Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in South Bend and Indiana

What is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy?

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is an experiential therapy.

“We talk a little bit and we do stuff.”

—Laia Jorba, SPI Faculty

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a talk therapy that focuses on present moment experience with particular attention to the body’s sensations, posture, and movement.

SP is a practice and experience in which both you and I are active participants and collaborative partners. It is nonviolent, transparent, and goes with the grain of your experience. We address your concerns at the pace your system can digest safely: in slivers. We savor the good (or the less-bad) bits of life at the start, cultivating resources before we dip a toe into the shallow end of the pool of the hard things. We collaborate, paying attention to what is alive in the moment: thoughts, body sensations, urges for movement, images, etc. to guide us.

  • Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a trauma-focused, full two-person therapy attentive to social location, power and oppression. SP prioritizes nonviolence and collaborative mindful attention to the participant's here and now experience (thoughts, emotions, movements, sensations, five senses, etc.), bringing implicit experience into explicit awareness. Through this deliberate practice, participants develop resources to regulate ANS activation, expand their capacity for ANS regulation, and interrupt and update their procedurally learned patterns (those learned through repetition and/or conditioned by events).

Help for anxiety and trauma when the body seems to be part of the problem

Common experiences of anxiety that can be present without an underlying medical condition:

  • gastrointestinal problems, abdominal pain, nausea

  • chest pain, increased heart rate, rapid breathing

  • insomnia or trouble sleeping

  • sweating, trembling, dizziness, feeling weak, fatigue

  • headache

  • a sense of impending danger, panic or doom

  • feeling restless or tense

  • difficulty controlling worry and trouble concentrating

Aversion to the body is a survival strategy.

In the course of a single life, with its intergenerational and collective histories, with all its hurts, the body often becomes a source of pain. Tuning out, distracting from, and shutting down the body often becomes an automatic reach toward relief. We scroll. On autopilot, we binge, clean, game, gossip, make lists, pick fights, plan, work late, and worry. The floating head becomes the norm. The body as a tool and as an object to be shaped and controlled becomes the norm. These automatic, preconscious survival strategies are crafted out of what was needed, what we had access to, and what worked well enough that we survived to use them again and again and again until they became the automatic go-to in even broader contexts.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy gently reintroduces the body as a resource.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a body-centered talk therapy for addressing complex relational and single-incident traumas, anxious symptoms, and attachment issues. An aversion to the body is normal, expected, and welcome in SP. We are more than floating heads, and the body is more than a tool. Yet divorce from the body as a survival strategy must be respected. Respect in gratitude for its success getting us this far, and respect due to necessity. The mind-body split is unconscious and coupled with survival, and cannot and should not be wrestled away. Recovery is additive. SP invites gentle and paced mindful curiosity about our body sensations, posture, and movement, reengaging the body as a resource, creating a new experience, and with that, a new felt-sense and window into previously unimaginable possibilities for living beyond survival.

Focus on the present interrupts autopilot.

In a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy session, here and now, present moment experience is the focus of the therapy hour. Directed mindful awareness of our present moment experience interrupts our propensity for autopilot and the mind-body split. The deliberate now-ness of an SP session can feel unusual. Like our aversion to the body, our aversion to the unfamiliar is culturally determined and welcome in SP practice.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is directive.

I am directive when practicing Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Because without interrupting autopilot, even to witness ourselves on autopilot as we speed along in the here and now of the therapy hour, we cannot be aware of what we are doing, much less create something new. The brief nod or pause to observe allows for the possibility of choice and change.

Develop resources for well-being and process past experience with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.

Indifferent to our own beliefs, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy trusts that we are whole as we are right now, today. Mindful attention, particularly to body sensations, posture, and movement, enables us to notice and follow the expressions of our inner-knowing as they emerge: discovering resources for greater well-being or processing through a layer of body-memory to become a bit more free. This paying attention to and naming our experiences in real-time, rather than talking about them, is a powerful act. This witnessing welcomes the sometimes quiet–and sometimes less than quiet–wisdom within us up into our explicit awareness where shifts emerge organically and change follows.