Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in South Bend and Indiana
7 Things to Know About How Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Helps Anxiety and Trauma
1. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is an experiential therapy that can help us get unstuck.
“We talk a little bit and we do stuff.”
—Laia Jorba, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute Faculty
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy creates new experiences. Through paying attention and moving in new ways, SP can help us get unstuck.
2. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a mindful body-centered therapy and trauma treatment.
Mindful = focus on present moment experience
Body-centered = focus on body sensations, posture, and movement
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a talk therapy that focuses on present moment experience with particular attention to the body’s sensations, posture, and movement.
Mindfulness-based therapy
In a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy session, the here and now, present moment experience is the focus of the therapy hour. Noticing and studying your thoughts, emotions, movements, sensations, and five sense-perceptions as they are right now, allows us to both narrow and deepen our focus on therapeutic material. Limiting our scope to manageable slivers reduces the likelihood of becoming overwhelmed or doing harm.
The deliberate now-ness of an SP session sets it apart from other therapies and can feel unusual to start. Directed mindfulness, for example, “Notice what happens in your body as you imagine your to-do list,” interrupts our automatic patterns and allows us to study them.
Body-centered therapy
Your mind is a powerhouse whether it’s problem-solving or overthinking. In SP, we use this strength while also building your literacy in your body and emotions. Consider, how do you know when a person is standing too close to you? Attention to that body-level sense of knowing is what sets SP apart from other talk therapy. Trauma processing work requires engaging body memory in a state of mindful awareness.
Do I need to be comfortable with my body or familiar with my body sensations to benefit from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy?
Each person’s therapy is different and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy follows you: your goals and your capacity. You do not need to be comfortable with your body or need to be familiar with your body sensations to benefit from SP. Focusing on the body can be awkward or triggering. Unfamiliarity and discomfort with the body is also common. SP invites you to safely and gently experience a new awareness of the body at a pace right for you.
How is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy different from talk therapy or CBT?
Talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy do not often include the body. CBT and other talk therapies favor thinking and talking, often excluding other ways of knowing and learning.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy uses thinking and talking as well as attention to body sensations, movement, posture, and emotions. SP is described as body-centered because its attention to the body contrasts with the norms of these therapies.
Each person’s therapy is different. When and how we use SP depends on your care goals and preferences.
3. 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, emotion regulation (including for anxiety), and relationship patterns.
Disconnecting from the body
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, even without physical injury. Physical symptoms of anxiety, for example, 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
Tuning out, distracting from, and shutting down the body is often an attempt to regulate–a reach for relief. If we are successful and find relief, no matter how short-lived, distancing ourselves from the body can become our automatic response to discomfort. Today, on long-learned autopilot, we may binge, clean, game, gossip, make lists, pick fights, plan, read, scroll, work late, or worry, to name a few familiar strategies, in a pre-conscious attempt to regulate whatever distress. What do you do when you’re on autopilot? Is it an automatic attempt to regulate?
Our 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, and today.
We disconnect from the body. The floating, detached head becomes the norm. The body as a tool and as an object to be shaped and controlled becomes the norm:
Putting off the restroom with the thought, “Just one more thing” or “It can wait until after the next meeting”
The string of judgmental thoughts when faced with our body and others’ bodies
Binging on food and media
“But first, coffee” and normed dependence on caffeine
Reconnecting to the body safely
Your 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 we must respect our divorce from the body as a survival strategy: if not in gratitude for its success getting us this far, then for pragmatic necessity. The mind-body disconnection is unconscious and coupled with survival, and cannot and should not be wrestled away. Whether we are simply unfamiliar with the body, or we have the sense of being its hostage, SP can help us to reconnect to these parts of ourselves safely.
Recovery is additive. SP invites gentle and paced mindful curiosity about our body sensations, posture, and movement. SP reengages 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
4. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a collaborative therapy.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy 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.
Can Sensorimotor Psychotherapy be used with medication or other therapies?
Yes, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a resourceful approach and reinforces doing what we find nourishing. SP is holistic and encourages collaboration across systems and can easily be used alongside other approaches to care. Collaboration with your providers will help to anticipate and address any inconsistencies if they were to show up.
5. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a directive therapy in the service of nonviolence.
Nonviolence is a principle of SP, and excluding directive interventions can do harm. I’m directive when practicing SP in two ways: to prompt–and therefore build your capacity for–mindful awareness and to protect your psychological safety.
Prompt mindful awareness:
We cannot be aware of what we are doing, much less create something new, if we speed through the therapy hour on autopilot. Gentle not-quite interruptions to notice the present moment pause autopilot and invite something new to emerge organically.
Protect psychological safety:
I monitor your psychological safety as you learn to monitor it yourself. I direct a session to reduce the likelihood of harm or retraumatization.
6. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a relational therapy that can help improve relationships.
Like all human relationships, our therapeutic relationship will have its misunderstandings and breaks in connection, and we risk being both seen and unseen. Anticipating these future hurts can keep us from reaching out to a therapist in the first place. Consider, is one or more of the following thoughts familiar?
“The therapist won’t understand me.”
“The therapist is just another person I’ll have to mask for/take care of/put ahead of my own needs.”
“The therapist will think I’m stupid/lazy/entitled/that it’s my fault/that I’m making something out of nothing.”
In all relationships, breaks in connection are normal and expected, and repair can follow. In SP, we have repeated opportunities to practice and expand our capacity for this friction. For example:
As happens in therapy, you may begin recounting a distressing story about XYZ.
I say, “Too much, huh?”
You have a felt sense my words don’t land, don’t fit, or notice a sense of disconnection, even dissociation. If you remain present, you may correct me: “No, not exactly…” and trail off.
Then I say, “Not too much, not exactly… something else, yeah?”
You may offer a word that is a better fit, or you may continue with the story. Let’s say you offer, “I’m stressed out.”
I repeat, “Yeah, stressed out right now, as you remember XYZ.”
You may feel the words settle, or not, deepening into the story or keeping to the surface.
And so we continue: we connect, disconnect, and try again.
These frequent disconnections and reconnections build our capacity for agency within the therapy itself, and outside of it. SP is an experiential space for relational learning: exploring asserting needs, being seen, boundaries, connection and disconnection, etc.
7. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy can improve regulation and update unwanted patterns.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy expands capacity for autonomic nervous system regulation and updates procedurally learned patterns. SP 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 (autonomic nervous system) activation, expand their capacity for ANS regulation, and interrupt and update their procedurally learned patterns (those learned through repetition and/or conditioned by events).