get to know me

I’m Shallyn (they/she).

I am a somatic therapist because I believe in our bodies’ innate ability to move towards relationship and move towards healing. And I believe in our bodies’ innate ability to move towards relationship and healing because I feel and have felt that movement in my own body.

I believe healing is an ongoing process, not a place to arrive at “healed.” I believe the specifics and the “how” of healing are unique to each person. And the mysteriousness and unfolding-ness of each person’s healing is one of the things I cherish most about this work.

Here are some roles, experiences, and identities (in addition to “therapist”) that may help you land with me: I am now embodying or have once embodied the roles of client, somatic practitioner, bird noticer, student, legal aid lawyer, child, caretaker to animal companions (who you may see in session), barista, partner, silly doodler, sibling, tarot reader, and friend, among others. I have experienced trauma, burnout, and chronic illness. I live with chronic pain, and I identify as white, queer, and non-binary/genderqueer.

I am many selves, many contradictions. I contain multitudes, and so, I believe, do you. And I'd have it no other way.

In my practice, contradictions, paradoxes, and dissonance are held sacred. Here, there is reverence for all the multitudes of you, every you that you had to be to find yourself here today. Here, survival strategies are treasured, not pathologized. Here, what’s “in the way” is the way.

Together, we get to co-create a therapeutic relationship and container between and beyond the binaries of good/bad, problem/solution. Here, the pace, the timbre, the cadence, the texture, and the movement of your healing are yours to discover and recover, create and re-create.

What will we be doing when we’re doing somatic therapy?

Sessions can look a thousand different ways, but a common thread is paying attention together.

Some things I might invite (always optional) or that might organically happen in session as we get to know each other include: laughing, crying, talking, not talking, feeling, sensing, drawing, meeting/checking in with a part of yourself, body scans, guided visualizations, trying to locate a feeling in your body, noticing or exaggerating movements or gestures, storytelling, lying down, sitting up, remembering, stretching and wiggling, drinking tea, imagining, yawning, sighing, sharing a poem, pulling a tarot card, inviting an aspect or part of nature into the space with us, and probably many other things that we will co-create together.

Approaches & lived experiences I work with

I have an M.A. in Somatic Psychology, and at a foundational level, my approach is to center and honor the lived experience of your body. One of the gifts of a somatic approach, I have found, is that it can be a gentle bridge between how we think we should feel and how we are actually feeling.

More specifically, Internal Family Systems, Relational Somatic Healing, Hakomi, and Liberation Psychologies inform my work.

  • Being with the unique ways that attachment wounding is held in the body is a core element of how I work with both individuals and relationships. I hold patterns of attachment in relationship—what we avoid and what we grasp—as pathways to our most tender (and often youngest) parts of self. I work with attachment wounding by supporting you as we map these patterns, make gentle contact with these parts, and begin to foster gentle relationship between how you aspire to feel in relationship and how you actually feel right now.

  • I have spent the past few years working with caregivers, direct service providers, and folks working within high-urgency professions (i.e. lawyers, nurses, doctors, crisis counselors, etc.) who are experiencing burnout. My approach to burnout is deeply informed by my lived experience as a legal aid attorney serving clients in active crisis. I hold burnout, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue in their systemic context (i.e. capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, cis-heteropatriarchy, etc.) acknowledging burnout as an embodied response to unjust and unsustainable systems, a somatic response to too much, too fast, with too little resources. Working with burnout, then, is a collaborative resourcing and tending practice where we get to explore together what it would look like to include YOU among the people and things that need care and attention.

  • My lived experience as a queer and non-binary person informs how I meet my clients and my perspectives on healing (i.e. healing happens beyond the binary of wounded/healed). I begin with the premise that everyone’s relationship to their gender identity and sexuality is simultaneously personal and contextualized by relationships and systems. In my practice, I hold your relationship to your identity as sacred and invite us to both celebrate the joy of queerness and navigate together what safety, protection, care, or tending might be needed to feel into that joy, into yourself and your body, more fully.

  • My own lived experience with chronic pain informs how I meet my clients who are experiencing chronic pain and illness. I do not hold somatic therapy as a cure-all for chronic illness or pain, and I believe everyone’s relationship to their pain and illness is unique. I see somatic therapy as our guide to understanding how your specific body needs to receive care when your specific body is experiencing illness and pain. I see somatic therapy as a way for us to learn to listen to your body even when it’s hurting, even when it’s tired—especially when it’s hurting, especially when it’s tired.