Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
“Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.”
― Dr. Pat Ogden,
(Founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Colorado
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy helps us find safety while embodying joy, relationship, and the present moment. Sensorimotor integrates talk therapy with body-centered techniques to help process trauma that is stored in physical sensations, movement patterns, and automatic reactions. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is uniquely created to resolve Developmental Trauma, which is trauma from childhood and youth where our foundation to relationships, self and the world is built. Unlike approaches that focus mainly on thoughts and emotions, Sensorimotor work pays direct attention to posture, breathing, gestures, muscle tension, and implicit survival habits; it uses resourcing, gentle movement, grounding, and present-moment awareness to interrupt reactivity and build new, adaptive physical responses. In this therapy we will explore experiments in relationship together to see what helps you get unstuck. It is a practical, experiential approach that helps people self-regulate in the body so thoughts and feelings can be processed more safely and fully.
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Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a robust healing modality that resolves many types of traumas. I’ve found Sensorimotor works best for Developmental Trauma (trauma that occurred before age 18), relational trauma, and Non-Epileptic Seizures (NES), just to name a few (many other traumas benefit from this modality).
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works wonderfully with Neurodivergent bodies and minds, helping the system find safety and comfort in a world that can feel chronically overwhelming.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in general helps to cultivate a sense of peace and safety in the body, it helps increase a sense of pleasure and joy in daily life, and helps us feel more resourced in areas where we felt triggered before.
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The process usually begins with teaching you mindfulness skills and resourcing, followed by trauma processing including experiments, followed by integration. Some of the experiments will be body based, some could be activating defenses that have gone dormant for years, other times it could be brining calm to high forms of activation. The intent is for there to be ease in the process (compared to EMDR), and for the process to be collaborative and highly relational in nature.
Mindfulness skills may include meditation, breathing exercises, and mindful observation. I’ll help guide you in how to apply these skills in daily life, especially when facing difficult emotions or situations.
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Developmental trauma centers around how we attach to people and the self later in life, this is a relationally-informed and non-pathologizing treatment that helps rebuild the missing foundational pieces to restore healthy connection to self and other using awareness of the body (instead of remaining cut off from it due to trauma). Additionally, many trauma survivors are incredibly gifted in the realm of thought and analysis, and as an adaptation to trauma get cut off from their body sensations (which can be quire scary and uncomfortable to experience). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy helps rebuild the capacity to be embodied, to tolerate sensation, understand what the sensation means and what the sensations needs in any given moment to feel safer or more at ease in life and living.
Over time, mindfulness-based psychotherapy encourages a shift in perspective and rewires the brain, therefore allowing you to respond to experiences more thoughtfully rather than automatically. This approach supports lasting change by promoting acceptance, reducing reactivity, and enhancing overall psychological resilience.
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I have completed Level 1 out of the 3-Level program through Sensorimotor Psychotherapy International created by Dr. Pat Ogdon. I have completed a live 3-month consultation series with Dr. Pat Ogdon herself and have received consultation by SPI-certified consultants. I am on the pathway to certification myself with upcoming trainings.
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Being a fellow therapist with curiosity about body centered therapy & the impact on their own healing.
Feeling like you have been doing all the right things with little relief. Maybe you’re worked with several great therapists, but find yourself in similar problems.
Body sensations or discomfort unrelated to any medical conditions. This could be tension, ticks, jerks, GI issues, acid reflux, fatigue, etc.
Having lived through a single event or chronic trauma including sexual, physical or emotional abuse.
Difficulties with anger, anxiety or depression, grief and loss.
Relationship difficulties.
Ping-ponging between activation, people pleasing, and not being able to get out of bed.
Avoiding hard tasks, feeling like you just can’t succeed at the goals you’ve made for yourself.
Chronically worried people will hurt your.
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Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a 3-phase trauma resolution model with more precise focus on Developmental Trauma. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy phases are: Safety and Stabilization (Resourcing), Working with Traumatic Memory (Trauma Processing), and Integration. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works best with clients looking for long-term trauma treatment spanning 3+ years in duration. It is a slower modality for complex forms of trauma requiring relational repair from developmental injury. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works with the Structural Dissociation Model with deep training in the different types of dissociation found in PTSD, C-PTSD, and DID-spectrum disorders.
