, Alexander technique, Breema Bodywork, Bodynamics, Focusing, Somatic Experiencing, Rubenfeld Method, and Hellerwork, somatic counseling is founded upon the holistic principle of mind/body unity.

Somatic counseling is a personal psychological growth practice that is founded upon the principle that each individual is a whole person consisting of a mind, feelings, and a body. For personal growth to be effective and lasting, it must touch and transform all of our levels.

By itself, the intellectual understanding offered by traditional verbal/cognitive counseling cannot penetrate to and transform the deeper levels of consciousness. If we deal with conceptual content, and we leave unchanged the deeper emotions and physical blockages, then the deeper roots of our problems remain untouched, allowing those problems to again manifest with the same or different symptoms.

Instead, each kind of blockage must be dealt with on its own level. Somatic counseling therefore uses a diversity of mind (verbal), feelings (affective), and body (somatic) counseling techniques to bring lasting change to each level of the whole person.

As the work progresses, clients resolve their issues (e.g., anxiety, depression, trauma). Typically they also begin to experience becoming more fully alive and more authentic. Of course somatic counseling is applied differently to clients according to their individual needs, and yet common themes underlie the work. Some of the goals of omatic counseling include:

• Develop mind/body integration, reducing dissociation, enhancing the experience of being fully alive.
• Ground you in your body and your experience of life, enabling greater competence in your dealing with life's daily issues.
• Center you in your experience of your own body, feelings, and thoughts, enabling your experience of your own authentic self.
• Create boundaries that define you to yourself, your relationships, and the world.
• Release emotional repression by expanding yur capacity to feel and express feelings.
• Contain feelings that might overwhelm you, until they can be expressed at an appropriate time in an appropriate manner.
• Strengthen your ego, your sense of and your experience of self.
• Restore the flow of your life force, enhancing its pulsation, your aliveness, and expressiveness.
• Enhance your capacity to increase and contain your biophysical energy -- to charge with energy and to tolerate increased amounts of energy, thereby enhancing your capacity for pleasure.
• Discharge long-held feelings anger, fear, pain, and longing allowing thereby for the enhanced capacity for feelings of love, trust, pleasure, and fulfillment.
• Increase your capacity for interpersonal contact, allowing therefore for greater emotional and sexual intimacy.
• Discover and express your authentic self, resulting in enhanced autonomy & self-direction.

Somatic counseling is based upon the humanistic psychology model that views individuals as being on a spectrum of personal growth. Somatic counseling is unlike many therapies whose medical models view persons as being either "sick" or "healthy."

Somatic counseling is rooted in the work of Wilhelm Reich, M.D. whose pioneering research on the relations of body, mind, and feelings has served to source so many of today's Western mind/body therapeutic practices.

Somatic Counseling Programs

My counseling practice in downtown Portland Oregon offers somatic counseling with individual session, group, and workshop programs. A description of each of these programs follows.

Individual Sessions

Individual 50-minute sessions are the principal method of doing somatic counseling. In an individual session, I work with you using any combination of techniques drawn from the physical, body awareness, breath, energetic, other non-verbal, and verbal techniques inherent to the somatic counseling body/mind approach to personal growth.

Each individual session is different, for your unique needs determine the direction, pace, and content of a session. Sometimes, for example, you may work with verbal techniques; at other times non-verbal body-centered techniques. Sometimes you may work to loosen boundaries or defenses; at other times you may work to strengthen the sense of self, build boundaries and defenses. The range of the work is so very diverse. Yet all of it is experiential. And at all times, I respect your defenses and boundaries.

Group

The experience of working in a group is very different than working in a private individual session with me. And, it's that very difference that makes group and workshop work so important. Naturally, persons are at first a little intimidated at the thought of doing group work. Yet consistently my group participants are genuinely pleased to discover just how valuable group work has become to them. In group, you often discover that your feelings are not unusual; that you are not "odd" for feeling as you do - you're just human like everyone else. You find supportive fellow group members who may be working with the very same or similar issues. The special vulnerability of working in group can contribute to important breakthroughs in your personal growth.

Somatic counseling groups are non-confrontational. The group format offers you special paired exercises and group activities that cannot be done in individual sessions. Still in group, individual work also is done. A group session is 2 ½ hours, often scheduled in the evening.

I encourage my clients to supplement their individual programs with group work when they can, because of the unique benefits that somatic counseling group work provides.

Workshops

I also offer day-long and weekend-long workshops throughout the year. In a workshop, participants do concentrated individual, paired-feeling, and group work. Often workshops are thematically organized on topics such as personal authenticity, discovering purpose, or working with anger, shame, abuse, etc.

My current schedule of workshops is listed on the Events page of my website. To request to be added to my email and/or postal mail lists to be notified of future workshops, please click on the "Subscribe" button below.

What's a "Typical" Somatic Counseling Program?

Most of my somatic counseling clients work with me in weekly individual sessions. Of these, often my clients will supplement their individual work with group work and/or workshops. Some clients choose only to participate in a group. Others perhaps limited by time or geography may choose only to participate in workshops.

The Origins of Somatic Counseling

Somatic counseling is rooted in the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, M.D. During the first half of last century, Reich discovered relations between emotional functioning and the body's energetic processes. These discoveries anticipated the holistic movement's understanding of the mind/body relationship. They also helped to source many of today's contemporary body-oriented therapies and personal growth disciplines including somatic counseling.

Reich's work on the relationship between emotional stagnation and degenerative disease was ahead of its time. At the root of emotional stagnation is what Reich called muscular armor. Muscular armor is chronic muscular tension that blocks the natural flow of life force through the body that is experienced as emotions. The restriction of the life force can result not only in emotional stagnation, but also in physical disease.

Reich developed techniques to loosen muscular armor thereby helping the client to allow and experience blocked emotions and the freeing of the body's natural emotional expressiveness. Long-held feelings then could flow through the body and be transformed, leaving the client to feel more alive and better able to establish contact self and others.

Reich's research on the body's vital energy foreshadowed contemporary research into the body's subtle biophysical energy. It also confirms some of the findings of Eastern philosophies about chi /prana. His work on healthy sexual functioning anticipated contemporary sexuality research.

From Reich numerous somatic psychology schools have evolved including Somatic Experiencing, Radix, Bioenergetics, Hakomi, Core Energetics, Alexander technique, Breema Bodywork, Bodynamics, Focusing, Rubenfeld Method, and Hellerwork. My initial training was with the Radix Institute.

Consider a free consultation

Counseling is a transformative relationship shared by two persons. So, it is important that you take the time to check out any counselor with whom you might work. Is the chemistry between you and the counselor right? Does the counselor’s background and abilities meet your needs? Would a referral be appropriate? Because it is important that you explore such questions before beginning work, I offer prospective clients the opportunity to meet with me for a free 50-minute consultation.

Where do I go from here?

My offices are located in Portland, Oregon. I welcome you to telephone (503.226.2771) or email me to arrange a consultation or answer any questions you might have.