Looking for Somatic Therapy in Sonoma County? Here's What I Actually Offer

I offer is somatic coaching and bodywork, and I think it is worth explaining exactly what that means, because a lot of people searching for "somatic therapy" are actually looking for something closer to what I do than to what a license implies.

Why the Search Terms Get Confused

Most people who type "somatic therapy" into a search bar are not asking for a specific credential. They are asking for a specific kind of help: something that works with the body rather than only with the mind, something that does not ask them to sit in a chair and talk their way through a pattern that talk alone has never quite touched. "Therapy" is the word most people reach for when they mean that, because it is the most common word in the culture for it. It is not always the right word for the thing they actually need.

Capacity for Self Listening, in Plain Terms

The work I do with the nervous system and the inner landscape is called Capacity for Self Listening. It is the inner pillar of my practice, and its technique-facing name is somatic parts work, the term I hear most often from people searching for a way through patterns that insight alone has not resolved.

The premise is simple to state and slower to live. Most of us are not one continuous self. There is a Survivor Self, the part that built every strategy, control, planning, vigilance, numbing, to keep us safe. There is a Young Self, the part still holding what was too much to feel at the time it happened. And there is a True Self, the part that can finally meet both of them with steadiness instead of managing them from a distance.

A session does not talk about the Survivor Self. It meets it, in the breath that will not drop, the jaw holding a clench nobody asked for, the shoulders that have been riding toward the ears for twenty years. That is somatic coaching. It is not psychotherapy, and it is not trying to be.

The Training Behind It

None of this came from one weekend course. Somatic parts work, as I practice it, draws on the Tamura Method, on Parts Work, Hakomi principles, and Somastery, a body-based, trauma-informed somatic methodology similar to Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing -which helps to deepen how I work with the nervous system's own responses. "Trauma-informed" describes an approach: an awareness that the body holds patterns the mind has stopped remembering. It does not mean I diagnose or treat trauma as a clinical condition. I do not.

When Licensed Care Is the Right Call

If you are in crisis, if you need a diagnosis, if you are working through something that calls for a licensed psychotherapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, please go get that care. Many of my clients work with a licensed therapist and with me at the same time. The two are not competing. Talk therapy works in the landscape of the mind, and I help bridge the gap between the mind and body. Most people benefit from both at different points, and neither one replaces the other.

What a Session Looks Like

Listening can lead an entire session, or it can open the door to bodywork or energetic work that follows it. Either way, it starts the same way: by honoring the Survivor Self for what it has been doing, asking, somatically and not just verbally, what it would need to soften, and waiting for an actual yes before going any further. Nothing here gets forced open. The Survivor Self is not a wall to get past. It is a collaborator, and it has to be earned, session by session.

From there the work follows whatever is actually present. Sometimes that is the Young Self, showing up as a specific age in the body rather than as a memory. Sometimes it is simply the breath, held tight for reasons that stopped applying years ago, finally allowed to move. I do not script this in advance. The body tells me where to go.

Where to Start

Capacity for Self Listening happens in person in the studio in Cotati, Sonoma County, or mobile to your location, and it is one of the few parts of my work that also happens virtually, from anywhere, since so much of it lives in the exchange between us rather than only in hands-on contact. A complimentary phone consultation is where we find out together whether this is actually the right fit for what you are looking for, no commitment either way. You can book a session or send me a message if you want to talk it through first.