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Somatic · Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy · Brisbane

Healing is never a journey of the mind or the body in isolation. It is a slow movement toward your integrated wholeness.

I'm Alpha Ponce. I weave together several approaches to help you make sense of how trauma lives in you, attending to both the story and the biology. We look for the root of the patterns you carry while following your body and nervous system to release what has stayed stuck. As survival responses and unconscious habits soften, room opens to reconnect with your intuition, your authentic self, and the wisdom to build a life that actually feels like yours.

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  • West End & Milton, Brisbane
  • online across Australia
  • sessions in English and Spanish
Alpha Ponce, somatic psychotherapist, looking at the camera in front of a green hedge

We all have trauma. It is part of our story. Healing begins by witnessing and honouring what happened, and offering gratitude for the ways your system learned to survive. Your past deserves to be heard and held with care. Only then can these patterns soften and transform, letting you release the constant need for protection and finally inhabit your authentic self.

Recover your wholeness and authenticity by acknowledging and honouring the wounds you still hold in your mind, soul and body.

Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you when you are left alone with overwhelming feelings and emotions.
Dr Gabor Maté

What has hurt us leaves behind more than a story. It lives in our biology, shaping our nervous system, our unconscious beliefs, and the quiet habits of how we perceive and relate to the world and to ourselves. A painful experience can leave an emotional wound that shapes how you relate to yourself and how you relate to others: you may understand what happened, yet still notice tension, numbness, self-doubt or a strong protective response.

Somatic work is a gentle path to look at the roots of these patterns. Whether they began in childhood trauma, in attachment difficulties, in a single overwhelming event or through years of survival — complex trauma — we follow your body's lead to release what has stayed stuck and transform the beliefs that no longer fit who you are.

As the grip of the past begins to soften, you can reconnect with your intuition, your gut feelings and your inner wisdom, and reclaim the freedom to build a life that actually belongs to you.

What we work with

Trauma and the emotional wound

The word trauma comes from the Greek word for “wound”. An emotional wound may affect your sense of safety, your self-worth or your connection with others, and an attachment wound can shape how you seek closeness, trust people, or respond when connection feels uncertain. In therapy we explore what the experience means for you, without assuming that every difficulty has the same cause.

Body awareness and embodiment

Embodiment means experiencing what you understand through your body and your everyday life. You may know that you deserve care and still find it difficult to receive it. We explore that gap gently, noticing what happens in your body and what helps you feel more connected with yourself.

Understanding your attachment style

Early relationships can shape how you seek closeness, respond to conflict and protect yourself. An attachment wound may leave you fearing rejection, putting others first, or withdrawing when connection feels difficult. Exploring your attachment style can help you understand these patterns without treating them as a fixed identity.

Body and mind are one

“I think that's one of the deepest changes therapy can bring: to stop abandoning yourself, and to understand that the ways you learned to survive were intelligent adaptations rather than proof that you are broken.”

Alpha Ponce

This work is a courageous journey inward, towards your wholeness. Your body carried the weight long after your mind filed the story away: it lives in the held breath, the braced shoulder, the startle that arrives before your thoughts do.

So we move slowly. We build enough safety and resilience that your nervous system can finally finish what it never got to complete, so you can inhabit your authentic self again rather than a version of you managing symptoms.

How I can help

Ways in

Each of these is a way into the same body-based work. If you're not sure which one is yours, write to me and I'll help you choose.

I can help you understand, question and challenge the beliefs and patterns that have shaped your life, and explore how those patterns show up in your body and nervous system. Together we can raise awareness, develop new ways to respond, and support changes that move you toward a life that feels aligned with who you are.

Somatic Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy

For a single traumatic event — surgery, an accident, an assault — or the cumulative weight of complex and childhood trauma. We work gently, at a pace your nervous system can safely hold, so you can reconnect with your body, with yourself, and with your capacity to move forward.

Somatic Counselling

Talking helps, and it has limits. Here we also listen to breath, posture and sensation: the parts that never learned words. It supports behaviour change, relationship skills, coping and decision-making. This is not for those who want to process trauma.

Somatic Experiencing — Dr Peter Levine approach

Developed by Peter Levine. A gentle bottom-up approach that works through the body and nervous system while making space for emotions, thoughts and understanding. For single-event trauma — accidents, surgery, medical events, violence, PTSD — as well as childhood and developmental trauma.

Somatic Couples and Relational Therapy

We explore how each partner's history, attachment styles, nervous-system responses, core beliefs and unmet emotional needs shape the dynamic between you, building self-awareness, emotional safety, compassion and authentic connection.

Psilocybin and Psychedelic Somatic Integration

Whether your experience was uplifting, challenging, confusing, profound or mystical, this work helps you understand what it meant and integrate what you learned, so it becomes lasting growth rather than a memory that fades.

Breathwork Somatic Integration

Somatic integration helps your nervous system make sense of what emerged during your breathwork experience, so powerful insight moves beyond understanding and becomes embodied, meaningful and lasting change.

Family Constellations

Developed by Bert Hellinger. For the pattern that started before you did. We look at the family system you were born into, and at what you have been carrying on its behalf.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Developed by Dr Richard Schwartz. For when you are at war with yourself about the same decision. The parts of you that conflict are protective, not broken.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

Developed by Sue Johnson. EFT helps you understand how emotions shape your relationships, supporting healthier communication, stronger connection and more secure bonds with the people who matter most.

Gestalt Therapy

Developed by Fritz Perls. Gestalt brings attention to the interplay between your thoughts, feelings and physical presence, exploring the unconscious habits formed by your history and your surroundings — and leaving room to try more authentic ways of showing up.

Compassionate Inquiry — Dr Gabor Maté approach

Developed by Dr Gabor Maté. A process for uncovering the attachment styles, unconscious patterns, hidden assumptions, implicit memories, unmet needs, core beliefs and body states beneath a person's words — and for recognising the dynamics that may be shaping your life.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy — Pat Ogden

Posture, movement and impulse carry memory. We work with what your body is doing right now — not only with the story of what happened — at a pace your nervous system sets.

Trained, registered and accountable

  • Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia
  • Registered Clinical Counsellor
  • Somatic Experiencing International
  • Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Australia
  • Compassionate Inquiry Certified Practitioner
  • Australian Centre for Emotionally Focused Therapy
  • Restoring Resilience

Alpha is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor and Somatic Psychotherapist. Sessions may be claimable through private health insurance or WorkCover.

Where we meet

Two locations in Brisbane, or wherever you are

In person in West End and Milton, or online across Australia and internationally.

West End

431 Montague Road, West End QLD 4101
  • Tuesday 9am–6pm
  • Thursday 9am–6pm

Milton

Unit 30, 1 Park Rd, Milton QLD 4064
  • Wednesday 9am–6pm

Before you go

So if you've read this far and something in you wants to change, I want you to know something:

There is hope.

It is possible to untangle the emotional weight you hold.

It is possible to return to your authentic wholeness.

And it is possible to reclaim the clarity to shape a life that truly belongs to you.

Write to me

Would you rather just write?

If you'd rather send a message before booking anything, this is the place. It comes straight to my inbox, and I'm the one who answers it.

So I can reply to you.

Google, Blue Knot, Victim Assist, a recommendation, a directory… whatever it was.

You don't need to explain everything. A sentence about what brings you here is enough.

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