Frequently Asked Questions

It can vary a lot based on the individual client.  So, our first session will always include an intake to get to know more about you, your history, and your goals.  That will help us figure out a plan together. 

For those doing SE®, I often begin by using gentle awareness exercises designed to help re-establish rhythm and regulation in the nervous system.  Then, if we are doing touch work, I’ll use a light, listening touch and when you are ready, we’ll bring in body memories of some discrete, one-off negative experiences to help to take the “stress charge” off of those experiences. 

For clients who want Rolfing®, we’ll do more direct manipulation of the body tissues and more functional movement explorations, generally following the Basic Series format.

We’ll always close with a few more somatic explorations to help the body-mind cement the gains made over the previous 75-90 minute session.  For example, we may spend some time noticing differences in sensations now as compared to the start of the session.  Or, I may invite you to walk or move while trying on new patterns.  Or you may be encouraged to come up with some things you want to continue exploring during the week in between our sessions.

Somatic Experiencing® is a technique that helps the body-mind uncouple memories of traumatic experiences from the physiological responses that often occur in association, restoring the ability to function with resiliency and ease.  Using SE®, I give your body time and space to process the trauma, working with you to rebalance the nervous system by gently retraining it through awareness, simple somatic explorations, and light touch (as appropriate).  In traumatic or stressful situations, your body can get stuck in flight, fight, freeze, or appease patterns. With SE®, you can:

• Learn how to sense and regulate your physiology

• Expand your capacity to process body memories of trauma

• Complete your unfinished stress responses

• Metabolize any unprocessed emotions

• Build more internal and external resources for daily life

These skills allow you to complete your “stuck” body responses and move out of trauma cycles and stress in a slow and safe manner. They can also be very helpful to work with in advance if you know you have a potentially stressful experience coming up and you want to make sure that those potentially negative experiences do not become stuck in a stress cycle of flight, fight, freeze, or appease.

Some approaches to trauma emphasize talking through the experience cognitively, missing the body-based story underneath.  Others focus on the body but ask clients to re-enact traumatic events directly, which is often too much for the nervous system.  And some use mindfulness-based approaches that are gentle to the nervous system but then tend to “bypass” the traumatic experience, leaving the underlying pattern intact. SE® is different.   

Somatic Experiencing believes in working with the body, slowly and gradually expanding the client’s capacity to regulate their body physiology, so that they can move through the full activation of the trauma.  Most clients appreciate this focus on the here-and-now present-moment experience of the body as a gentle and effective way to create long-term transformation of trauma patterns that have been holding them back.

Rolfing® is much more than a massage. Developed by Dr. Ida Rolf in the 1950s, Rolfing® is a method to improve the body’s alignment and function in gravity, helping to ease pain and discomfort.  Rolfing is not about static “posture” as we often think about it, but about the dynamic choices your brain and body are making every moment in order to help you stay upright and accomplish whatever task you are about to do.  These brain-body choices usually happen without your conscious thought. 

So, rather than working to change the muscles, we’ll be working to change deep-set holding patterns in the fascia and nervous system.  These deep-set holding patterns can really cause ongoing tension, but they can be changed!  So we’ll do this through hands-on bodywork to release connective tissue restrictions that limit movement options. But we’ll also do this through movement education to change the nervous system patterns that cause you to move in the same (perhaps painful) ways over and over again. Using both hands-on work and movement explorations, folks can usually make significant progress toward their goals.

Patterns can be hard to break.  Ida Rolf wanted to figure out the most efficient and effective way to change our body-brain’s relationship to gravity that would work for the largest number of folks.  So, she created a sequence of steps, each with a specific goal and body area to address.  Later Rolfers® continued to refine her methods.  I ask clients interested in Rolfing® to sign up for a Basic Series of 12 sessions because I find that this timeframe allows clients to make significant progress toward their goals in a way that one-off sessions can be hard to match. 

In the Basic Series, we work through each body area in turn.  Each of the 12 sessions builds on the one before it so the body has time to adapt to the changes made in the previous session, building more overall adaptability and support.  For example, even though pain may be localized in the shoulder, it may actually be caused by connective tissue pulling from near the knee and then across the sacrum and low back.  If we just address the shoulder, we might get temporary symptom relief, but we’ll miss the chance to create sustainable, long-term relief.  However, while the Series is my standard recommendation for most new Rolfing® clients, it may not be right for you, so I look forward to discussing in more detail your hopes and needs during a free consult.

In the early days of Rolfing®, some Rolfers® believed that tissue changed primarily due to the depth and vector of their manual pressure and so they pushed past clients’ pain thresholds.  While this approach worked well for some clients, creating quick “miracle” cures, it was too much for many others.  Luckily, our understanding of both science and human nature has advanced greatly in the last fifty years and we now know that such deep pressure is not required for the work to be effective.  For many clients a light or medium-level touch works well. Clients often describe the sensation of Rolfing as “gliding,” “releasing,” or “unwinding.”  For those who need a deeper pressure, my goal is always to employ it in collaboration with you and your body.  If something doesn’t seem quite right, just let me know.  As the client, you are in control of the process.