SENSORIMOTOR PSYCHOTHERAPY
Looking for relief from trauma? Have more traditional talk-based therapies not been helpful? Sensorimotor psychotherapy is a body centered trauma therapy in which body sensations and movements become the central focus of the work, and through the body work, the traumatic memories are worked through.
“Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a method for facilitating the processing of unassimilated sensorimotor reactions to trauma and for resolving the destructive effects of these reactions on cognitive and emotional experience. These sensorimotor reactions consist of sequential physical and sensory patterns involving autonomic nervous system arousal and orienting/defensive responses which seek to resolve to a point of rest and satisfaction in the body. During a traumatic event such a satisfactory resolution of responses might be accomplished by successfully fighting or fleeing. However, for the majority of traumatized clients, this does not occur. Traumatized individuals are plagued by the return of dissociated, incomplete or ineffective sensorimotor reactions in such forms as intrusive images, sounds, smells, body sensations, physical pain, constriction, numbing and the inability to modulate arousal.
These unresolved sensorimotor reactions condition emotional and cognitive processing, often disrupting the traumatized person’s ability to think clearly or to glean accurate information from emotional states (Van der Kolk, 1996).”
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