Healing beyond words. Where the body remembers.
When you have experienced trauma, the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Racing heart. A slumped posture. The freezing-out feeling that talk therapy alone cannot quite reach. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a body-oriented approach designed to bridge that gap.
Book a free 15-min consult with MelissaWhen the body holds what the words can't reach.
You may have done significant work in talk therapy and still feel stuck. The breath that won't fully drop into your belly. The shoulders that won't unclench. The collapse that pulls you out of your own life. That stuckness is not a failure of your work. It is your body holding what your mind has not yet been able to release.
At Turn the Mind, we offer specialized Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with Melissa Green-Jackson, LPC, who is Level 1 Certified in SP. Melissa works with clients in person in Glen Rock and virtually across NJ and NY to help them process trauma where it lives, in the nervous system.
"Mindful awareness of the body is where the healing begins."
A bottom-up approach that begins in the body.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, is a bottom-up therapy. Where traditional top-down therapies focus on changing thoughts to influence feelings, SP begins with the body's physical experience and lets the mind catch up.
Trauma often leaves us with what Ogden calls procedural memories: the physical habits of survival. Holding your breath. Tensing your shoulders. Going small. Going still. These were once protections. Today they may feel like a body that won't relax even when nothing is wrong.
SP is particularly helpful for clients who:
- Feel stuck in their healing journey despite years of talk therapy
- Find that talking about the past is too overwhelming
- Or, conversely, feel unchanged by talking about it at all
- Live with hypervigilance, emotional numbness, or intrusive physical sensations
- Want to move from understanding the trauma to actually resolving it
Three ways SP works to reset the nervous system.
SP is intentional and gentle. Melissa moves at the pace your body is ready for. The work tends to organize around three core gains.
Develop somatic resources
Find physical anchors that help you feel safe in the present moment, so you have steady ground to return to when activation rises.
Regulate the nervous system
Learn to stay within your window of tolerance, rather than swinging between panic and shutdown. Your body learns it is safe to settle.
Complete survival responses
Safely allow your body to finish the fight, flight, or freeze responses that were interrupted during the traumatic event, so the energy can finally release.
Stuckness in healing is rarely about thinking harder. It is about where the body has not yet been listened to.
Melissa is dually licensed in New Jersey and New York and is specifically trained in the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute's Level 1: Affect Dysregulation, Survival Defenses, and Traumatic Memory.
Her work is for clients who feel stuck in their healing journey. By bringing SP into the room, she helps you move from talking about your trauma to actually resolving the physical symptoms of PTSD: the hypervigilance, the emotional numbness, the intrusive sensations that show up without warning. The goal is not to live alongside those symptoms forever. The goal is to give them somewhere to go.
You don't have to live in a body that feels like a battlefield.
Schedule a free 15-minute consult with Melissa. Whether you meet in person at our Glen Rock office or virtually across NJ and NY, you can begin to reclaim your sense of physical and emotional safety.