INDIVIDUAL Therapy
Counselling 1-1
Individualised regular sessions to heal trauma, reclaim your life, and live as your fullest and truest self.
Do you ever find yourself…
- Struggling to switch your mind off
- Replaying thoughts, events, moments in the past, even when you don’t want to
- Agreeing with others when you don’t want to
- Getting irrationally angry at things you know in your head aren’t a big deal, but they feel like it anyway
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Struggling to be ‘in the moment’
- Needing to use something like tv or social media to switch off
- Setting goals but not quite being able to achieve them
- Feeling like you’re getting in the way of what you want
- Feeling numb
- Feeling like you’re here but not really here
- Going through the motions
- Feeling disconnected from the people and places around you
- Feeling tired all the time
- Struggling to enjoy things you used to
You're not alone. And you're not broken.
Although these symptoms may not seem linked, they can be a sign that your nervous system has become stuck in time, defending itself from a threat that passed long ago. It might sound crazy, but if our bodies don’t have enough time, space or resources to process a stressful event in the moment, then it can continue conveying messages of danger and acting as if the danger is still there.
Many of us manage to tuck these traumas away. We might even forget on a conscious level that they exist.
But the body remembers.
When this happens, we can get stuck on ON (anxiety, difficulty focussing, always on the go, hard to switch off, reactive, overwhelmed) or stuck on OFF (low energy, disconnected, feeling like it’s not worth it, not getting as much enjoyment out of life, can’t feel like you used to). And yes, we can swing between both.
Continuing on with life is totally possible. But trying manage the many stresses and demands while also wrangling a nervous system that is silently screaming danger all the time is exhausting.
Eventually takes a toll on our hearts, bodies and minds. We begin to experience symptoms of a system under threat or worn down, such as disrupted sleep patterns, ongoing muscle pains, gut disturbances, skin conditions, and more.
Traditional therapy tries to fix this process by changing your thoughts.
This can be helpful for a while, but in reality, your thoughts are just trying to make sense of the danger messages your body is sending to your brain. If your body has got stuck in a danger pattern, that’s what it will communicate, and the associated emotions will be generated along with it. Your clever mind will piece all these body (somatic) and emotional experiences together and create a story.
But the stories aren’t the problem. They’re just the signposts to what is happening on a deeper, body level.
We can try to change these stories. But until we know how to resolve what is happening within the body, nothing really changes. And it can be exhausting.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Just like you learned these nervous system patterns, you can teach your body new patterns, to find joy, peace, and energy in your here and now.
By completing these danger responses from the past and learning to cultivate regulation, safety, and presence from within your body, you offer yourself a new lease on life. Because when your nervous system state changes, your story changes.
And you have the power to write something incredible.
It’s a slow but incredible process of coming home to yourself.
With gentle but powerful, collaborative experiences that reconnect you to your vital force, expands your capacity for resilience, and brings you home to your body.
About Somatic Therapy…
How does it work?
In somatic therapy, we begin by first supporting your body to find and re-find safety and stability, which we call regulation. As we build regulation together, we learn the unique language of your nervous system. Only then is it safe to work small pieces of ‘activation’ or tricky past moments.
This approach ensures you can come back into safety and stability with each ‘activation’. This is a key component to ensuring you are not re-traumatised, and that we don’t overwork the system.
Rather than focussing only on the story, processing traumas is done through sensations, images, movements, behaviours, emotions, and meaning, allowing your body to respond to the perceived danger in a way it wasn’t able to at the time.
This allows the ‘driving’ force behind your symptoms to be resolved, and many people experience a sense of peace, a connection with their vitality, and a sense of being more themselves.
How is it different to traditional therapy?
While traditional therapies rely heavily on narrative and story, and focus on making changes from a cognitive perspective (‘top down’ therapy) somatic psychotherapy recognises that our story, or thinking patterns, often follow the ‘state’ that our body is in – if we have unresolved fight or flight physiology in the body, it is likely to drive anxious thoughts, for example.
Somatic therapy uses the physical experience you have in the here and now to identify where patterns within the body have become ‘stuck’ in stress, overwhelm and trauma cycles. This enables us to find the source of the difficulty and resolve it, allowing the body to release the pain rather than repeating a story and becoming overwhelmed with painful memories.
Drawing on central components of psychoeducation, developing bodily awareness, resourcing to connect with innate strength and resilience, titrating difficult sensations and learning to move between autonomic states of arousal and regulation, somatic therapy techniques are easily incorporated into other approaches for effective resolution of traumatic memories.
How much does it cost?
Initial sessions (80 mins) are $300. We take your history, learn about the approach, and make a treatment plan together.
Ongoing sessions are $250.
Rebates are currently unavailable.
If you are experiencing financial hardship, please reach out. Sliding scale is available for a proportion of clients.