Rosalind Arden Somatic Therapy

02/10/2025

30/09/2025

Two things -

One, there is a lot of grief in this process. If this is hard to read, I understand. To heal will mean allowing yourself to feel sad & angry about the many times you weren’t met where you needed to be met.

Two, other people can help, but they can't do the deep inner work for you.

Our caregiver’s job is to show us how to be in the world. They’re supposed to keep us safe and teach us that we’re inherently worthy & valuable just as we are, how to regulate ourselves, how to comfort ourselves, how to advocate for ourselves, how to relate to others.

They’re supposed to be teaching us throughout childhood how to meet our most important human needs, and they create the first and biggest blueprint for our beliefs about who we are in the world.
They're teaching us how to relate to & think about ourselves.

And if they don’t meet those needs or create a crappy blueprint, and that window of development & influence passes and you move into adulthood, no other outside adult is going to be able to meet those needs for you in quite the same way.

After that, it becomes your job. And it’s not an easy one.

Other people can help us, love us, see us, and support us, but they cannot do this deeper inner work of feeling our feelings and learning how to relate to ourselves differently.
We have to do that.

And it IS possible. It is so very possible.

And doing that deep inside work is what helps you mature emotionally, and is what allows your external behaviors and preferences to shift over time. You start choosing differently, and showing up with more grounding and less reactivity.

Today is the last day to get 50% off your first month when you sign up for daily text messages from me — use code ENDOFSUMMER50
Get daily (m-f) texts sent straight to your phone with reminders for relating to yourself and others in grounded, compassionate ways.
https://hdly.me/theeqschool

22/09/2025

Announcing Our 1st Peer-To-Peer IFS Parts Processing Training

I was sitting on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean during an IFS workshop led by IFS founder Dick Schwartz when I told him I’d been engaging in daily IFS peer-to-peer parts processing with a British woman named Emma for about seven years and that it advanced my IFS inner work and helped my trauma recovery and relational recovery work far more so than my 50 minute weekly IFS sessions did. Even though my IFS therapist was fantastic and I have nothing but glowing things to say about how much she helped me, 50 minutes is just not enough time, and my parts get activated many times in an average week, especially since I started trying to make a partnership with a survivor of the worst kind of severe trauma work out.

When I said this to Dick Schwartz, he asked me whether I’d be willing to write down exactly what Emma and I did during our peer-to-peer work. I wrote up a first draft of what we do every day, as best I could- the do’s and don’t, the best practices, the importance of precise boundaries, and the mistakes we’d made along the way. It hadn’t always been perfect, and we’d hurt each other periodically, unintentionally but nevertheless, we had to learn relational repair as part of our parts processing partnership.

Then I turned the document over to Emma and she tweaked things and made her own additions. It wound up being 13 pages of detailed instructions on exactly how to do daily peer-to-peer parts processing as an adjuvant between therapy sessions or as a way to benefit from doing IFS parts work when someone can’t access or afford a one-on-one therapist.

Now...Emma and I are going to lead a weekend Zoom training in Peer-To-Peer Parts Processing in November.

Is it a perfect, flawlessly safe process? No. Is it the same as therapy? No. But does it advance your IFS practice if you commit to doing this every day? I cannot say “Hell yes” strongly enough.

She lives in the UK and I live in California, so we do this whole thing on WhatsApp voice message because of the time zone issue, and remarkably, it works great! Especially during the loneliness of the pandemic, waking up to Emma’s daily messages and going to sleep to her responses to mine was a balm for collective and personal wounds.

When I was co-teaching Write To Heal, the IFS & Memoir Writing workshop I co-led twice with IFS lead trainer and Harvard trained psychiatrist Frank Anderson, MD, I shared the document Emma and I had written with Frank. I told him we’d had to fuss with the process and make some painful mistakes before we got it right. He read it and said something like, “Oh, brilliant. You figured out how to love a trauma survivor.”

Not until then did I realize he was right. We both had to learn to love each other and foster intimacy in a safe enough way, to earn each other’s trust, to tiptoe around our wounds until we got around to healing them, to communicate without conflict avoidance, to dare to be vulnerable and brave, to take risks and see how the other handled it.

Are you interested in learning more about how to do this self-help practice with a peer support person? Are you interested in finding someone willing to try this with you?

You’ll have the opportunity to “speed date” parts processing partners if you attend this training, to see how it feels to process your parts with different people and pick the pair up that works best. Emma and I are so confident that this method really helps to support your self-help IFS practice. I’ve taught it to many peopla at my in person workshops who have paired up and done parts processing with each other. But we’ve never taught a training specifically to help people get good at this.

Not only will this help you be an effective peer to peer IFS parts processing partner; it will also improve the quality of your relationships. The lessons you learn in parts processing can’t help but bleed over into your daily life relationships with your kids, your partner, your parents, your siblings, your BFF, or even your boss or employees. It also helps you communicate on behalf of your parts, rather than blending with them, which creates more relational safety. When we say “I have a part that feels upset right now,” we automatically create more safety by reminding our loved ones that it’s not all of us that’s upset, that we also love our friends and family, that we also care about them, even when we’re upset.

If this sounds up your alley, please spread the word to friends, clients, other therapists, or anyone who you think might benefit.

Save $100 if you register for the early bird bonuses now. I'll post the link in the comments below.

06/09/2025

Why consider including the somatic sense in psychotherapy anyway?
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Research studies have found that awareness of the physical sensations related to one’s problems makes a decisive difference in the success or failure of psychotherapy. Nearly thirty studies support this correlation, which was first recognized by Eugene Gendlin of the University of Chicago.
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🌿 Embodied Healing

By addressing physical sensations, patterns, movements, it is possible to access deeper layers of trauma and emotion that may be inaccessible through dialogue alone. This holistic approach fosters a profound sense of embodied healing, empowering clients to integrate their emotional experiences on a somatic level.
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🌿 Regulating the Nervous System

Somatic techniques, such as vagus nerve activation, grounding exercises or breathwork, offer effective strategies for regulating the nervous system and restoring equilibrium. By teaching clients how to modulate their physiological responses, therapists can empower them to manage stress and anxiety more effectively in their daily lives.
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🌿 Enhancing Emotional Awareness

By attuning to bodily cues, clients can gain deeper insight into their emotional states, allowing them to identify and express feelings that may have been previously overlooked or suppressed. This heightened emotional awareness supports greater self-understanding and emotional intelligence.
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🌿 Trauma Resolution

Traumatic experiences are often stored in the body, manifesting as chronic tension, pain, or somatic symptoms. By renegotiating the body's response to past trauma, clients can reclaim a sense of safety and empowerment, paving the way for healing and resilience.
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🌿 Cultivating Mindfulness and Presence

Through practices such as body scans and mindful movement, we learn to anchor ourselves in our bodies, deepening our connection to the here and now. It alleviates symptoms of anxiety and rumination but also enhances overall well-being and resilience.
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P.S. During this 3-month training program, you will understand the core ideas of somatic therapy and learn effective somatic tools 👇🏻
https://bit.ly/SomaticTechniques

01/09/2025

Our minds are battlefields for engagement. Algorithms learn our weaknesses and manipulate us with hate, greed and fear in order to hold our attention and turn it against us. The best way to protect ourselves is to get to know our own minds and weaknesses.

From a conversation with Friends of Clear Mountain Monastery.

Watch the whole thing: bit.ly/CMM-YNH

21/08/2025

19/08/2025

Dissociation is a term that’s often used by therapists and other people in the mental health profession to describe a sort of mental withdrawal.

It’s the experience of temporarily losing connection with your thoughts, sensations or feelings.

Dissociation is often used solely to describe the conscious element of the immobilisation response. In fact, ‘freezing’ and ‘dissociation’ describe the same neurology - going really, really quiet and a sense of ‘playing dead’ is the survival strategy here.

We collapse and shutdown if our threat detection systems sense inescapable threat. So people might feel numb, or as though there’s a veil between them and the world.

The confusing part about dissociation is that it can often feel a little dreamy, and it often feels like quite a pleasant place. Sometimes it can feel terrifying, but it can also be quite floaty, which is one of the reasons why people sometimes confuse it with expanded spiritual experiences.

When you’re working to heal trauma, it’s important to learn to interrupt dissociation (as well as freezing and flooding) as quickly as you can. Put the brakes on early and give your system time to settle and integrate.

In our Trauma and Tension Releasing Exercises trainings, we guide you in how to recognise what dissociation, freezing and flooding feel like, so you can create safety.

To explore our upcoming TRE trainings, please visit: www.trecollege.com

12/08/2025

Trauma is complex and strange, and so it touch. In fact, touch is stranger and more powerful than often assumed, especially when it comes to working with trauma. Touch can be a safe, novel stimulus to access new possibilities in our physiology.

As bodyworkers we can learn to be more skilful as we touch our clients. A focus on slow, relational touch can help them to shift their emotional core, re-frame and transcend habitually scary feelings, and release themselves to feel alive and connected.

Touch can help us meet our wordless places in a way that is hard to access through conversation alone.

And it turns out that how touch works is quite different from how many of us have been taught...

For example, if you’re a bodyworker or clinician who is focused only on local tissue dynamics, there’s now very little evidence in pain science that manipulating joints and stretching muscles works in the long-term pain relief.

This was devastating to learn, as someone who trained for five years as a chiropractor. I used to love doing locally focused work, but I moved away from chiropractic because I found I wasn’t getting the desired results.

So, if we can’t change tissues by locally focused touch, what is useful about touch?

More and more, we’re seeing evidence that slow, gentle, emotional, compassionate, interpersonal touch that meets the whole person is most effective in relieving pain and creating more ease in the body, particularly where there is trauma.

06/08/2025

10/06/2025

FREE Resource for anxiety.

It's devastating for many people to live with constant worry and fear. Anxiety that becomes panic attacks can be severely limiting.

And the latest studies show that there's an epidemic of anxiety, indicating more that 1 in 4 people regularly experience anxiety. In teenagers it rises to 1 in 3.

Anxiety is rooted in protective gestures of speeding up to survive. It is much more a psychological problem.

A couple of years ago I created a webinar called ‘Anxiety is Really Strange’ webinar to explore embodied approaches to managing anxiety, such as appreciating how the hidden stories and protective reflexes (like excessive rumination) are working hard to protect you - this can transformative for many people.

In it I teach simple, practical, research-based embodied approaches to managing anxiety, as well as how you can support others to find agency and choice in meeting their anxiety.

The webinar introduces some models, rooted in science, that have helped many people shift their anxiety experience.

You can watch the webinar for free here: https://vimeo.com/704034138/ac6cd36820 or you can listen to the podcast version of the webinar here: www.bodycollege.net/podcast/