An understanding of the mind/body connection is integral to trauma work. Trauma is experienced in our body, and our most traumatic experiences are often simultaneously those that are the most difficult to put into words. But even if the help that you’re seeking in therapy is not specifically about trauma, it’s important to remember that most of us are likely experiencing chronic stress. Chronic stress is an inherent part of living under oppressive systems, and the more marginalized identities you hold, the more the stress compounds.

I am Level 1 Certified in sensorimotor psychotherapy. The focus of sensorimotor psychotherapy is to relieve the participant of the bodily sensations associated with traumatic memories. It centers an understanding of what happens in our bodies when we’re under stress – fight, flight, freeze, and fawn/appease. Sensorimotor psychotherapy incorporates attachment theory (how we learned about care and intimacy, starting from our relationships with our caregivers in early childhood), as well as cognitive exercises and neurophysiological foundations, to achieve the ultimate goal of helping you experience and embody closure and wellness in the present. Sensorimotor psychotherapy also helps participants incorporate an awareness of how things like movements and postures may indicate where trauma or memory is “stuck” in the body and once aware, to devise and practice actions that might help “complete” the process in an embodied way.

One of the core tenets of relational cultural therapy is that mutually satisfying relationships are integral to our sense of emotional well-being. By creating a safe, affirming environment, relational therapy helps participants to feel the warmth and unconditional positive regard of the therapist and trust that, as long as they keep showing up to therapy, the therapist will show up too. The nature of the relationship with the therapist is professional, and yet it is also one that contains a unique kind of intimacy. Against this backdrop, participants who engage in relational therapy will often see, in real time, and within the safe container of a trained professional, what their patterns are around things like stating needs, describing and setting boundaries, bringing up feelings of hurt, harm, and frustration, and creating resolution and repair after hurt feelings (known as “rupture” in therapy). And because this work happens in the present, and can be talked about in the present, recognizing these patterns can happen on an intellectual and embodied level, rather than purely intellectual.

Relational therapy also recognizes that relationships themselves don’t happen in a vacuum. Created by Jean Baker Miller in the 1970’s and 1980’s, relational therapy concerns itself with intersections of identity and how power, privilege, and oppression influence our identities, and therefore our relationships. (This is where the ‘cultural’ part of relational cultural therapy comes from.) In a relational approach, participants will not only explore the power differentials in their previous relationships, and how this may have contributed to stress, disconnection, dissatisfaction or unhappiness, but will also examine how the power differentials that exist between them and the therapist might touch on and activated old wounds, patterns, and coping mechanisms. Then, once this is illuminated, together the participant and therapist can consider what the emotional experience of these patterns are, what it is like to bring greater awareness to them and talk about them with another person, and whether or not there are things that no longer serve the client that they might wish to change.

Like somatic and movement therapy, the creative/expressive therapies hint at a specific important point when it comes to healing: Not everything can be put into words. We are complex human beings and the first couple of years of our life were spent non-verbally as our brains developed. But just because we weren’t born knowing how to talk doesn’t mean we didn’t know how to communicate – spend any time with a toddler, and you’ll know they get their point across very well. Some forms of creative/expressive therapy include art therapy, dance therapy, and sandplay therapy.

As a writer myself, the use of story and narrative in therapy is close to my heart especially because of its emphasis on clients being the expert – or protagonist – of their own lives. With a narrative therapy influence, I hold a space that views people as separate from their problems; that is, the ways in which we are struggling do not define the totality of who we are. This approach is non-judgmental and non-pathologizing, centers respect, non-blame, and honors the participant as the expert in the room, which can be a relief for people who have experienced therapy as heavily influenced by a medical model, rife with hierarchy. Most importantly, it gives us room to tell stories, something humans have done for eons in order to make sense of the world, understand and resolve trauma on both individual and collective levels, and form life-saving connections (attachments, relationships) with others.

The good thing about the creative therapies is that many of them are things that you can experiment with on your own, or bring into session. For example, I’ve worked with folks who have read me poems, or talked to me at length about characters or fan fiction that has been especially meaningful to them. Participants have also incorporated memes they’ve created, poems they've written, or shown me drawings and paintings that have helped them uncover things about themselves that have otherwise been hard to put into words.

As a therapist, I am nothing but excited to engage with people in the ways that resonate most clearly for them. Finally, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to remember that with the creative/expressive therapies, the point isn’t to produce, but rather to express. The pieces that you create don’t have to be “good” in any type of way; in fact, I challenge clients to release judgments like “good” or “bad” or “skilled” entirely in therapy, as a shame and comparison-based capitalist framework that, once a week for forty-five minutes, we can try to do without.

Family constellations is a form of energy work that seeks to identify and move stuck energy within a family system. It can be done in-person or virtually, and individually or within groups. One of the most well-known contributors to the development of Family Constellations was psychoanalyst Bert Hellinger who, in the 1900s, began to develop it specifically to address themes of perpetrator/victim within family systems in post-WWII Europe, and drew influence from the healing modalities of the Zulu people as well as Western psychotherapeutic practices. Participants and therapists who practice Family Constellations work within what Francesca Mason Boring describes as the indigenous knowing field, a sacred and ancestral space that we all have a connection with by virtue of our shared spiritual & human experience.

Family constellations is a creative, intuitive practice that helps participants develop awareness of their subconscious and unconscious patterning through the lens of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. It asks us to consider that not all of what we are burdened with may be ours to carry, and asserts that all members of a family system long to be related to from their rightful place. It is especially powerful when coming to therapy seeking to work with such themes as: abuse and intimate partner violence; adultery and infidelity; disordered eating and substance use; estrangement, family secrets or what remains unspoken or unknown within a system; histories of chronic illness and pain; and complicated grief resonate within our own lives and intergenerationally.