Somatic Psychologist and Therapist in Fremantle
Somatic therapy in Fremantle with a Clinical Psychologist
Body-aware therapy that helps with trauma, anxiety, depression and long-standing emotional patterns.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy is a form of psychotherapy that pays attention not only to thoughts and emotions, but also to the experience of the body and nervous system.
Many emotional patterns are not held only in our thinking. They are also expressed through physical sensations, emotional responses, and automatic patterns in the nervous system. Somatic therapy works with these experiences directly, helping people develop awareness of how their mind and body respond to stress, threat, and connection.
By bringing attention to present-moment experience — including physical sensations, emotions, and impulses — somatic therapy can help make unconscious patterns more visible and easier to understand.
At A Good Space Clinical Psychology in Fremantle, Somatic Therapy is integrated with psychological understanding, mindfulness, and attachment-informed therapy.
Why Somatic Therapy Can Help
Many difficulties that bring people to therapy involve patterns that developed earlier in life as ways of coping or adapting to challenging environments and relationships. While they helped us cope at the time, they may now be limiting or exhausting.
These patterns can become deeply embedded in the nervous system. As a result, people may understand their difficulties intellectually but still find themselves reacting in ways that feel automatic or difficult to change.
Somatic therapy helps address this by working not only with insight, but also with the emotional and physiological patterns that shape how we respond to stress, relationships, and everyday experiences.
Through increased awareness of bodily experience and emotional responses, therapy can help people gradually develop greater regulation, flexibility, and choice in how they respond to situations.
Somatic Therapy for Long-Standing Difficulties
Somatic therapy can be particularly helpful for long-standing or recurring problems that have not shifted through insight or cognitive approaches alone.
Many people find that they understand their patterns very well but still feel caught in them. This can happen because emotional responses and defensive patterns are often held within the nervous system and body, not only in conscious thought.
Working with these deeper patterns can support change that feels more integrated and lasting.
Difficulties Somatic Therapy Can Help With
Somatic therapy may be helpful for adults experiencing:
• Anxiety and chronic stress
• Depression or persistent low mood
• Trauma and PTSD symptoms
• Emotional overwhelm
• Difficulties regulating emotions such as anger, shame, or fear
• Relationship difficulties and attachment patterns
• Long-standing patterns affecting self-worth
• Persistent tension, fatigue, or stress-related physical symptoms
These experiences often reflect patterns that developed earlier in life and continue to shape how we experience ourselves and others.
Somatic Therapy in Fremantle
As a Clinical Psychologist in Fremantle, I integrate somatic therapy with psychological insight.
Somatic therapy is available for adults in Fremantle and surrounding areas, with Telehealth appointments also available
What counts as progress in Somatic Therapy for Trauma ?
It can be hard to know what counts as progress in therapy for trauma. Here are 4 things I am looking for as a Somatic Trauma Therapist.
Growing Awareness
Emotions
Progress in trauma therapy does not mean difficult emotions disappear. It means you can stay connected to your body when you experience unpleasant emotions without being completely overwhelmed. You can also name emotions when sharing something difficult and painful without intellectualising the story.
It also means that you can feel and tolerate both joy AND pain. A common strategy in trauma survival is to numb emotions – the hard ones and the pleasant ones. Being able to connect to happiness, laughter and playfulness is a good sign of progress in trauma recovery.
One of the first signs of progress in Somatic Therapy is a growing awareness of different nervous system states - What sends you into each one, how often, and how intense each state is. You know how to care for each state you aren’t just applying blanket coping strategies. You have an individualised plan to give your system the support it needs.
You Matter.
It’s common in trauma therapy to have learned, often from early experiences, to minimise your own needs or feelings. Progress in therapy includes an important shift : the growing sense that your needs and preferences matter. Through somatic trauma therapy, you will begin to listen to signals from the body and respond with greater care and respect for yourself. Over time this can support healthier boundaries, relationships and a deeper sense of self worth. You can receive compliments, care, and support without feeling totally weird about it.
Trauma affects your brain’s ability to delineate time. That’s why a flood of sensations, feelings, beliefs and urges from your past can come rushing back when you are triggered.
A sign of progress in somatic therapy is the growing ability to notice when you are being “time warped” by pain into thinking and acting as if the past is the present reality. You can more easily notice and act from the understanding that, “that was then and this is now”.
That was then, this is NOW
Where to find Somatic Therapy in Fremantle.
A Good Space Clinical Psychology is located in the heart of Fremantle in Princess Chambers, 27 Market Street Fremantle. It is a 2 minute walk from Fremantle Train Station.
You will find Princess Chambers next door to Kakulas Sister Grocer.
Address:
Suite 10, Princess Chambers, 27 Market Street, Fremantle, 6160.