An introduction to My Portland Oregon somatic counseling / THERAPY focus

Somatic counseling applies to personal growth a therapy approach that expands the counseling experience beyond mere talk to include working on our issues with the felt experience of them in our emotions and body. This is essential, if we are to bring forth lasting change, because we experience our issues not just as mental preoccupations, but also as habits of feelings and patterns of muscular tension, gestures, postures, and other physical phenomena. Effective counseling and therapy brings forth comprehensive change on all these levels of our experience.

Somatic approaches to therapy are rooted in psychology's increasing understanding of the interdependent unity of the body (soma) and the mind. Not only does the mind affect the body as in psychosomatic illness, but also the body affects the mind as with drugs prescribed for mood disorders. This mind-body unity explains why throughout the world emotional and experientaial counseling treatments are propagating such as Somatic Experiencing, Radix, Bioenergetics, Hakomi, Core Energetics, Alexander technique, Breema Bodywork, Bodynamics, Focusing, Rubenfeld Method, and Hellerwork.

Contemporary scientific research tells us that there is a cognitive brain and an emotional brain. The emotional brain is intimately connected with the body, much more so than the cognitive brain. That is why it is so much easier to access emotions through the body than it is through language.

Understandably, the mind-body unity frees somatic based therapy practices from the sometimes ineffective constraints of talk-only therapy. When we just talk about our issues, certainly we may achieve intellectual insights, but often our habits of feeling and patterns of physical tension remain untouched. Many of us know persons who have undergone years of verbal counseling only to discover that despite their comprehensive intellectual understanding of their problems, their problems still shackle them and inhibit their aliveness.

A somatic counseling approach honors the emotional and the cognitive components of our lived experience. It allows our personal growth to more integrated, deep, and lasting than just an intellectual understanding. To learn more about my somatic counseling practice in downtown Portland, Oregon, please explore the links on the left.