Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Finding safety embodying joy, relationship, and the present moment
“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 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.
What to Expect: The process usually begins with teaching you mindfulness skills and resourcing, followed by trauma processing including experiments and activation of inhibited defenses or down-regulating activation, followed by integration.
Why it Works: 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).
