Find Healing and Transformation Through Somatic Therapy
A Path for Living Fully
Michael Shiffman PhD, LMFT
Could Somatic Therapy be the Answer for you?
Somatic therapy explores the body-mind connection to address issues often inaccessible through traditional talk therapy. Somatic therapy supports working with dysregulation as well as with implicit memories and unconscious experiences that are split off from awareness.
Attachment Strategies First Help, Now Hinder
Early childhood attachment strategies arise so infants can communicate their needs. They adapt to their care givers to survive. These adaptive survival strategies form in early childhood and become the filter through which adult relationships are formed and maintained. Dysfunctional patterns appear invisible at first but can be made explicit and change.
The Goal of Trauma Therapy is to Live a Happier Life
My approach to trauma therapy is grounded in a three-phase approach to healing and integrates bottom-up and top-down processing.
Safety and stability are essential for emotional and physical regulation. Grounded in a solid base, we can explore painful memories to help regulate mind and body.
Bottom-Up Repair of Early Trauma
Trauma affects both mind and body. Current approaches work with both. Top-down processing moves from thoughts, emotions, sensations, and then to the deeper aspects of neurophysiology and energetics. Bottom-up processing starts with the nervous system and moves toward thoughts and meaning. Successful trauma repair uses both bottom-up and top-down practices to address the complexities of identity and dysregulated physiology.
Psychodynamic & Non-regressive
Self-regulation is an important part of daily life. In order for our work to be both psychodynamic and non-regressive, it must help clients establish connection to the parts of themselves that are coherent and functional. Somatic therapy works in present time to build on the parts of us that are organized and regulated.
Let Me Help You to Move Forward in Life
How Can Touch Help You Regulate Your Nervous System?
Michael Shiffman is uniquely trained in the use of touch for trauma resolution and attachment repair.
How does Physical Touch Help with Somatic Regulation and Attachment Repair?
Competent and ethical psychotherapists have used intentional physical contact since the early 1930’s. I am extensively trained in the use of touch for trauma resolution, with both neurophysiological and neuroaffective approaches.
Through physical contact with the body, it is possible to tune in to the inherent motion within, establishing a direct physiological rapport between the therapist and client. The skillful use of touch supports our client’s capacity to heal their earliest developmental traumas. Working directly on bodily systems has the effect of healing emotional wounds. The following is possible through the power of touch therapy:
- Nurture developmental deficits
- Encourage new neurological connections
- Elicit dormant impulses
- Reduce hyper-activation
- Calm vigilance
- Release dysfunctional somatic patterns
- Renegotiate family trauma
Learn how touch therapy and somatic regulation can help you process implicit memories, regulate physical and emotional trauma, and facilitate attachment repair and somatic awareness.
Are You Considering Consultation Services?
I offer in-service trainings to clinics and groups as well as individual therapists on somatic therapy, dissociation and complex trauma.
I provide a variety of consultations depending on the context, scope and need of the participants. Consultation ranges from supporting individual psychotherapists working with complex cases to consultation groups and training workshops. These consultations may include talks, workshops or multi-session trainings related to mindfulness meditation, workplace organization and somatic therapy.