Sensorimotor Psychotherapy – Focusing on Stress & the Body

What Is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy?

For this trauma treatment, sensorimotor processing is integrated with cognitive and emotional processing. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are generated by unassimilated somatic responses that induce trauma involving both arousal and defensive responses. These unassimilated somatic responses are also contributing elements in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy treats the physical effects of stress on the body, focusing on the body as the primary entry point in processing that trauma. This will then allow emotional and cognitive processing of stress.

How Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Helps

Traditionally, psychotherapy focuses on cognitive and emotional elements of trauma. These traditional methods do not offer a technique that works with the physiological elements even though trauma significantly affects the body and many trauma induced symptoms are somatically based. For more information on Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, feel free to contact us.

The Sensorimotor Psychotherapy method benefits clinicians working with PTSD symptoms like:

• Dissociation
• Emotional reactivity or flat affect
• Frozen states
• Hyperarousal

"Since re-living of trauma often occurs in the form of physical sensations, which, in turn, precipitate intense trauma-related emotions of terror and helplessness, learning how to manage and uncouple physical sensations from trauma-based emotions has emerged as one of the essential aspects of the effective treatments of PTSD".

- Bessel van der Kolk, MD Author of Traumatic Stress