Services

How I can help

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.

Somatic therapy is a trauma-informed approach that explores the relationship between your body, your emotions, your nervous system, your thoughts, your core beliefs, your relationships and your lived experience — including childhood trauma, attachment wounds and recurring relationship patterns. It recognises that what happened to you shapes not only how you think and feel, but how you respond, relate, protect yourself and move through the world.

We begin with what brings you here. That may be the weight of an emotional wound, difficulty trusting your gut feelings, a relationship pattern, or a sense that you have lost touch with your authenticity. You don't need to explain everything at once.

Through greater awareness of what is happening inside you, we can gently explore the patterns that developed as ways of coping or protecting yourself. The aim is not to force change: it's to create the conditions for more choice, more self-understanding, more regulation, and a deeper sense of connection with yourself.

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.

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As you become less governed by unaware beliefs, patterns and automatic survival responses, you can begin to:

Feel more regulated and grounded in your body
Develop a deeper understanding of yourself and your emotional responses
Reduce the sense of being stuck, and the anxiety, depression, overwhelm or disconnection that comes with it
Reconnect with your authentic self, beyond trauma and protective patterns
Strengthen your connection with your instincts, your intuition, your gut feelings and your inner wisdom
Develop self-understanding, self-awareness, self-compassion and self-empathy
Build greater confidence in your choices and decisions
Create healthier relationships and boundaries
Move forward with greater clarity, freedom and self-trust

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.

The approaches behind the work

Two of the methods I trained in have names of their own, and many people find my Brisbane practice searching for those names — or recognising the face behind them — before they ever find mine. If that's you, here's what they are.

Compassionate Inquiry®

Developed by Dr Gabor Maté

A Hungarian-Canadian physician. He spent twelve years working in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside with people living with addiction and severe trauma, and that's where his central argument comes from: that much of what we call illness began as an adaptation to pain that had nowhere to go.

I'm a Compassionate Inquiry® Certified Practitioner. I earned that certification through a year-long professional training developed by Dr Gabor Maté himself, and I'm currently in a second year of mentorship, deepening how I bring the framework into my practice.

Compassionate Inquiry is a gentle, mind- and body-centred approach that helps you reconnect with who you actually are. The way I work with it weaves together neuroscience, somatic awareness and a compassionate exploration of what sits underneath conscious thought.

Underneath most struggles there tends to be a disconnection from yourself. It can be shaped by childhood trauma or by patterns inherited from the people who raised you, and it can show up as anxiety, as depression, or even as chronic physical symptoms.

The work is to look at the root of that disconnection with enough empathy that you can bear to look: your thoughts, your emotions and your memories, gently investigated rather than interrogated. Bringing those unconscious patterns into the light is what lets long-suppressed feeling move, and what opens room again for joy, creativity and freedom.

It can help with

Emotional difficulties
Trauma
Developmental and complex trauma
Attachment wounds
Difficulty in relationships
Self-discovery

Somatic Experiencing

Developed by Peter A. Levine

He holds doctorates in medical biophysics and in psychology, and spent more than forty years on one very specific question: why wild animals, who live under constant threat, don't end up traumatised, and we do.

I'm currently completing my Somatic Experiencing training, and I work within its pace rather than around it.

Somatic Experiencing is a body-based, trauma-informed approach developed by Peter A. Levine. Rather than working only with thoughts or memories, it works with how trauma shows up in the body: in patterns of fight, flight and freeze.

It helps release survival energy that got stuck, by guiding you to notice sensation and gradually process what never finished. It's grounded in physiology, psychology and neuroscience, and has been in use for more than forty years.

It's a bottom-up approach: it works through the body to reach the emotional brain, without leaving out what the thinking mind understands.

It can help with

Anxiety, stress and burnout
Single-event trauma: accidents, surgeries, PTSD
Childhood and developmental trauma
Emotional overwhelm, or feeling nothing at all
Nervous system dysregulation
Attachment wounds

Before we start, one important thing

This therapy is not a substitute for crisis or safety intervention. It isn't appropriate if you are currently in an unsafe or dangerous situation, or if you are at immediate risk of harming yourself or ending your life. In those circumstances you need crisis, emergency or specialised support first.

Somatic psychotherapy is also unsuitable for people who have recently faced, or are currently facing, legal allegations.

Ready to start?

Book a first session, or write to me if you'd rather ask something before you do.

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