Approach & Experience

Ellen is a counselor who strives to provide uniquely tailored, compassionate, and quality therapeutic experiences to support your evolving circumstances and needs. With extensive training in somatic and dance / movement therapies, she is a fierce advocate for your innate wisdom to spring forth, refine, and grow into an impeccable resource for your own healing and thriving.

Counseling Philosophy

What is somatic therapy?

Soma is of Greek origin, translating to ‘the body experienced from within.’ Somatic therapy is a form that recognizes the healing inherent in learning about and building awareness around the vast information that is alive within in our bodies.

Teaching a client to notice their sensate experience and the feedback loop it offers can be restorative instead of re-traumatizing. For example, anxiety can often manifest in a variety of ways - an upset or tight stomach, a heavy chest, challenges with taking a full breath, a lump in the throat. With practice, these sensations can be regarded not as inherently negative, but as intelligent cues to slow down and pay attention.

Techniques in somatic therapy support a client to recognize and understand their body’s cues, and to then make conscious choices based upon this deeper intelligence and resourcing. This can include beginning with meditation, visualization, gesture, and then tracking sensation into creative conversation, art-making, singing, movement, play, or whatever may feel resourceful to a client.

What is Dance / Movement Therapy?

Dance / Movement Therapy is defined by the American Dance Therapy Association as: “the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of the individual.”

Through time, dance and movement have always been a vital form of human expression; communities gather around celebratory movement, find solace and spirituality within dance, and deepen into self-awareness through embodied motion.

This transformative modality allows clients to explore the dynamic relationship between their mind and body. Both the movements of client and therapist become a pathway for conscious self-exploration and evolution. Techniques build awareness around the interconnectedness between movement and breath, posture, spatial relationships, gestures, sensations, and more. Non-verbal witnessing and attunement within movement can also provide a bridge toward healing pre-verbal, young childhood ruptures.

Dance / movement therapy can restore confidence, unwind developmental trauma, build healthy neural networks in the brain, lower stress and anxiety, and offer profound insight.