Note: The testimonials listed here are applicable only to Samantha Terriss's Somatic Healing practice, not to be construed with Samantha Terriss, MFT.
Sessions align with the inherent wisdom of a person’s being. In a safe and supportive environment, sessions will build one’s emotional body memory of trust, inherent capacity for self awareness and contact, psycho-neurological organization, and authentic relational intimacy. Working with awareness, presence, touch, movement and dialogue, a session will give you ways to integrate your body, energy and emotions.
Samantha draws from the following modalities in her Body Centered Counseling Practice as an MFT:
· Somatic Listening / Trauma Resolution
· Psycho-Spiritual Integration
· Pre and Peri-natal Repatterning
The following services are for Samantha's Somatic Healing Practice:
· Facilitated Touch and Movement
Emotional and Physical Healing
Flexible and Clear Boundaries
Capacity to Ground and Center Oneself
Vitality and Health
Enhanced Intimacy with Self and Others
Psycho-Spiritual Integration
Self-Awareness and Somatic Presence
Healing from PTSD, Surgeries, Accidents and Abuse
Anxiety and Stress, Grief and Loss
Authentic Communication
Relationship Support
Somatic counseling uses the mind/body connection as a way to access one’s inner experiences and offer transformational healing.
Samantha integrates Somatic Experiencing®, the work of Dr. Peter Levine, a powerful modality for healing trauma, into her healing sessions. It is a process of tracking the body for sensations, feelings and impulses that have been blocked during an overwhelming experience so that they can be healed.
For example, it is common for people after having an overwhelming experience, such as car accidents, assaults, falls, surgeries, life changes, and/or illnesses, to develop symptoms that are not easily remedied by traditional therapies. It is not the events themselves that have caused the symptoms; rather, it is the responses to these events that have not been completed. Our bodies ready themselves for fight or flight when overwhelmed. Sometimes these responses get thwarted, and the energy gathered to respond, gets frozen in our body. Part of us stays in a hyper-aroused, dissociated and frozen state due to this incomplete response. This frozen energy causes symptoms that occur individually or couple together.
The key to resolving trauma and relieving symptoms is discharging the excess energy in our bodies. The rate that this energy leaves is crucial to effectively regulating the nervous system. It is our body’s ability to regulate that allows us the flexibility to respond to and recover from life’s experiences.
Discharging the excess energy happens by working with our sensations. By staying with our sensations and impulses, we activate our survival energies, and renegotiate rather than relive the events. Working with survival energies is so potent that the transformation that occurs goes beyond the reduction of symptoms. Untapped resources and a deeper sense of self are discovered, empowering and mobilizing individuals in their lives.
Often times shock trauma is a recapitulation of early developmental woundings that are waiting to be healed. It is essential to meet these experiences with heart resonance and embodied presence so the person can feel and be felt,able to move through the experience integrating emotions, body and energy. In this way, not only symptoms can be reduced or resolved, but a deeper healing of the emotional and essential aspects of the human being can occur.
Samantha integrates somatic experiencing with both presencing work and hands-on unwinding support. Her specialties are working with trauma and early attachment issues as well as with psycho-spiritual growth processes.
Samantha works with people who are experiencing spiritual emergence and want support and facilitation. She integrates her personal psycho-spiritual practice and orientation with the DiamondLogos work with her knowledge of how trauma affects the emotional and physical body. Using trauma resolution skills, presencing, and heart to heart contact, Samantha facilitates growth in a grounded and balanced way. Subtle tracking of the emotional, energetic and physical body encourages embodied integration and healing. Oftentimes, ‘spiritual’ openings collide with trauma patterns held in our emotional bodies. Sometimes these openings feel overwhelming and unmanageable because of the enormous energy of the earlier experience that has been touched by the expansive experience. Tolerating the feelings and sensations that are stored in these held experiences in a supportive environment, allows the contact to be made with these wounded places that can then begin to heal. Learning to regulate our inner journey work makes life an experience wanting to be lived rather than one to survive. It is where we are available to experiencing grace and a personal meaning to existence.
Pre and Peri-natal Repatterning
Many of our deepest life issues connect to our early patterning during our womb, birth and early stages of development. Using traditional methods of talk therapy does not address these non verbal somatically patterned imprints of our early memories. Somatic exploration offers profound and effective resolution of these early experiences leading to deep healing in our present relationship with ourselves and others. Our neurological and emotional development are interwoven. As early patterning is so intertwined with touch, both facilitated touch and cranial sacral therapy is often used as a way to gently access and unwind stored memory.
Cranial sacral work is a gentle approach to working with the body. Its primary focus is working with the tide or rhythm of the cerebral spinal fluid that flows through the spine. Working with the tide is essential in regulating the nervous system and clearing trauma from the body. This work touches all the systems of the body, including joints, muscles, connective tissue, organs, and bones. Heart resonance, and energy awareness is used with cranial-sacral techniques to facilitate the gentle shifting of physical and emotional patterns. Deep states of presence often arise that offer rest, expansiveness and inner resources. Mindful and safe touch deepens a person’s capacity for self awareness and embodiment.
Facilitated Touch and Movement
Touch, heart presence and movement are our earliest ways of learning. Supportive touch facilitates exploring emotions and movements that want to be felt, expressed, and completed. Safe touch is negotiated in relationship. Boundaries and impulses can now be explored, experienced and respected in a safe and supportive holding environment. This will free up our internal truths and energies to be known and shared in our present relationships and lives. Habitual patterns of stress and tension are often organized by our survival mechanism, both of our physical instincts and our emotional defenses. Touch and awareness helps us to feel our way through our patterns, and offers new ways of perception and movement encouraging more freedom in our psycho-structural reality. Intuitively, Samantha blends movement with facilitated touch inspiring energetic flow and expanded awareness.
Using embodied role play as an avenue for discovering how we live in dynamic relationship with ourselves and others. The shapes, postures and habitual gestures of our family of origin influence our own options for relatedness. Seeing these patterns directly through personal embodiment explorations allows new creative choices to emerge which enhance healthier intimacy with ourselves and others. This is a powerful, playful, and deeply enriching process where we regain our inherent knowing of who we are and sense our own empowerment as differentiated adults. Using the skills of embodied role play, couples begin to find deeper ways of understanding and relating to each other.
As a Holitic health practitioner, trained in basic nutrition, Healing touch and energy awareness, samantha offers supportive healing sessions and suggestions for wellness and balanced health. She refers to a wide variety of health practitioners for specific and/or serious health concerns. Emotional body distress is often inter-related with our lifestyle choices and habits. Encouraging healthy habits supports emotional-body healing success. similiarly, emotional body wounding has influenced the ways we take care of ourselves. Therefore, it is most useful to work with the emotional body issues that are influencing our habitual patterns.
Pregnancy Birth and Post-Partum Support:
Samantha specializes in supporting women during their pregnancy, birth and post partum time, to fully embody their experience, clear out any old memories and patterns that no longer serve them, ground and balance, and address attachment, bonding and lifestyle changes.
Assistance is given to mothers to bring into awareness their feelings, both of fear and excitement, about birth and mothering. Integrating one’s feelings through the body, allows for the natural ease and joy of pregnancy and labor.
The baby’s health is connected with the mother’s. Supporting the mother, in staying balanced, helps establish healthy bonding, and a positive birth and postpartum experience.
She assists couples using visualizations and hands on support to bring ease to the birth process itself, whether it be a home or hospital birth, vaginal or cesarian delivery.
Samantha’s sessions with the mothers and infants after the birth help facilitate clearing of any birth trauma, and support healthy attachment and bonding. After the great task of birthing and being born, mother and child receive a gentle cranial-sacral session together to resolve and heal birth trauma imprints. This enhances their shared birth experience to be remembered in all its beauty and perfection.
Pre and Perinatal Issues Affecting Mother, Infant and Family
Postpartum depression
Body Image
Life style changes
Stress/anxiety
Body pains
Sleep disturbances
Bonding and attachment issues
Developmental delays
‘Fussy’ baby / Colic
Birth stress
Chemical and surgical shock
Grief and Loss
Family dynamics
