Getting Started with Somatic Therapy for Attachment Trauma
- Fundamental principles of Somatic Therapy
- Attachment theory simplified
- Assess your own attachment style to improve the therapeutic alliance
- Create a safe first impression
- Risks, limitations and ethical issues
Boundaries: The Often-Overlooked Foundation of Effective Therapy
- The 4 key boundaries to know for every session
- Using Mirror Neurons to understand the client's experience
- Interoceptive awareness to distinguish the client's emotions from therapist's
- Reframing “difficult” clients
- How your own boundaries impact your work with clients
Assessment & Treatment Planning for Somatic Shame, Implicit & Explicit Memories
- Brain regions and their relationship to attachment styles
- Notice subtle cues in body language, eye movements and posture
- Map your client’s underlying attachment wiring
- Provide co-regulation for corrective emotional experiences
- How developmental trauma shapes somatic shame identities
- Create targeted treatment plans for unique attachment patterns
- Risks, limitations and ethical issues
Anxious Attachment Style: Treating Relational Anxiety
- Focus on deeply rooted beliefs like, “I’ll never get enough love”
- Help clients transition from anxious toward secure attachment
- Target memory rumination that reinforce anxious patterns
- Redirect clients’ attention toward positive experiences
- Help clients create internal and external boundaries
- Simple exercises to repair the core attachment wound
Avoidant Attachment Style: Treating Relational Avoidance
- Focus on beliefs such as: "Relationships aren't enjoyable", "I am all I need.”
- Support clients to notice and experience goodness in relationships
- Target implicit/explicit memories that reinforce disconnection & withdrawal
- Effective boundaries for avoidantly attached clients
- Provide simple somatic exercises to repair the avoidant wound
Disorganized Attachment Style: Treating Terror and Creating Safety
- Focus on beliefs, such as: “I need you but relationships are dangerous.”
- Enhance relational safety with distance, pacing and more
- Target implicit and explicit memories that reinforce dissociation
- Teach effective boundaries for disorganized attached clients
- Simple somatic exercises to treat terror responses
Self-of-the-Therapist Work: Relational Impact and Self-awareness
- How somatic and attachment dynamics influence session effectiveness
- What to do when you need to work on your own attachment style
- Avoid getting “pulled in” to clients’ attachment wounds
- Identify your own implicit memories related to:
- emotional intimacy
- gender dynamics
- power relations
- How the therapists’ stress and anxiety affect each session
- “Grounded, present self” as a secure attachment to accelerate healing
- Somatic transference and countertransference on alliance building


