As a therapist educator, I sometimes get the question, do you certify therapists in somatic therapy? The simple answer is no. Sometimes I say, no, everyone who takes my program is already certified through their graduate degree to be a therapist. What I don’t say, but explicates our pedagogy behind this policy is important, and complex, and I think useful for therapists and the general public seeking therapists to think about and consider, I’ve outlined below.
Here’s are the five reasons why we don’t offer certification in the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training.
Everyone who takes our training is already a therapist who has been educated, tested, supervised and most importantly deemed to be proficient from a graduate program by a university. This allows us to start the training at a post-graduate level, building on the ethical, theoretical, and practical knowledge that the therapist brings, and leaning into and building upon the university graduate program’s foundational work.
Because we don’t offer certification there are no additional or minimal sessions or hoops that people are required to complete. How this translates is that we expect more from our students than the minimal requirements many somatic certification programs require. We invite our students to be engaged in ongoing therapy and supervision as they move through the training because it is a useful, necessary and ethical component of clinical practice.
Taking the stance that we don’t certify allows us as educators, and as a training program, to prioritize the teaching, learning and relationship without judgement or assessment that can interrupt the safety of the learning environment, and open up more projection and transference onto the teachers as assessors now rather than mentors. What this really means, is that we trust that everyone in the training program is attending to the training, integrating it as they need to in terms of their own learning and place in their journey. Coached practice sessions are truly about supporting the therapist to integrate the new material and skills into their practice, and not about what needs to be demonstrated for certification. Additionally, students in the program can have more room to bring their clinical challenges to consultation. Our pedagogy directs us to support the learning and integration without pass/fail assessment, and lean into our belief that therapists in our program are digging deep to evolve their clinical practice.
Certification is a slippery slope. Any training can offer certification in whatever they are training, (insert training here) because these professional development trainings fall outside of the purview of regulated training institutions like universities or regulatory bodies that have legislation and regulation that they are accountable to. Certification in professional development has the intention to indicate mastery of the orientation or model of work, but it often gets reduced to therapists completing a certain number of sessions and consultations that don’t really ensure mastery. What we tell our students is by all means advertise that you are in our training or have completed our training, but really, we believe that your work will stand on its own, that our goal is to support your education and evolution as a therapist. We do offer continuing education credits for therapists to use with their professional associations and regulatory bodies.
Certification in a particular model that has broad entry requirements, so training people from diverse professional backgrounds can lead professionals to practice outside of the their scope of practice, for example, bodyworkers offering somatic therapy, and the public to misunderstand that those certified may not in fact trained in therapy (graduate degree) and the foundational training necessary for safe and ethical practice. This is precisely the reason everyone who enters into the program has a graduate degree in a mental health discipline.
We hope that this clarifies the pedagogy and practice that underpins our decision to not offer certification and that we believe that our stance provides real benefit for therapists and clients alike.
If you are interested in our Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy training, have a look at it here.
Understanding attachment and the ways in which it forges the self, and continues to be alive in one’s internal and relational world in the present day, is an imperative for therapists. As a therapist educator, I spend a lot of time talking with therapists and teaching about attachment, and how to apply attachment theory to clinical practice. I have found that most therapists have a clear understanding that early relational dynamics with primary caregivers wire the self, the body and psyche, neurophysiologically (affect and physiological regulation capacity) and psychically (internal working models) in ways that typically remain active across the lifespan. However, understanding this and seeing it in action, or mentalizing how attachment dynamics, particularly insecure attachment patterning, actually happens in people’s early years and continues to be active across the lifespan (through clients out of awareness or unconscious relational dynamics), stretches many clinicians.
I often hear in consultation, “they had a good childhood“, or “there was a secure base”, yet the ensuing case presentation tells a different story ~ one rife with a typical history of neglect, non-recognition, invalidation, accommodation, etc., ~ all of which are basically the bread and butter of insecure attachment, where the child needed to meet the caregiver’s needs, or meet the caregiver on their terms, rather than on the developing infant and child’s terms. This essential need for one to be met on their own terms, to be recognized, validated, cherished, seen, heard, and valued, are hallmark challenges for caregivers with their own histories of insecure attachment, which are transmitted unconsciously through the attachment dynamics of relationship. This relational trauma, is often difficult for therapists to grasp and see it unfold in their clinical work, both in the stories of today and yesterday that clients tell, and the relational dynamics that are showcased both in and out of the therapeutic dyad.
This is where the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training comes in – over two years we translate attachment theory into clinical practice through lecture, dialogue, demonstration and debrief, and practice sessions. The SAP training is particularly sophisticated in its nuanced understanding and application of attachment, relational dynamics, and how they intersect with the body and psyche. Through the SAP training, we…
dig into the heart of how attachment is formed,
explore how attachment is transmitted through the out of awareness early relational dynamics of everyday contact and connection,
learn about the unconscious dynamics of attachment transmission in relation to caregiving, including the window of tolerance and the polyvagal,
understand and recognize the internal working model(s) of self and how they showcase in people’s lives for better or worse
learn to recognize and work with patterns associated with attachment classifications gleaned from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
learn how to recognize attachment patterns in clinical practice in terms of relational dynamics that are present in the content of the material that clients bring to therapy,
deepen how to listen and discern dynamics from early caregiving relationships that forged the self,
learn how to listen for and track the relational dynamics that continue to be recapitulated over the lifespan, so in the relationships of today,
understand how chronic shame goes hand in hand with insecure attachment and is foundational in the development of self,
explore how to work with chronic shame dynamics that are deeply interruptive of healthy functioning,
explore therapists attachment and how that intersects with clinical practice,
and of course, we learn how to recognize and work with relational dynamics in the therapeutic relationship.
In addition to attending to the relational dynamics, the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training supports the regulation of the autonomic nervous system which is compromised with insecure attachment, and other traumas. Through this dynamic and comprehensive training, therapist capacity to understand, recognize and work with insecure attachment is advanced and solidified.
If your interest in Attachment Training is piqued, here’s a linkto more information and the next cohort dates. Hope to hear from you!
There is so much talk about identity politics in the political world—this is nothing new in the world of psychotherapy. The distinguished silos of understanding and practice, the dismissal of psychotherapeutic traditions, the identification and alignment with ‘one way’ is beyond a doubt, problematic. We can see this rigidity and problematic ideology in our political worlds, why is it so difficult to see that in our clinical worlds? In our clinical trainings?
The idea of somatics and working in and with the body is not new, and is making inroads through multiple previously isolated silos of clinical practice. The idea of working in and with the body has become romanticized in many clinical minds and worlds, and in those worlds has often assumed a superlative position to talk therapy. In other words, it remains misunderstood and misaligned. These polarizing positions speak to this problem of silo mentality, setting people up to defend their positions, and missing the necessity of working with both the story and the body, with the relational dynamics that are wired neurophysiologically and operate behaviorally, or relationally, often firing out of awareness.
Coming from a somatic or body-centred origin as a therapist, and having moved my orientation to bridge it with attachment theory in practice, and psychodynamic psychotherapy has made all of the difference in how I see and understand clinical work with people, people with trauma, particularly relational trauma.
In twenty years of clinical practice and teaching hundreds of therapists, I haven’t found there to be easy answers to what it takes to sit with, and heal human suffering. Clinically, I have needed a bigger and bigger canvas, read, an ever-expanding tapestry of theory and practice not only to hold the unbearable, but to understand and traverse the depth and vastness of the abyss, to meet and companion people back from the outskirts of the void that trauma creates.
From my perspective, one that I teach in the Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy two-year online training, not only is the body necessary for processing trauma, but so is the story, the narrative, the content. People need to be witnessed. With relational injuries (insecure attachment), typically passed down through generations, we are working with elements of mystification and distortion of one’s understanding of self, other and how relationships work, we are working with an autonomic nervous system that has difficulty with regulation, we are working with a system that defends against integration, we are working with folks that have trouble mentalizing, and some folks with insecure attachment may have a lack of emotional literacy and capacity. That’s a good amount of injury to work with on both sides of the clinical chair.
There is no one way to practice, and there is no one way to heal. That is clear. Nor, can only one silo of psychotherapy respond to histories rife with anguish, unbearable, distorted and mystified experience. To bear witness and hold someone with a history of relational trauma requires the therapist to enter into the clinical space ready and able to work with the whole of the self—the body and psyche, the relational dynamics that are present and replicated from early relational experience, and work beyond silos with an ever-expanding clinical canvas that allows for diversity, nuance, and integrated thought and practice. My invitation here is to reach across the aisle (I know this sounds political, but isn’t everything political), to invite curiosity and integration, to expand your canvas—your particular understanding and brand of psychotherapy.
I’m in the process of closing my clinical practice—after 21 years—to make more space for my teaching practice, but also to explore new frontiers that have been calling for my attention for a while. It took my clients by surprise, and truth be told, it surprised and continues to surprise me. I love my work. I have profound and meaningful connections with the people in my practice, all of them, and some of them I have known and worked with for 17 years. That’s a long time.
As I find myself in transition, I have been reflecting on where it all started, this love that I have for therapy, for working in and with the bodyself. I have been tracking the unfolding of my evolution and understanding of how to work with and support the healing of trauma, trauma of all kinds, but specifically, the heart of my clinical and teaching practice has always been the reparation of early attachment injuries.
If we go back to the beginning, to the fall of 2001, I saw a demonstration of Somatic Experiencing. I was in my first semester of grad school. I entered grad school knowing I was interested in trauma work but had assumed I would learn and use EMDR (I never did), but I was captivated by somatic work. I don’t know that I could grasp the profundity of what I was seeing, but my body knew. I remember as I witnessed the demonstration, I had an involuntary vocalization—not a gasp, not a laugh, but some sort of bubbling forth of a knowing—this is it I thought, I need to know more. Two months later as I started my second semester of my Master’s, I started training in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing.
For the next 12 years I was deeply immersed in the somatic world—in 2006 I began working with Dr. Sharon Stanley as she built her Somatic Transformation training program. This immersion served me well—Sharon is a gifted and generous clinician and educator, and I was fortunate to be mentored by her until the end of 2014. I had found my clinical home in the somatic world.
Homes change 😊. I began studying with Dr. Allan Schore sometime around 2010 and I stretched my clinical mind and practice: I continue to appreciate Allan’s brilliance and the vast disciplines his work traverses. During this time, I was departing more and more from my somatic roots and teachings. In 2015, I studied with Dr. Mary Main and Dr. Erik Hesse in the Adult Attachment Interview Training (AAI)—that training was significant in putting into words the relational dynamics I was working with in my practice that were replications of early relational injuries and also embedded in the body. In retrospect, it was the AAI that helped me articulate my knowing and continues to serve as foundational to my understanding of relational trauma, which is the heart of my clinical work. This created yet another home.
Fast forward to 2016 and I started my own Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy 2-year training for therapists. I had been teaching workshops for the previous twelve years but this was different. I was able to have a bigger canvas to explore and expand upon my understanding of how to work with folks that have an insecure attachment from a somatic lens. It started out as a good program, but I’m excited to say that my thinking and knowing from there has significantly shifted again and again as I leaned into relational and interpersonal psychoanalytic psychotherapy training beginning in 2019. This too feels like another clinical home.
I think that what’s true for me is that over my clinical career I have found many clinical homes that continue to be foundational in my clinical thinking, practice and teaching. Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy (SAP), as it stands today, is an embodied way of practicing psychotherapy oriented toward working with relational injuries (insecure attachment).
Now, SAP has evolved into an outstanding training program and community. That’s not even hard to say—I have been supported by incredible teachers, some of the most brilliant hearts and minds in the field, and I have taught hundreds of amazing therapists that continue to invite me to expand my thinking and practice. Perhaps most significantly, I have walked with incredible people in my practice over time as they, and we processed, their early wounds and they found healing. This is where the work really happens, in clinical spaces, where theory meets practice, and emergent process happens and builds new practice and theory. Kind of a spiral situation.
While there’s lots more to my story, I find myself at the next opening of the spiral. I’ve found my next teacher, it’s in a different discipline, related but outside of psychotherapy. Sometimes, when I listen to him speak, I weep…and that tells me, like that involuntary vocalization 24 years ago, follow this—see what doors open, bring your curiosity—I think there’s another home here.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by how its animals are treated.” Mahatma Gandhi
Last week we spent an afternoon meeting with some staff and volunteers from the BC SPCA Wild ARC (Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre) in Metchosin. It was incredible to hear about the exquisite care the team offers to injured and orphaned wild animals, and overwhelming to put together just how many hands and hearts it takes to run the animal hospital. WOW.
Wild ARC cared for 2,043 wild animals last year from all over the region, helping them recover and return to the wild. This incredible program provides much needed care to injured, sick, orphaned and distressed wildlife (more than 80 percent related to human impact) with the goal to release recovered animals back into the wild.
In the BBP Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy 2 year training we talk about love being medicine—and throughout the clinics we talk about what does that really mean? In essence, we come to know that love means holding a frame and framework to allow for the most possible healing for our patients. In a reflection of this principle, the humans that work and volunteer at the BC SPCA’s Wild ARC offer a similar holding environment, offering interaction and care that is most beneficial for the wild animal to heal and return to life.
The thing that struck me most was the dedication of the team—volunteer and staff—to care for the animals. There is no snuggling Bambi, befriending the owls, or petting the rabbits—the team members take exquisite care NOT to familiarize the animals with people so voices are low in the hallways and protocols are taken to ensure wildness is maintained so they can return successfully and not be habituated to humans. We were inspired by the people we met that work and volunteer at Wild ARC and got an inside scoop on their dedication, what it takes to nurse some of the animals back to health, or to save their lives – baby hummingbirds need to be fed every 15 minutes! Some volunteers come in and just do laundry, like for their whole shift! WOW, just wonderfully dedicated folks.
While from the outside it looks like a wildlife education centre nestled among tall trees, once inside the centre, it is a hospital and infirmary. Wild ARC is not open to the public for tours as it’s patients need a dedicated environment to heal and recover in. We were able to learn that spread out on the hospital campus are a variety of enclosures to house and rehabilitate the animals—from deer enclosures, to a raptor shed where large birds of prey can spread their wings and fly, or learn to fly, to the raccoon rooms – specific for babies, juveniles or adults. They also have water enclosures for animals that are water based like seabirds, water fowl, river otters, etc. The enclosures are enriched with materials from the animal’s natural habitat like cedar boughs, water pools, and things to climb. Each species of animal has specific dietary requirements and meals are carefully prepared, including Wild ARC growing their own mealworms!
This quality of diverse care is an incredible feat – to be able to treat over 2,000 injured or orphaned animals per year, most of them (70%) in the spring and summer months, to coordinate over 150 volunteers, to fundraise the money needed to run the hospital (nevermind the whole of the BC SPCA—they don’t receive government funding), is monumental.
Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, to the BC SPCA, the dedicated staff and volunteers of the Wild ARC, and to everyone who opens their hearts and wallets to care and support wild animals.
If you are interested, one of the enclosures that we sponsor has a web camera – the deer enclosure – (there are currently no deer in care so the enclosure is empty though check back often during the busy spring and summer season) – WATCH
I’ve been having lots of conversations with therapists looking to enroll in our Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training about working with the body in therapy. Lots of therapists identify that they in fact already do use the body in their clinical practices, by asking,
what’s happening in your body?
where do you notice that?
is there a sensation that tells you that?
and then what they share with me is that they often feel uncertain about what to do with that information, or how to take it beyond their initial question/intervention – of course, this is what we teach in SAP over the two years! These conversations inevitably beg the question, is that enough? Is it enough to have people identify what is happening in their body and then notice it, stay with it, watch it? My response is, enough for what? What is the purpose of drawing the client’s attention to their internal sensation or felt sense? What is the working theory, not only about why the therapist is inquiring about the body, but also inviting clients to stay with it? That’s the guiding question here, what is the purpose?
If the intention is to merely have people increase their capacity to be present, be with what is, and increase capacity to tolerate discomfort, then yes, the status quo of how people often use the body might be a worthwhile intervention, though perhaps not the best intervention, as most therapists, prior to somatic training, choose to include the body at a time when there is distress, intense emotion, or disconnection/disembodiment. (More on this later).
If the intention to help process and metabolize material in the system (relational and incident traumatic material), then no, just dropping in and noticing the sensation, and staying with it, particularly difficult or uncomfortable sensations, is not likely going to further the processing of the neurophysiological material or psyche reorganization, and if it does, it will be short-lived. What is likely though, is that simply focusing on the body during these times of arousal will move the system out of the processing window into high/hyper or low/hypo arousal as the dysregulation in the system creates more and more dysregulation. Alternatively, the client may continue to feel the sensation but not really garner further process or understanding from it – for example, the tightness remains tightness, so the intervention fizzles without any further clinical or embodied process unfolding.
In order to process (trauma, grief, loss, etc.), the work is to up and down regulate the autonomic nervous system along side the story. This is where BBP/SAP differs from other somatic dominant trainings – one of our guiding principles is that people need to tell their story, and be witnessed relationally, rather than just experience and process what is happening in their body, so working to re-organize the psyche and body in concert. When we invite the body into the clinical dialogue and process, we want to be able to work to help people to not only be present to what is happening within, but to the nuanced truths of the story that also help anchor and facilitate processing and internal re-organization, both of which are key to change.
Change is key to therapy. We know the body and psyche are wired together, and that trauma is held in the right (versus the left), so we understand as therapists how bringing the body into practice offers an effective way to attend to and process traumatic material (of all kinds) in order to regulate and process the physiological body and reorganize the psyche and internal working models, and ultimately bring forth a new narrative understanding of self and story.
For clinicians, working adeptly with the body necessitates a solid understanding of the Polyvagal Theory (Porges) (read, the Polyvagal made simple) and the Window of Tolerance (Siegal). These conceptual frameworks offer therapists a theoretical framework to guide the use of somatic interventions, rather than simply inserting them into the therapy. Further, I would suggest that correlating sensations and felt sense into this framework is necessary for therapists to have a sophisticated capacity to work with, and in the body.
If we circle back to these conversations I’m having about bringing the body into practice, it seems to me that what we are differentiating here is mindfulness and somatic processing. While there is overlap, they ultimately have different purposes. Mindfulness is a practice oriented towards increasing one’s capacity to be with what is. Somatic process has the intention to shift the internal state and process material. These are significant differences when thinking about the purpose of inviting the body into the clinical conversation. In this way, I want to underscore not only the difference between mindfulness and somatic therapy, but the difference in intention. Somatic therapy is used to process material. It may use mindful presence to attune and be with experience, but it at its core, it’s about shifting and processing—making it different, not learning to be with what is.
Wild ARC cared for 2,043 wild animals last year from all over the region, helping them recover and return to the wild. This incredible program provides much needed care to injured, sick, orphaned and distressed wildlife (more than 80 percent related to human impact) with the goal to release recovered animals back into the wild.
