Therapeutic Approach
Body Matters provides therapy and counselling services that honours your process while holding the potential for deep and lasting transformation.
“Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.”
Dr. Laurence Heller
When providing counselling services I use a blend of cognitive and somatically-oriented therapeutic interventions. Together these approaches examine how the mind interacts with the body, and how the body in turn interacts with the mind. It is in these bi-directional pathways that we are able to access our aliveness and life energy. These pathways also hold the clever and purposeful strategies that we have relied upon to get us through some of life’s most challenging circumstances.
The clever strategies that we have used to cope during an overwhelming situation may continue days, months, years, or even decades after the event is over. We may find it difficult to feel connected with ourselves and others, or we may find it challenging to embody a vibrant sense of life energy or joy. Without sufficient understanding, we may place blame on ourselves for engaging in patterns that once served a protective function. This process can further alienate us from ourselves and those that we care about.
Gently examining these bi-directional mind-body pathways and understanding their survival functions in therapy can help us to reconnect to our own sense of vitality. It can also help to bring completion to cognitive, emotional, or physiological processes that have been unable to organically resolve.
Fortunately, humans have an inborn capacity to heal from trauma. No matter how altered or irrevocably damaged we may perceive ourselves to be, there is a the part within us that continually seeks movement towards connection and vitality.
Counselling or therapy provides a unique opportunity to look closer at ourselves and the strengths that have carried us through. It permits the opportunity for compassionate inquiry, spacious introspection, and even playful curiosity. Therapy can also create the conditions that allow the gradual resolution of unresolved or incomplete emotions or energetic states in the body. In this way, therapy can become an avenue for reconnection with the heart and the true or authentic self - a reawakening of the joyful life energy that is our birthright.