Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work

Somatic Experiencing® Touch offers a gentle yet profound way to help the body resolve the lingering effects of trauma, overwhelm, stress, and developmental trauma. It is done while clothed and sitting or lying on a massage table.

Using light contact and supportive holds—anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes—this work supports coregulation, where a safe and regulated nervous system meets yours, helping it feel secure enough to soften, release, and restore your birthright of feeling safe, at ease, and welcome. This process is centered on consent, and the client is supported throughout the session to set boundaries, share preferences, ask for changes, and stop the touch work at any time. No touch happens without consent.

Through this process, held survival energy can begin to move through the body—especially in the joints and the seven diaphragms identified by Somatic Experiencing®, common places where the nervous system compartmentalizes energy to protect from overwhelm. Giving supportive touch to the adrenal glands, which regulate stress, can also be deeply calming and grounding to the nervous system. This gentle unwinding can repattern the effects of early childhood neglect, offering your system the contact and holding it may have longed for but never safely received.

Unlike massage, Somatic Experiencing® Touch is not about manipulating muscles, but about meeting your nervous system where it is, with deep listening and steady presence. Sessions can feel calming and restorative, but may also bring moments of activation as long-held energy is freed. The result is often a greater sense of safety, vitality, and flexibility— both physically, and emotionally.

If you are interested in SE® Touch, we would start with a consult and then 1-3 sessions of Somatic Experiencing® without touch, to assess whether touch work is the right fit for you.

These videos are not presented by me, but this other Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work Practitioner explains about Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work and briefly shows what it looks like:

IMPORTANT LIMITATIONS OF WHAT I OFFER: If you have Complex Trauma (when acute trauma has been pervasive, throughout the lifespan in different ways, especially throughout all of childhood), or diagnoses that benefit from specialized support (such as a personality disorders or Major Depression), I require you to be working with a primary therapist to process past issues and to support you in the present to engage in Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work with me. If you would like to add Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work to augment your therapy, you can fill out my new client questionnaire, and then we can have a video consult to see if it makes sense to move forward. Then, with your consent, I can consult with your therapist, to hear their perspective on how Somatic Experiencing® Touch Work may fit into your support system.

What an SE Touch Session Is Like

• Check in and talk for 10-15 minutes about what's going on for you in your nervous system, body, and life. We'll check in about boundaries, consent, and communication around touch.

• Transition to either seated or lying down, face up clothed table work.

• I often start with contact on the shoulders to make contact with your nervous system and settle into deeper nervous system regulation and support.

• With my intuition and yours, we will sense into when a change of hand position or support of a different joint, diaphragm [one of the 7 diaphragms (bell like structures in the body that compartmentalize held energy so the system does not get overwhelmed with trauma or too much intensity) that SE recognizes (see image above), or internal organ feels needed. Along with intuition, we will listen to signals from your body that include deeper and fuller organic breaths, pulsation, heat, digestion sounds, relaxation in muscle tone, and a sense of completion or settling, to tell use when to shift holds.

• I may typically offer holds above or below a diaphragm that is holding a lot of energy (which can show up as tension or pain), to support the energy to have somewhere to flow into in the surrounding diaphragms, as the system feels safer, with support, to allow the energy to release and move. This often provides a feeling of relief and relaxation, though at times it can feel emotional or intense.

• Check-ins throughout the touch work to ask for consent, support your boundaries (we can stop the touch work at any time), and to invite your inner felt experience or impulses to be shared, and I will share my impulses to bring touch to certain areas and ask your consent before initiating.

• Holds consist of my hands being placed gently above and below or on the joints, the 7 diaphragms (bell like structures in the body that compartmentalize held energy so the system does not get overwhelmed with trauma or too much intensity)] that SE recognizes (see image above), the adrenals/kidney area to support deactivation of stress, or near internal organs to offer regulation and support.

• Holds last from 1-10 minutes. You can be quiet and rest and have an internal focus, or share what you notice inside. I will invite you to share and check in from time to time about your experience.

• 10 minutes to come out of the touch work slowly and check in about the session and integrate what you experienced.