Reviews
"Dear Pamela,
Thank you for an amazingly relaxing and nurturing treatment. I walked into your treatment room feeling incredibly tense and tight — both physically and emotionally — and walked out feeling more relaxed than I'd been in months. Now, five days after just one treatment, I still feel the benefits. I'm breathing more deeply, the muscles in my back and neck feel more free, and emotionally, I feel more at peace. I also want you to know that I was impressed not only with the quality of your work, but with the quality of your attention. Clearly, you are passionate about what you do. During my treatment, I felt that there was nowhere you would rather be and nothing you'd rather be doing. I felt accepted, cared for, and loved. I will absolutely be recommending you and spreading the word about your great work."
"As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, my work with Pamela has been life altering. I have been in talk therapy with various practitioners for decades with great success, but kept feeling stuck around certain behaviors, particularly my responses to stressors in my life. Pamela helped me to understand that the responses I had to the abuse as a child were biological mechanisms for survival and although they did exactly what they were suppose to do at the time (keep me alive), they had created pathways in my brain which no longer served their original purpose. Through her mindfulness techniques and light touch massage, I have been able to "rewire" those pathways. I have re-trained my brain to know it is now safe to be in touch with feelings within my body, and through that have been able to respond to stressors in my life in more appropriate ways than I have in the past. Working with Pamela in conjunction with talk therapy has enabled me to get to a much deeper place of healing than I ever thought possible."
"I am overweight. And after a lifetime of failed weight loss solutions, and a failure to understand my eating patterns, the only thing I was losing was hope.
My research on childhood trauma led me to Pamela. She gently explained the neuroscience of habits, behaviors, patterns, and reactions. She made the connection between what is physical, mental, and spiritual. I came to understand that I was neither physically addicted nor mentally flawed.
Pamela equipped me with a set of tools I have found invaluable and use every day. Tools that help me feel safe, that help me get in touch with my body, and that help me find self-compassion and comfort. My life is now filled with greater peace and clarity.
Through somatic work, I am beginning to feel in my body that the physical abuse I experienced in childhood was just an experience rather than something I am responsible for. I can now stand back from the trauma rather than allowing the trauma to control me. I still have work to do and am grateful that Pamela respects that I must continue my journey at my own pace.
Thanks to Pamela, (although I am still overweight) the weight is beginning to come off; not by increasing my protein, counting my calories, doing Pilates, or keeping a food diary, not by confessing my sins, eating potatoes at night, setting intentions, chanting affirmations, or taking moral inventory. I am losing weight because the anger and resentment is beginning to leave my body, because I have the tools to be kind to myself, and because Pamela has given me the skill of being able to create a peaceful space between my thoughts and my behaviors."
"Pam is a very kind, compassionate person who is very good at what she does. Her body massage has been able to tap into repressed feelings of early childhood traumas which many years of talk therapy did not do. A combination of Pam's treatments and talk therapy has been very helpful for me and I would recommend her to those seeking alternate forms of therapeutic experiences."
"I began my 6-week session with Pamela with very little understanding of what her work was about and even less understanding of what I wanted from it. I left with significantly more of both. I learned how to check in with myself in order to figure out what I was feeling, and, more importantly, I learned some very specific and effective tools to take it from that point - a combination of accepting where I am and soothing myself to the point where I can imagine moving forward from various kinds of "stuck" places. More importantly for me, Pamela is so genuine, kind, and unconditionally accepting. For me, this makes all the difference in a healer, and enables me to go back and learn more."
A follow-up message from this client:
"I wanted to share with you something I have been noticing recently. I have noticed that I'm able to honestly assess how I am or what I need without judging myself in a way I have never done before. It might be something as simple as knowing I need a certain amount of alone time every day, or knowing I react differently to different people. I'm able to understand deeply that I am who I am and need what I need for real and complex reasons. From that place, I can still make a good decision about what to do. Possibly even a better one. All this is internal. I don't talk about it. I just feel it. So I just wanted to say thank you, because I'm pretty sure you taught me that."
"Research about the impacts of early trauma on spiritual, emotional and physical well-being in the last 20-30 years have allowed me to have a sense of increased compassion for myself. Pamela's Somatic Experiencing approach is the embodiment of integrating this research in relating to trauma in our own experience. Pamela is gentle, patient, encouraging, non-judgmental and very kind. She also has a wealth of knowledge of useful techniques for integrating trauma. Her therapeutic massage approach is powerful and gave me direct access to emotional material that needed release. What a relief! I am so grateful for Pamela's work, and do not hesitate to recommend her work to others who are serious about healing."
"Since our last session, I definitely felt an immediate shift within me. I felt more free to just let whatever was showing up for me to be there and in my body to just be, and I also noticed myself just saying things or being more "me" in social situations where I may have felt more reserved at first. I still have moments of what I would call freezing or shivering, but I feel I have more access to recognizing and being with these emotions, and acknowledging whatever my body is telling me to do. I've really leaned into this side of me more, and also exploring building more confidence in taking risks in social situations more.
I am still a work in progress in social situations and still wake-up all sweaty in the middle of the night from time to time, but I do feel that a significant amount of healing has occurred in my body. I feel more safe in social situations or being able to be gentle with myself and my boundaries in social situations. Mostly, I feel I don't perseverate as long about how I showed up in social situations after it is over. I really didn't realize how lack of nurturing, love and witnessing to who I am that I didn't get from my parents had impacted me."
“I just wanted to send a quick email to let you know how last session impacted me. Immediately after the session was hard. I went back to work and felt extremely low energy, sad, drained, which wasn't surprising given the intensity of the session. The next morning, I woke up with more energy than usual. I felt motivated and lighthearted. As the day went on, I noticed that I did not feel depressed or sad all day (which is pretty remarkable for me). Sunday morning, I woke up feeling mildly happy. I noticed I was really enjoying music, singing along to the radio, feeling content doing the usual weekend chores and errands. It is an old, familiar feeling but one I don't experience very often anymore. It feels like I showed up in my own life once again, that I am back in my body. I know that all emotional states are transitory (unfortunately this good one too) and there will be a lot more sadness to process, a lot more ups and downs. Regardless, however, I am so grateful for this reminder that I am capable of feeling even the smallest sense of contentedness, peace, and ease.”
"I struggled with horrific body image problems throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. In years of recovery I would go through phases of intense drive or total burnout. After this, plus many toxic or failed relationships I questioned these patterns and turned to Pamela. She helped me understand that these patterns were very normal for various types of trauma and helped me to get through a very hard stretch of confronting my childhood demons. I've been able to find meaning and understanding in my past with Pamela's guidance. I feel far less burdened, far more empowered and I can see how I can help others."
