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.