Client Experiences

Somatic Experiencing with Allison has been a total game changer. Allison holds safe space to touch on fear and anxiety, then guides you back to a feeling of safety, helping you connect pathways that you may not otherwise have access to on your own. As someone who often intellectualizes feelings, it’s been an important step in my healing journey to be guided into fully feeling. I have been dealing with attachment anxiety throughout my life and have worked with a variety of practitioners. Working with Allison has helped me find a deeper, more embodied healing than I have with traditional talk therapy.

Working with Allison using somatic therapy has been a true gift to heal my anxiety stemming from childhood and trauma from a bike accident. I was introduced to Allison after having a pretty severe bike accident, resulting in facial breaks, a concussion, and a very overactive nervous system.  She helped my body slowly tap into the trauma and fear from the accident in a safe and controlled way.  The process of experiencing small amounts of difficult memories at a time helped me revisit the event by focusing on listening to my body and its sensations, with the goal of relieving pain and calming my nervous system.  We have been able to take a very pivotal event in my life (ie. The bike accident) and allow that to dive far back into my own grief of my father’s passing 14 years ago.  We worked on grounding myself by using “tools” to allow my “up energy” (that’s how I experience my anxiety) to move down and out of my body, which in return gave me more stability emotionally and mentally.  

It feels important to mention we did all of this work together virtually.

I now live with a calmer nervous system and am able to tackle life in a way I have never experienced for over 35 years.  I am less charged and reactive, I am more focused, and I have healthier relationship boundaries.  Being an artist, a lot of my unhealthy childhood relationships had shaped and formed major walls that affected me creatively.  With all the work I have done with Allison for 3 years, she has helped me break down these creative walls and allow myself to fully engage and create in ways I have always dreamed.  I no longer stand in my own way of becoming my best self.

Engaging in Somatic Experiencing work with Allison has dramatically changed the way I move through and experience life. I met Allison in midlife while navigating transitions of menopause, parenting, and loss. I aspired to embrace aging with acceptance and increased strength and flexibility of body and mind. I have experienced that in ways I had not imagined.

While being a long-time swimmer, yoga practitioner, and someone oriented towards personal awareness and growth, I hadn't realized the extent to which embodiment was missing from my equation. Becoming more embodied has taken many forms. My body has become more of a friend and a guide. I am learning how to listen to what it has to tell when my system gets thrown. I have learned that if body awareness is in the driver’s seat, I am able to move through autonomic nervous system states with greater clarity, trust, ease, compassion and resolution.

As someone who experienced an eating disorder in high school, my relationship with my body has been complicated. Though I considered myself mostly recovered from the disordered thinking and behavior, it has been a delightful surprise that somatic experiencing has further liberated me. Increasingly, I see my body as an ally and a healer.

Allison has been a wonderful facilitator and champion of this process. She brings tremendous knowledge and intuition to the work, and transmits that to the individual. Her ability to compassionately witness and encourage engenders trust in the process.

The effects on my life have been numerous. My intuition has gotten exponentially stronger and louder. My body and mind are learning how to settle and rest. Through befriending my body’s wisdom, fear and anxiety have less of a hold on my life. I feel more balanced. As my somatic knowledge and reflexes continue to awaken, I feel a greater sense of agency, and life feels more expansive. I look forward to continuing to learn how I can meet challenges with curiosity and resilience.

I started my treatments with Allison as a Rolfing patient where she is an accomplished professional. But it’s the mind body therapies over many years that have lessened my bipolar challenges. Learning how to leverage the body’s responses to trauma, anxiety, and other mood issues has greatly expanded my ability to manage the diagnosis. While naturally different for each situation, these tools and strategies work effectively for me in both the depression and mania phases of the bipolar disorder. Allison has my full respect, is a pleasure to work with and has supported my life with significant positive impact

Working with Allison has been incredible! I spent 7+ years in talk therapy and I felt that this was an important part of my journey to be able to have a space to be able to express myself and be self reflective. However, I always felt like there was a missing piece to my struggle with anxiety and depression. Being able to work with the body and also with my attachment patterns has changed everything for me.

I have worked with Allison for less than a year and instead of having to cope with my anxiety and depression and stressors in relationships, I have noticed a shift towards my body finding a new reality. Relationships and situations that typically are incredibly stressful for me are starting to become more easeful and even enjoyable; it isn't because I am convincing myself with my mind to be different, but because my body has found more safety and in turn more expansiveness in all parts of my life. I have even seen relationships with family that have been a challenge for my entire life begin to move towards more safety and health. I couldn't recommend Allison enough!

I found Somatic Experiencing with Allison at a time when anxiety had reached an all-time high for me. It was disorienting, I felt panicked much of the time, I was so afraid of the anxiety, and yet, I existed in it all of the time. I had been to therapy at other times in my life, dabbled in all kinds of body work, and even worked as a therapist myself. And yet, working with Somatic Experiencing with Allison felt wildly different than any other approach I had ever taken or been trained in. We started by actually not  focusing on the anxiety. I remember being taken aback the first time Allison redirected me towards the regulation that actually did already exist in my body. I noticed how strong the pull was to keep focusing on the anxiety, and then I noticed something new- that there was actually access to just neutrality. Allison worked really slowly with me to relearn how to feel safe & calm in my body, something that I didn't even realize I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I learned how to address the chronic stress in my life, slow down, and got to explore unprocessed trauma from years before. In all my experience in talk- therapy and training as a therapist myself, SE with Allison was the most effective approach to actually rewiring my nervous system and changing my life