Sarah Simpson

You show up. You work hard. You carry the mental load. You solve problems. You hold everything together.

Somewhere along the way, though, you may have lost touch with yourself.

Maybe you feel overwhelmed and cannot fully explain why. Maybe your body stays tense, alert, numb, or exhausted even when nothing is obviously wrong. Maybe you keep finding yourself in the same relationship patterns despite understanding them intellectually. Maybe closeness feels deeply important to you, yet vulnerability, conflict, or intimacy activates something inside you that feels difficult to control.

You may know the story of what happened.

Your body may still be living inside it.

Somatic Therapy for Trauma, Attachment, and Relationships

My work is primarily somatic, which means we pay attention not only to what you think and feel, but also to what is happening within your nervous system and body.

Trauma is not defined only by the event itself. It can also be found in what your body had to do to survive it.

You may have learned to brace, disconnect, stay quiet, become hyper-independent, overfunction, anticipate everyone else’s needs, avoid conflict, or remain constantly prepared for something to go wrong. These responses are not weaknesses or personal failures. They are intelligent protective adaptations developed by a nervous system trying to keep you safe.

Somatic therapy creates space to understand those adaptations without judgment while helping your body gradually experience something different.

Rather than asking you to repeatedly retell painful experiences, we work gently with what is happening in the present moment. This may include noticing sensations, impulses, emotions, images, patterns of tension, shifts in breathing, movement, numbness, or moments of emerging safety.

Talk therapy remains part of our work, but it is not the only doorway into healing.

Our work may include:

Recognizing how your nervous system responds to stress, conflict, closeness, uncertainty, and vulnerability.

Gently working with trauma responses such as fight, flight, freeze, shutdown, collapse, appeasement, or chronic overfunctioning.

Exploring how early attachment experiences continue to shape your adult relationships.

Noticing what your body communicates through tension, numbness, anxiety, restlessness, pain, disconnection, or overwhelm.

Increasing your capacity to remain present with emotion without becoming flooded or shutting down.

Understanding the protective parts of you that developed for good reasons and helping them feel less alone.

Completing survival responses that may still feel unfinished within the body.

Strengthening boundaries, self-trust, emotional regulation, and the ability to recognize your own needs.

Working with concerns related to intimacy, desire, sexuality, betrayal, emotional disconnection, and relational trauma.

Creating new experiences of safety, connection, choice, and secure attachment.

I draw primarily from Somatic Experiencing®, attachment-based psychotherapy, parts-informed work, trauma-informed therapy, and somatic sex therapy. Traditional talk therapy and cognitive approaches may be included when helpful, but the center of our work remains the nervous system, the body, and your lived experience in the present moment.

Therapy is collaborative, paced carefully, and tailored to your goals. You remain in control of the process. You will not be pushed to disclose, revisit, or move through anything before your system is ready.