San Francisco Psychotherapy Associates - Blog
Sharing some thoughts
Our Philosophy
Somatic psychotherapy works directly with embodied experience. It offers support to recover from past hurts, restoring emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing by helping to change physical patterns that obstruct our natural capacity for pleasure, fulfillment and loving relationships.
The body is the primary source of experience and aliveness, and when hurt or frightened, we protect ourselves by organizing defensive patterns. These survival strategies protect us as we grow up but restrict our spontaneous, pleasurable life as adults. Including the body as the central vehicle for the therapeutic process facilitates and deepens growth, creativity, and transformation.
Therapy for individual Adults, Children & Teens
We offer psychotherapy to individuals adults of all ages and lifestyle orientations. We have worked with children as young as three and adults as old as 84. Anxiety, depression and relationship issues are the main reasons people seek therapy.
However, we also offer individual work for a host of other conditions from addictions, eating disorders, personality difficulties, recovery from abuse and trauma to stress management for life transitions, career, and work, as well as self-esteem, personal growth and spirituality.
Working with Couples
The basis for marriage is the honeymoon phase, the thrilling experience of falling in love, bonding, and delicious feelings of uniqueness and specialness. It usually involves magical moments, long intimate talks, and hot sex. In the process of attaching to each other, the couple’s differences, disagreements and potential conflicts are generally suppressed.
Couples therapy offers the possibility of rediscovering and working through unfinished childhood difficulties with abandoning, abusive, and otherwise unsatisfactory parents and siblings. This helps both partners understand themselves and each other more deeply.
Cultivating Romantic Intelligence
We think of romantic intelligence as a series of complex but decipherable emotional and social skills which relatively securely attached people are able to develop from their earliest interactions with their emotionally safe caretakers and families. It involves being able to trust other people – to feel safe being and staying close to them.
Romantic Intelligence also involves exploration of the world, maintaining one’s sense of self with others, and emotionally connected sex. Romantic love also involves expanding into a new and expanded sense of oneself. Integrating a partner into one’s life leads to new and amplified possibilities for both people.