Somatic Therapies for Trauma Recovery
The Feldenkrais Method
Moshe Feldenkrais was one of the early pioneers and explorers of somatic intelligence and healing. The first group of people he worked with early on in the development of his method were Holocaust survivors. He found that his work restored not only a felt sense of biological fitness and wellness, but a sense of dignity.
In fact, Feldenkrais wrote a critique of Freud in which he detailed his perspective and experience that recovery from anxiety and other traumatic and "mental" challenges could be facilitated more quickly and surely through his somatic work than through pyschoanalysis.
Kevin offers Feldenkrais sessions to support trauma recovery.
In addition to other benefits, Feldenkrais sessions tend to have a profound calming and regulating effect on the nervous system and to restore a physically and emotionally felt-sense of empowerment.
Transforming Touch®
Kevin has also been trained and certified in "Transforming the Experience-Based Brain", also known as "Transforming Touch," or "Co-regulating Touch."
Transforming Touch® (also known as Transforming the Experienced-Based Brain™ or TEB®) is a trauma-informed, somatic healing approach developed by Dr. Stephen J. Terrell, PsyD, SEP to support people — especially those with developmental and attachment trauma — in regulating their nervous systems and reshaping early non-verbal patterns that talk therapy alone often doesn’t reach.
Core Idea
Instead of focusing primarily on words or cognitive insight, Transforming Touch® works with the body and nervous system — the parts of us where trauma is stored and enacted — through structured, intentional, and gentle physical touch (while the client remains fully clothed) and attuned presence. It’s designed to co-regulate and help the nervous system learn safety and connection at a pre-verbal level.
What It’s Used For
Transforming Touch® is most often used to help with systems stuck in:
* Developmental trauma (early life neglect, misattunement, medical trauma, adoption stress)
* Attachment disruptions
* Chronic anxiety, shutdown states, or nervous system dysregulation
* Difficulty feeling grounded or present in the body
* Stress and overwhelm that doesn’t shift with talk therapy alone
Clients may notice improvements in regulation, embodiment, relationship capacity, and emotional resilience.
How It Works
* Gentle, intentional touch is applied in supportive areas (e.g., shoulders, sacrum, head) to invite regulation and safety.
* Presence and attunement from the practitioner help repair relational ruptures and build a secure interpersonal experience that many with early trauma have never had.
* Sessions usually happen on a massage table while fully clothed and always with informed consent.
Why Touch?
In early life, before language, touch is the first language of safety and connection. Because developmental trauma occurs before words, Transforming Touch® uses somatic experience to communicate directly with the nervous system, offering a new template for safety, co-regulation, and embodied presence.
Not Massage
While there is physical contact, Transforming Touch® is not massage therapy; it’s a somatic therapeutic modality grounded in attachment theory, neurophysiology, and trauma research, and is delivered within ethical, trauma-informed boundaries.
Who is trained in Transforming Touch®?
Practitioners are typically licensed or certified helping professionals, such as:
* Psychotherapists (LPC, LMFT, LCSW, Psychologists)
* Somatic practitioners
* Bodyworkers with advanced trauma training
* Some medical or allied-health professionals
More about Transforming Touch (TT):
Transforming Touch (TT) is a Nervous System Regulation Based Modality.
The modality is based on the theory that when we experience ruptures in our feelings of safety and trust during our development years, they continue to disrupt our lives at any age. This disruption can be seen as behavioral challenges, psychological challenges, spiritual challenges, and physical challenges.
Transforming Touch® can be particularly helpful for working with the effects of early trauma ... pre-birth trauma, birth trauma, and trauma that happened in childhood when the nervous system and brain were developing (also called "developmental trauma").
Untreated early trauma, and associated nervous system and behavior adaptations, can lead to not only to chronic health problems but to problematic behavior compensations, addiction, compulsions. Historically viewed by the culture asa character weakness or defect, these compensations are natural normal and they are treatable.
Transforming Touch® Practitioners create a safe place for people to experience healing through a lens of safety, presence, and nervous system regulation. Your body already knows how to heal itself if it is finds the support to experience more safety and less triggering of survival energy.
Transforming Touch® uses touch to work directly with areas of the body affected by nervous system dysregulation (kidney/adrenals, brain stem, limbic system). Transforming Touch can be particularly helpful for anxiety, panic attacks, incontinence, gut disturbance, sleep disturbance, and many other kinds of nervous system dysregulation arising from early trauma.
Tranforming Touch® builds new neural connections of safety and nervous system regulation, helping restore the healthy reflexes and early development that may have been interrupted or underdeveloped by trauma.
Transforming Touch® Practitioners see each person as whole and complete. TT Practitioners do not rely on pathology to label people. Each body and brain is capable of creating new neural pathways in your brain that allow for less stress/anxiety and more ability to learn, relate, and heal.
Much of this work has been pioneered by Dr. Terrell and Dr. Kathy Kain, co-authors of Nurturing Resilience. Synthesizing across disciplines—Attachment, Polyvagal, Neuroscience, Child Development Theory, Trauma, and Somatics—this book provides a new lens through which to understand safety and regulation. It includes the survey used in the groundbreaking ACE Study, which discovered a clear connection between early childhood trauma and chronic health problems. For therapists working with both adults, children, and anyone dealing with symptoms that typically arise from early childhood trauma—anxiety, behavioral issues, depression, metabolic disorders, migraine, sleep problems, and more—this book offers hope for a happier, trauma-free life.
Kevin trained with Dr. Stephen Terrell and is certified as a Transforming Touch therapist.
To listen to an interview with Dr. Terrell about Tranforming Touch, go here!
For more information about Dr. Terrell and Transforming Touch go here.
Transforming Touch sessions are available on a sliding scale of $100-150.
Website offer:
Your first Transforming Touch session is available for $75.
To schedule contact Kevin: kevincassity@yahoo.com, or (907) 350-1715.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
Recent neuroscience studies show that anxiety and depression can become a learned default mode in the brain, a habitual response to life, particularly when there has been signficant trauma experienced in childhood, a time when the brain is developing.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy for anxiety and depression is based on the most recent neuroscience understandings of the brain and engages both neuroscience and relevant therapeutic modalities to help the brain unlearn anxiety and depression as a brain habit.
It is relatively rare that anxiety and depression has a physical origin.
Usually anxiety and depression is neuroplastic in origin, meaning that it is something that is learned and something that can be unlearned. This is also true of physical pain that is neuroplastic in origin.
Kevin has been trained in Pain Reprocessing Therapy via a professional course offered by its developer, Dr. Howard Schubiner, director of the Mind Body Medicine Center at Providence Hospital in Southfield, Michigan and author of over 100 scientific articles.
Kevin offers PRT-based therapeutic coaching for anxiety, depression, and other emotional and physical effects of trauma.
When reading the information on PRT for chronic pain on this website substitute "anxiety" or "depression" for the word "pain."
For more information on PRT, go here.
Our heritage is not necessarily our destiny.