Somatic Journal: Insights on Trauma & Emotional Healing

when understanding hasn't been enough to create the change you hoped for... You may be tired after years of personal growth work. Having reflected and learned about yourself a lot. You may understand where certain patterns come from, why you respond the way you do, and how your past experiences have shaped the person you are today. And yet... Something still feels stuck or incomplete somehow. Maybe you still find yourself becoming overwhelmed in certain situations. Maybe the

People usually don’t come to therapy because everything is fine. It’s more often something like anxiety that won’t quite settle, patterns in relationships that keep repeating, a sense of overwhelm, or a kind of disconnection from yourself that’s hard to explain. For these sorts of things, we sometimes need another person to support us in finding what we need to shift. In Relational Somatic Therapy, we don’t just talk about what’s happening—we also pay attention to what’s happ

We live in a world that tends to prioritize talking things through. Talking is important, obviously. It can bring clarity, meaning and relief. It helps us to organize our perspectives and is a way of digesting events. But it simply is not the whole picture of healing. If you’ve ever thought: “I’ve talked about this so many times… why do I still feel the same?” That's natural, because... Trauma isn’t just something you remember. It’s something your body lives. your body doesn'

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the core medicine that counselling offers. It’s Spring here where I am, and the city is vibrant with all sorts of people and happenings everywhere I go. There’s aliveness in the air. People everywhere. It's a whole relational playground! With the freshness of this season, and seeing so many humans out and about, I find myself contemplating what we all have in common in this world we share… especially during this time where it can feel li

Like all counsellors, Relational Somatic Counsellors work from a particular therapeutic orientation. In our case, that orientation is body-based. There are many different approaches to therapy. Some counsellors focus primarily on emotions, trauma processing, or attachment patterns. Others specialize in specific modalities such as Art Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Play Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Some may w

Somatic therapy is an approach to psychotherapy that recognizes the deep connection between the body (and it's systems), the mind, the emotions, and lived experience. Emerging research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that stress and trauma are not only processed cognitively, but are also held in patterns of tension, sensation, and physiological response within the body. Because of this, many people find that meaningful healing involves more than insight alone — it als

For a little while now I have been reflecting on the importance of allowing oneself to feel fully. What I mean by this is enabling oneself to feel all emotions; the full spectrum of them... and learning to let them move through us, entirely. Without holds, without restriction, without limitation. This doesn't mean acting on them, and it doesn't mean letting ourselves lose our balance (unless we're ready to), but most certainly, feeling them. A lot of us in Western society are

Healing through somatic work happens slowly, often with moments of big revelations or movements of energy. It moves at the pace of trust—in your body, in your rhythms, in your resilience, and in the relational support around you. Over time, life begins to feel less like something to manage, and more like something you can meet. Small moments of strengthening and willingness lead to deeper awareness and release which together weave into a steady footing beneath you. This work

I am feeling the call to write about what I know at this point about integration work generally as well as in the context of...

Resourcing is a common term used in the therapy world - but what exactly is it? To start, when we consider the word "resource", generally...

the nature of wounding in relationships Most often, our wounding as human beings happens in the relational arena. When we're relating...

The short animated film Kingdom inspired me SO much that I'm still thinking about it a year after it's release. Still it moves me to...

Disconfirming experiences are experiences which disconfirm our previous understandings and update our perspective. When a disconfirming experience comes in, it creates a different or alternative experience than what we're used to. Often, these are positive and uplifting - creating a new, more life-affirming outlook than we had previously. We might have a disconfirming experience about just about anything. If we previously had concerns about what it would be like to be in a si

Trauma from childhood, also known as developmental trauma, is a particularly challenging form of trauma to heal from. Because so much of our understanding of the world and our templates for relationship are laid down at this time, the imprints we received can stay with us in our bodies and tissues, in our minds, in our emotions and in our perspectives; until our system is ready to resolve them. I have personal, first-hand experience with the insidious nature of childhood trau

Space holding is the act of creating an intentional space for listening to and being with another person in a way that is supportive to their process. The space that is "held" is the space between and around the two people. The essence of the space is influenced by what the space holder chooses to do to create a space, and what it's like for the person receiving support to be held in that space. What do I mean by creating the space? Well, the space may be built upon particula

This January 1, 2025 marked 9 years of daily devoted meditation practice for me! I began on January 1, 2016... and I am eternally grateful to myself for making that commitment. Meditation supported me in healing from a very difficult and harmful year that was 2015, and it has since continued to be an anchor in my life. I was in such a bad place emotionally and spiritually that I knew I had to commit to looking at it all, and sitting with it all, on a regular basis. So, I just

Did you know? Currently the world of therapy is undergoing a paradigm shift. We are evolving from a mental model to a psycho-biological model. In this model, we recognize the interconnectedness of all parts of us: our mind, our emotions, our spirit and our body. It seems that up to this point, the dominant therapeutic paradigm kinda left the body out. So, bringing back the awareness of the individual's inherent wholeness is significant while really being an ancient way of h