Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a somatic (body-based) therapy modality for healing trauma and attachment ruptures. SP uses mindfulness and the body as a guide to developing resources, processing trauma, and occasional experiments to invite in new experiences. Through SP, we can take a break from the “thinking” part of our experience, and into the felt sense, where the body is an integral source of information.

How does it work?

Often, when people experience something traumatic or highly stressful, the body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS) responds automatically in different ways to help us survive/cope/endure the event(s). Sometimes, these responses look like clear fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses; sometimes, they look like ways we avoid thought, emotion, or sensation reminders of what happened. Sometimes, these responses are a one-time-thing, and sometimes, they’re repeated so often that they become ingrained in how our body copes, making it challenging for our body to utilize other resources or be flexible in our ways of coping.

Sometimes, even after the trauma or stressful situation has passed, our bodies continue with these responses in attempts to stay safe. This is what people mean when they say “trauma gets stored in the body”. Much like with IFS, these are not “bad” ways of coping - they felt necessary at the time. SP works to normalize these responses, find more adaptive responses, and is one way to help the body process and release trauma it may have been stuck holding.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy was developed by Dr. Pat Ogden in the 1980’s after observing a common disconnect from clients’ physical experiences in their trauma healing. See below for two podcast episodes with Dr. Pat Ogden discussing SP and processing trauma from the bottom-up, and SP in a cultural context.

More information can be found through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, here: https://sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/about/#what-is-sp

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