By Sara Vos , Photos by Joni Strickfaden

An Ann Arbor couple, Erin Stohl and Dan DeSena, has found a place within the local somatic psychotherapy community. I sat down with Stohl and DeSena, pre-pandemic, to learn about how they came to somatic psychotherapy, and how their experiences as somatic psychotherapists have impacted their relationship. Stohl and DeSena are both seeing patients via video chat and doing appointments by phone.

Sara Vos: Can you tell me what somatic psychotherapy is?

Erin Stohl: Somatic, or body-centered psychotherapy, is a holistic approach to therapy that focuses on the relationship between the mind and body and sees the body as a deep source of innate wisdom.

Dan DeSena: Often a big part of healing comes from our ability to tap into that inner wisdom that is deeper than just the intellectual, thinking mind. Somatic therapy helps us to do that. Exactly how it is done depends on the type of therapy, but ultimately somatic therapy is about using the body’s innate wisdom to help us learn about ourselves and move toward healing. One way is by helping people learn how to pay attention to, and get information about themselves from, the subconscious — through the automatic, physical impulses and emotions that our body generates [below the level of our conscious awareness].

Sara Vos: What made you want to pursue this path professionally?

Erin Stohl: My interest and intrigue with the body started when I was an athlete, throughout my childhood and during college. Feeling my body in space, and moving energy through my body with physical exertion, was the primary way that I learned to manage stress and the energy that comes with powerful feelings, like anger. The physicality of being an athlete and transforming strong emotional energy through movement and competition was so helpful in a lot of ways.

Then in my early 20s, I shifted to exploring holistic approaches to health and healing. Although I didn’t fully realize it at the time, I believe I was primarily drawn to learning about healing and psychotherapy as a way to heal myself.

My curiosity about energy and the relationship between the body, mind, and emotions, led me to learn reiki and other energy cultivation practices. After becoming a social worker and starting my holistic psychotherapy practice, I learned about Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) from my supervisor, Dr. Carrie Hatcher-Kay. This approach to therapy felt like a great fit because of its holistic nature. It blends traditional dynamic therapy with somatic awareness, mindfulness, and interpersonal neurobiology, which really resonates with how I understand myself and others.

Dan DeSena: I came from a really intellectual family—it was like a family where we had heads floating around on bodies and the body was kind of disconnected, you know? I also had Carrie Hatcher-Kay as a supervisor here in Ann Arbor. I started working with her in 2014, I believe, and through Partners in Healing, an organization formed by Carrie Hatcher-Kay, Sharon Gold-Steinberg, and César Valdez, I received trainings in somatic-based therapies, especially for trauma. After I started working with Carrie I started to realize how disconnected from my own body I was, and I started exploring this for myself. This [exploration] had such a big impact on me that I decided to enroll in Sensorimotor training. I finished the Level 2 training in SP with Erin at the end of 2017. There is a Level 3, too, which is the certification course. So we aren’t actually certified in SP quite yet.

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Sara Vos: What makes somatic psychotherapy different, unique, or cutting edge?

Dan DeSena: Somatic psychotherapy is a complicated thing to try to explain briefly—this is why it takes so long to train! Big picture: it isn’t completely new if you think about the long history of somatic therapies that are embedded in many spiritual and ancient healing traditions. For example, Taoist and Indian traditions nicely blend the physical, mental, and spiritual elements into a holistic system and often involve a mind-body component. And these traditions are aligned with, or have influenced systems of, therapy such as craniosacral therapy, massage therapy, Polarity Therapy, and many others.

These healing traditions use attuned awareness of one’s internal state, and healers traditionally get really good at noticing the subtle changes in a person when they have an emotional block or challenge. Modern somatic therapies draw on the same types of intuitive knowledge. It is unique from certain types of “talk” therapy in the sense that the therapist is not just listening to what the client is saying, but they are also scanning the client’s body visually for subtle changes and indications that the body is communicating, and these signs help lead the therapist and client together naturally toward healing.

Erin Stohl: And I think that Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, while drawing on some of those ancient healing traditions, also has a foundation in some of our traditional psychotherapies like psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy. But it builds in other somatic elements that wouldn’t be as much a part of psychoanalysis. So, the body is not absent from some forms of traditional therapy, but in SP the body is a greater focus in the therapeutic process.

SV: Is there a network of somatic practitioners in the area?

DD: Yes. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, in particular, is growing in Ann Arbor because of the work that Partners in Healing has done to promote the therapy. There have been a number of SP trainings in the Ann Arbor area over the last five years, and there are more and more therapists that are trained to deliver this treatment. For a long time, there have been many, many practitioners here that do a variety of somatically-oriented therapies. In the area of psychotherapy we’ve had somatic therapists since the 1960s and maybe even before. (Editor’s Note: Reichian psychoanalysis was around in the 1950s, and Bioenergetic Analysis and Rolfing were somatic therapies that were around in the 1960s.) The names of the therapies change over time, but the essence of them has remained the same. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is one of a variety of therapy types that can be considered somatically-focused, and it is a modern incarnation with its own strengths, I think.

ES: I agree with that. For me, personally, I have appreciated how many more therapists are offering somatic psychotherapies like Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and another one called Somatic Experiencing. Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) has been around for awhile and just keeps growing. It’s been really nice to have more somatic psychotherapists to refer to, and there is a good-sized community of somatic psychotherapists here. It’s exciting.
SV: What aspects of body-centered psychotherapy are most helpful or interesting to you?

ES: I think it gives people other options for how to regulate emotions. For example, if someone is experiencing some kind of painful emotion, they may have a hard time regulating their emotions with something more mental, like journaling or talking. They might first need to start with a physical, mindfulness-focused practice to shift their emotional energy, and then maybe afterward they could journal or talk things out with someone else.

DD: I like that it gives me another way of teaming with a client to understand what is happening on an unconscious level. This gives us more routes to make change.

SV: So, how about your personal lives? In what ways has your somatic training shifted the ways you approach your relationship?

DD: Haha… well, I met Erin at a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training, for one (laughs). We were not together as a couple during the SP Level 1 training. But then we did Level 2 together. I loved that we could learn together and share this experience. Another way it has affected us is that it gives us another common language to help us navigate our relationship. For example, it helps that I know that Erin gets a lot out of movement to help her feel more regulated. So we have worked out ways to work with this physical energy together. Like sometimes we even wrestle (laughs).

ES: Haha! Yeah, we’ve come up with creative ways to shift tension and emotional charge that comes up between us. It really helps! Also, the more I have learned about the attachment dynamics that come up in relationships, the more compassion and appreciation I have for anyone navigating the terrain of relationships. And I don’t just mean people in romantic relationships or partnerships…any relationship can trigger the most vulnerable, scared, angry, or hurt parts of ourselves, and I think it takes a lot of courage to be willing to navigate all of this within one’s self and within a relationship.

I think the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training, in addition to other information I have learned over time about relationships, has helped me to feel reassured when Dan and I are experiencing some type of conflict. More and more I have felt a sense of trust in navigating conflict in our relationship and in all of my relationships. It is natural and ultimately builds more connection and intimacy.
SV: To me, it’s so powerful to hear the way you process emotions together in a healthy physical way. I haven’t heard of that before, and I really love it! Since we’re getting to the end of the interview, do you have any advice for readers about how to bring somatic wisdom to their everyday interactions at work, school, and home?

DD: I think we live in a thinking-heavy, left-brain dominant society. Some of what I am going to say comes from my own personal experience, too…but I think that we need more right brain in our world to balance out the left-brain… There is nothing wrong with rational thinking—it is really necessary! But without the balance of right-brain feeling, empathy, and intuition we can find ourselves more and more disconnected from others and the world at large. I think that a “micro” way we can add some of this balance is by getting more into our emotions and into our body. So, if I had to give advice I’d recommend practicing something body-oriented like Tai Chi, Yoga, or exercise—something that is not focused on an outcome, but rather on the process of being in one’s body.

ES: I agree with Dan about the benefits of being more connected to the body, feelings, and intuition. The thinking mind can be really helpful, but it can get pretty out of balance if we don’t have ways to integrate the wisdom of the body. My advice would be for people to sense into what feels like a fun way to move. That might look like trying out Yoga or Feldenkrais for one person, but could also be something like dancing in your living room. There are lots of ways to feel more embodied.

SV: I’ve found that I’m writing a lot about embodiment practices right here in the Crazy Wisdom Community Journal. I think it’s the cutting edge of where we are going—integrating the wisdom of the now with the principles and practices of the past—the ones that have withstood the test of time. I really appreciate the work each of you is doing and how much care you obviously bring to it.

My hope is that people who have not had success in traditional talk therapy, where it didn’t meet their needs for whatever reason, will read this article and be open to trying out Sensorimotor Therapy or another type of somatic psychotherapy to get access to a deeper, more physical kind of healing.