Focalizing: Somatic Healing

I trained to be a Focalizing Practitioner with The Focalizing Institute and I do stand alone sessions and weave some of this work into my parent coaching. I was particularly drawn to this trauma informed modality because parenting can bring up a lot of unhealed wounds and it can bring up a lot of inner child pain. I also had personally been on a journey with somatic therapy. After years of talk therapy making limited progress somatic work really clicked for me and I made rapid change.

What I love about focalizing is how gentle it is as a modality because it’s all about grounding and resourcing. There is so much out there in the healing world where its about purging, letting go and releasing but actually focalizing is about none of these things because when you try to purge parts of yourself away you basically communicate that those parts are bad. I much prefer to believe that we have no bad parts. Just adaptive strategies and defensive accommodations. It’s only when we can accept all of ourselves that we find freedom. I loved how my mentor Jo Miller put it that we find space to integrate these parts and find belonging for them so they are no longer “driving the bus”.

Grounding through Nature

Part of Focalizing that I love is how important nature is in the practice. It’s a remembering that we are nature and that nature is the great regulator. Throughout focalizing sessions we find grounding resource through nature.

If Healing Work Makes You Feel Worse Is it Healing?

There is so much out there in the healing world where people are putting themselves through “healing” experiences where they feel terrible afterwards or feel like they need recovery time after each session. I have personally experienced this and It angers me because my belief is that if healing work makes you feel worse then its not healing and can even be retraumatizing. In focalizing my aim is always this “How can I make sure people leave feeling better than they came in” this doesn’t mean they need fixing. But it does mean that I aim for people to feel resourced and feel grounded in every session so they leave feeling like they have been co-regulated with and their nervous system has had an experience of safety by the end of each session. This is at the core of my personal philosophy because healing work can be uncomfortable but if it feels unsafe I think that’s wildly unhelpful.

Living an Embodied Life with Safety

Truth is a lot of people who are drawn to somatics are already living an embodied life, they feel things acutely in their body but those sensations can feel wildly unsafe. Throughout the sessions We explore how to experience safety in the body.

For other people who are struggling with disassociation who feel completely disconnected from the body this journey is a slow and gentle remembering starting with having safe experiences “with the body” with no expectation to be “in the body”

10 Reasons Why Someone Might Choose to do Somatic Work

1) They feel inherently unsafe. Safety is the aim of the game here

2) They feel disembodied, disassociated

3) They are fed up and stuck with talk therapy

4) They overthink everything

5)They are open minded to explore a different modality

6) They are stuck in past traumas

7) They want to feel more connected and alive

8) They are yearning to feel more authentically them

9) They are living in high activation in their nervous system

10) They are yearning to feel more connection and openness