Somatic Experiencing® Therapy with Clara Mackinlay | Long Beach, CA

Each SE session is tailored to your unique needs, but the process is always gentle and collaborative. The first couple of sessions are focused on getting to know each other and creating a sense of safety and trust, while we also discuss your history, current challenges, and/or goals for healing.

Rather than diving directly into past trauma, SE focuses on what’s happening in the present moment. I’ll guide you in noticing physical sensations, emotions, and subtle shifts in your body. Through this awareness, we gently track how your nervous system is holding onto stress and help it release stored tension in a way that feels manageable and supportive.

This process might involve slow movements, breathwork, guided awareness, or small, mindful experiments to help your body complete stress responses that were interrupted in the past. Unlike talk therapy, SE works directly with the body’s natural healing capacity to restore balance, regulation, and a greater sense of ease.

You’ll always be awake, aware, and in control of the process. SE is not about reliving trauma but about learning to feel safe in your body again—one small step at a time.

Healing is a deeply personal process, and the timeline looks different for everyone. Some people notice positive shifts within just a few sessions. If you’re working on a single-incident trauma, 6 to 12 sessions may be enough to help you process what’s been holding you back. Many clients find SE so beneficial that they choose to continue even after resolving their initial concerns.

For others, especially those who have experienced long-term stress, trauma, or deeply ingrained patterns, healing takes more time. When our nervous system has been stuck in survival mode for years, unwinding those patterns can be a gradual process. In these cases, ongoing work over several months—or even years—allows for deeper, lasting transformation. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to healing, but committing to this work can bring about changes that often go beyond what we imagined! (Speaking from experience here … )

Talk therapy focuses on thoughts, emotions, and life experiences by processing them verbally. While this can be powerful, talking alone doesn’t shift the nervous system patterns that keep us feeling stuck. Somatic Experiencing® works from the perspective that trauma, stress, and emotions live in the body just as much as in the mind.

SE slows things down and helps surface what your nervous system is trying to communicate, not just through words but through sensations, tension, breath patterns, posture, and subtle shifts in energy. Rather than just analyzing experiences, SE helps you feel them differently—guiding your body toward releasing stress and completing responses that were interrupted by trauma. Over time, this work can help you feel more alive, resilient, and at ease in your body.

Somatic Experiencing® therapy bends talk therapy and somatic work; we use the intellectual insights that talking provides to go to the body and create deep, physiological change.

While both Somatic Experiencing® (SE) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) are used to process trauma, they work in fundamentally different ways. EMDR focuses on reprocessing traumatic memories by engaging the brain through bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements or tapping. While this can be effective in desensitizing distressing memories, it remains largely a cognitive approach—it still relies on thinking, remembering, and making sense of experiences.

Somatic Experiencing, on the other hand, works directly with the nervous system and the felt sense of the body rather than primarily focusing on memory or thoughts. SE helps you develop witnessing capacity—the ability to observe your sensations, emotions, and nervous system responses with curiosity and non-judgment. This is crucial for trauma renegotiation because it allows you to process stress at a physiological level, rather than just intellectually understanding or reprocessing past events. Without this body-based awareness, trauma can remain stuck in the system, even after cognitive work like EMDR.

Many therapists trained in EMDR eventually turn to SE because they find that EMDR alone leaves gaps—it may reduce distress around memories, but it doesn’t always resolve how trauma lives in the body. SE provides the missing piece, helping people truly move through trauma rather than just reframe it. By working at a slower, more attuned pace, SE allows for deep, lasting transformation, restoring a sense of safety, regulation, and ease in both mind and body.