get to know me
Hi, I’m Shallyn!
I am a therapist because I love complexity and nuance.
I work somatically because I deeply trust our bodies’ innate ability to move towards healing.
I work relationally because I believe we heal in and through connection.
I came to somatic therapy first as a client—with years of talk therapy, two degrees, and a career as a lawyer under my belt. I knew I needed somatic therapy because I learned—from years of trying—that I could not just think or study or work my way into feeling better.
I move through the world, now, with a basic trust that “what’s in the way is the way,” and that we’re not meant to walk the way alone.
Professional Experience
I have a master’s degree in Somatic Psychology, and I have additional, more specialized training in a trauma treatment/nervous system support modality called Relational Somatic Healing. I have over 10 years of experience providing support to people impacted by trauma—first, in a legal aid context, and now as a somatic therapist.
If it feels grounding to know more about my educational background and history, I got my B.A. at UC Berkeley, my J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center, and my M.A. at The California Institute of Integral Studies.
Working with Me
I believe the best therapy starts with meeting you where you are, as you are. Support feels best when it’s attuned, responsive, and not rushed. I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all therapeutic interventions, and I don’t hide the ball about what I’m offering for us to try and why.
My priorities as a therapist are building authentic connection with my clients and supporting their embodied choicefulness in session—the rest of the healing process grows from there.
I work responsively and relationally with what’s needed here and now. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re sitting or standing, talking or not talking, indoors or outdoors—healing is not a performance of therapy norms and tropes; what matters is that your body is choosing, is guiding us towards what it needs and that we follow that together.
Lived Experience
I am a fellow human with my own lived experiences. I share some of them here to invite in more choice for people considering working with me.
Deep healing can happen working therapeutically with someone who shares or does not share certain lived experiences and identities, but I believe it’s important for that healing experience to be a “choose your own adventure” situation.
I am queer, and non-binary; I’m a body living with the wild and humbling ebbs and flows of chronic illness and pain; and I’m white with mostly Scottish, German, and English ancestry.
I enjoy working with people who share these identities and people who do not share any of these identities at all, and I believe that sameness and difference are both beautifully rich territories to explore in relationship.
What brings me joy in addition to somatic therapy?
Birds, plants, dappled light, my dog, Buster, Mary Oliver poems, chamomile tea, arts & crafts, and good company.
My dog, Buster, at one of our favorite bird-watching spots.
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I begin with the premise that everyone’s relationship to their identities are simultaneously personal and contextualized by relationships and systems. In my practice, I hold your relationship to your identities as sacred and invite us to both celebrate the joys of those identities and navigate together what safety, protection, care, or tending might be needed to feel into that joy, into yourself and your body, more fully.
