Key Components of the Mind Body Balance Treatment Approach
Therapeutic Neuroscience Education: Explaining the brain-body connection, geared to your level of interest and existing knowledge.
Mindfulness Coaching: Explaining the concept of mindfulness, and introducing mindful self-care practices for supporting your needs and goals.
Relaxation Techniques: Breathing and visualization exercises to calm the "fight or flight" response. The techniques I teach are brief and can be used throughout the day, not requiring significant time commitment.
Somatic Experiencing™: Fostering awareness of sensation through guided mindfulness of the body involves a process of communication between therapist and client. Simple yet powerful techniques for gently resolving trauma symptoms.
Hands-on Techniques:
Somatic Experiencing™ Bodywork promotes awareness and self-regulation through touch that is used to support the Somatic Experiencing™ process.
“Autonomic Balancing” is a full-body hands-on technique that includes 5 types of touch used on arms and legs, as well as shoulders, face hands and feet to calm the body and encourage a healthy mind-body response to stressful events. I adapt this technique to best benefit each client’s nervous system.
These components are combined differently for each client depending on their history, health status, and treatment goals. This is a flexible and responsive treatment process, rather than a protocol.
What we do in the office and what a client practices at home are equally important. During our time in sessions, I will introduce and explain various mindfulness and relaxation techniques for self-care at home. We will practice these techniques together to reinforce them and provide the opportunity for questions and observations. The key to establishing new patterns in the brain is repetition, so the more often you can use the self-care techniques, the more progress you will make towards your treatment goals.
Somatic Experiencing™ focuses on body sensation as it relates to emotion, mental processes, and the choices we make with our attention, so that we learn to release stress, self-regulate, and respond rather than react to life's challenges. Describing the sensations with words promotes brain integration and social engagement, and develops the ability to focus on sensation with curiosity and avoid overwhelm. It can take time to develop this awareness and ability to talk about it- that’s normal!
The hands-on bodywork techniques allow us to communicate with the "survival brain" in a powerful, non-verbal way, promoting a sense of safety, connection, and increased body awareness. In this flexible process, an important aspect is using the social engagement system we share with all mammals for you to have the experience of being "safe with another." Touch and Somatic Experiencing™ are so powerful for healing because the therapist is able to provide a safe container, a support for regulation, and a guide for cultivating the ability to "feel what you feel" safely, without overwhelm. Through this process you build the confidence that you can visit rocky inner terrain and return again to secure ground.