I am a clinical psychologist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.  I practice somatic psychotherapy and offer individual psychotherapy, supervision, and teach clinicians about the approach.

While serving as the Director of Counseling Services at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, I created the Postdoctoral Psychology Training Program in University Counseling: Trauma and Somatic Studies.  One of the first of its kind, this postdoctoral training program focuses on issues of embodiment and intersectionality in psychotherapy with an eye toward the impact of trauma, whether that be acute trauma, developmental trauma, and/or structural trauma, such as racism, transphobia.  Now in its fifth year, this program provides trainees a comprehensive overview of this approach with clinical practice and supervision grounded in a nuanced theoretical framework that draws from multiple traditions.

As the child of academics, I was drawn toward the world of psychoanalysis and embraced the rich theoretical frame it offered only to find that I yearned for something that psychoanalysis, at least in my own experience as a patient, seemed not to touch.  This led me to somatic psychotherapies and I devoted myself to researching different modalities and the ways in which they were, and were not, compatible and integrated with psychodynamic approaches, ultimately publishing my findings in the International Journal for Body Psychotherapy.

My three years training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner affirmed my belief in the importance of engaging the body in clinical work: change is possible and it is embodied.  The practices were powerful and yet I found myself not understanding how or why they worked, prompting me to seek out theory and mentors that helped make sense of it all, bringing me back to psychoanalytic theory, as well as the growing body of research and work in the neurobiology of trauma, attachment, and affect regulation, and finally public health, psychoimmunology, sociology, critical race studies, and disability rights as I grappled with enlarging this model to incorporate embodied experiences that historically have fallen outside the purview of psychology.

While serving as the Director of Counseling Services at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, I worked to bring this framework to clinical practice with health care providers and trainees, expanding it further to consider points of harmony and divergence with the medical model, which tends to locate sickness in individuals, rather than in systems.  COVID has highlighted the widespread healthcare disparities in our system as well as the reality that doctors are themselves patients, grappling with medical illness as well as moral distress/injury, vicarious trauma, anxiety, perfectionism, imposter phenomenon, and burnout.  And yet, perhaps because of their training and understanding of the psychophysiology of stress response, healthcare providers are particularly amenable to somatic psychotherapy, both because it provides science-based, non-pathologizing explanations for their experiences and because it is practical and effective, focused on building resilience in short, deep bursts.  This pacing, akin to High Intensity Interval Training, creates personalized opportunities for rapid restoration that facilitate quick return to demanding, high-stress environments.

I have taught this material to psychoanalytic candidates at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, postdoctoral psychologists at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Montefiore Medical Center, and presented at numerous conferences and workshops on embodiment, trauma, and structural trauma.  Each has provided fruitful dialogue that has continued to deepen my understanding about a psychotherapy that is both embodied and in-context.