Approaches
The three trainings I lean on most, and what each one is actually for.
These aren’t separate rooms. In a session they braid together — and the line between them isn’t something you need to track.
Sensorimotor approach
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy — Pat Ogden’s method — is the most structured of the four approaches here. It works with posture, breath, and habitual movement as the material of a session rather than as background detail.
I turn to it when structure is what helps: numbness that talking only deepens, bracing that insight hasn’t loosened, an attachment pattern that reaches the body long before it reaches language. It has its own shape, and I use it selectively.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level 1 · Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute
It shows up mostly in individual sessions, and in couples work when one partner’s body needs that structure.
EFT approach
Emotion-Focused Therapy — Sue Johnson’s method — reads a couple’s trouble as an attachment story rather than a communication problem. Underneath the argument about the dishes is usually a much older question: are you there for me, can I reach you.
Most couples arrive having already done the talking part. They can name the loop. They can predict, almost word for word, how the next fight will go. Naming it hasn’t stopped it — because the loop doesn’t live in the words. It lives in two nervous systems reacting to each other faster than either person can think.
EFT gives me a way to slow that down and work with the bond itself. Alongside it I use PACT, Stan Tatkin’s psychobiological approach, and the somatic attention that runs through everything I do.
EFT Core Skills for Couples · PACT Level 1
It shows up in couples work and nowhere else — it was built for two people.
Pre- and perinatal approach
This one isn’t about pregnancy.
The pre- and perinatal approach works with our earliest experiences — the ones that came before language, before memory as we usually mean it. What happened around conception, in the womb, at birth, and in the first months of life leaves an imprint. Not a story you can recall, but a shape.
That shape becomes the perception we carry about ourselves and about the world: whether we are welcome here, whether needs get met, whether other people are safe to reach toward. And it triggers automatic responses — the reaction that fires before you’ve decided anything, the one you’ve tried to talk yourself out of for years and that feels impossible to change.
It feels impossible because reasoning develops later. The pattern was laid down before words, so words alone don’t reach it. This work goes underneath them, at the pace your nervous system sets.
Most people who come to it are simply adults who keep running into the same automatic response and have never found the bottom of it.
Pre- and Perinatal Psychotherapy with Dr. Annie Brook · Perinatal Loss and Grief · Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders · Perinatal Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment
It shows up inside individual sessions, where I work with this material one-on-one.
Somatic & dance/movement approach
Of the four, this is the one I don’t choose. Somatic attention and dance/movement therapy came out of my first training, and they’re the layer the rest of the work happens in — not a technique I select, but how I’m listening the whole time.
What that changes is where my attention goes while you talk. A breath that catches mid-sentence, a hand that starts a gesture and stops, the way you settle into the chair when the subject turns — I’ll say what I’m noticing, and we’ll stay there a moment instead of moving past it.
Some sessions never move at all. Others do, and the movement stays small: a shift in how you’re sitting, an arm finishing what it started, occasionally standing up.
MA, Somatic Counseling Psychology — Naropa University · Dance/Movement Therapy
It shows up in every session — couples work as much as individual sessions.
How these fit together
These four sit underneath the two ways of working: individual sessions and couples sessions. Not all four turn up in both — each section above says where it lives. You don’t choose an approach when you book — you bring what you’re carrying, and I draw on whichever of these the moment asks for.
One of the four doesn’t work that way. The first three are things I bring in; the two in the section above are already there — nothing to ask for, nothing to opt out of. They’re the ground the others stand on.
Not sure which of these is yours?
That’s the normal starting point, and it isn’t something you need to work out in advance. Bring what’s happening. Thirty minutes on a call is usually enough for both of us to get a sense of the fit.