1. Focus of Awareness
Traditional Therapy
Primarily focuses on cognitive and verbal processing — exploring thoughts, behaviors, and feelings through conversation.Hakomi Somatic Therapy
Centers on mindfulness and body awareness — using present-moment experience, sensations, and nonverbal cues to access unconscious material.
Traditional therapy uses tools like cognitive behavioral therapy, ie: how to change your thoughts. It also uses tools like talk about what's not working, and we'll talk about how to “fix it”. It works great for some people, and more accurately I'd say works partially for most. It does sometimes help create relief and freedom to change your thoughts. When it does, great, that is an incredibly powerful practice.
Often times with deeper level questions, challenges, behaviors we want to change, etc, our thoughts are a byproduct of our lived experience, and of core beliefs that were formed a long time ago. Often times we know what we want to change, and we even try really our hard, but thinking our way there isn't working. We are ignoring the other powerful parts of our experience: our body, our nervous system state and our emotions.
2. Role of the Body
Traditional Therapy
May reference bodily symptoms but doesn’t usually work directly with the body.Hakomi
Actively works through the body — observing posture, breath, movement, and physical tension as entry points to deeper emotional and psychological patterns.
What we know from somatic study and what I can also say from direct experience is that communication with our bodies is essential for feeling at home in our bodies, listening to our intuition, and honoring this vessel that we live our whole lives in. Our bodies are not just for sports, pleasure seeking, and procreating. Though these can be beautiful ways we engage with our body. Rather our bodies are intelligence organisms that are sensing our environment, our emotions, our safety at all times. They have been doing this since we were in utero. In somatic work we actively engage listening to our bodies, our heart, as well as creating space to hear thoughts.
If you’re curious to learn more about this wisdom and trauma our bodies hold, you can check out this seminal work in the field of somatics by Dr. Bessel Vanderkolk called “The Body Keeps the Score”
3. Method of Exploration
Traditional Therapy
Involves talking through problems, analyzing behavior, and developing insight through logic and reflection.Hakomi
Uses mindfulness “experiments” to gently explore inner beliefs and early experiences — inviting new awareness to arise naturally from within the body-mind system.
- In sessions with me, we work in mindfulness. Rather that just coming in and talking, we take time to generate awareness of ourselves in the present moment. Coming into mindfulness, and staying in mindfulness allows us to generate a different kind of awareness, separating ourselves from the "issue". We are not that the story or challenge, though it is part of our experience.
4. View of the Client
Traditional Therapy
Often sees the therapist as an expert who diagnoses and treats the client.Hakomi
Emphasizes collaboration and sees the client as inherently wise and whole. The therapist is a guide who supports the client’s self-discovery.
5. experiential healing
Traditional Therapy
Aims to change thoughts and behaviors through conscious insight.Hakomi
Facilitates healing by creating new experiences in the nervous system — helping the client feel safety, choice, and connection at a deep, embodied level.
We're tracking the body and nervous system. As the practitioner, I am tracking keeping our connection within a "window of tolerance" - a nervous system state that feels engaged and sensing your body and emotions, and tracking the edges of territory that feel like overwhelm or disengaged. We honor this place of creating safety and connection at a deep embodied level as the place that healing happens.
6. Outcomes
Traditional Therapy
Tends to be goal oriented and fixing problems.Hakomi
To feel a greater sense of connection and safety in your body.
To build your capacity to be with both pleasure and discomfort.
To develop a deeper connection with language of your body, emotions and inner knowing. To be able to distinguish between body signals that are old protective patterns and new impulses that want to emerge.
To illuminate core beliefs that are inhibiting you having what you want, so that you can see them clearly, heal where those beliefs originally started, and give space to your longing for something new.
In essence, Hakomi somatic therapy brings the body into the healing process, allowing change to emerge not just from the mind, but from the whole self — body, emotions, and nervous system included.
