Can You Do This Work While You Are Seeing a Therapist?

People ask me this carefully, in a lowered voice, as though they might be about to confess to something. Am I allowed to do this if I am already seeing someone? Do I have to tell my therapist? Will you mind?

Yes, no, and no.

Plenty of the people I work with are also in therapy, some of them for years. The two sit together well, and quite often each one makes the other more useful.

They are doing different jobs

Talking therapy is very good at understanding. Where something came from, why it keeps happening, what it is protecting you from, how the pattern got built in the first place. That understanding is worth a great deal, and this work does not replace it.

What understanding often cannot do is change what happens in your body when you are actually in the moment. You can know exactly why you go blank and still go blank. You can have explained your own history articulately for three years and still find yourself saying yes when you meant no, then lying there waiting for it to be over.

Somatic work comes at it from the other end. Not the story of why, but the practical business of noticing sooner and being able to say so out loud. It is slower and much less interesting to talk about at a dinner party, and it tends to be the part that shifts what actually happens.

You do not have to tell your therapist

There is no obligation here and no permission to seek. This is your business and nobody else's.

Most people do mention it, and most therapists respond well, particularly those who already work with the body. Occasionally someone gets a wary reaction, most often from a therapist who has heard the word bodywork and pictured something else entirely. That is generally solved by explaining what the sessions actually involve, which is a good deal less dramatic than it sounds.

What this work is not

I am not a psychotherapist and I do not pretend to be one. I do not diagnose anything, I do not treat mental health conditions, and I am not the right person to call in a crisis.

This is education. It is learning about your own body, your own limits and your own preferences, practically, with someone who does this for a living. It sits alongside therapy rather than standing in for it. If you are not in therapy and something difficult surfaces in a session, I will say so, and I will suggest you get some support in place.

Alongside medical care

If sex hurts, get it looked at medically, either first or at the same time. Pain has causes, some of those causes have treatments, and no amount of body awareness is a substitute for a proper examination.

What this work can offer is the part medicine tends to leave out. After the infection is treated or the surgery has healed, many people find their body has learned to brace anyway, and nobody has offered them anything for that. That is a good place for somatic work to start.

Alongside relationship counselling

Couples counselling does a lot of good work on how two people talk to each other. What it rarely covers is the physical side in any practical detail, partly because it is awkward and partly because it sits outside most counsellors' training.

Individual sessions often help here, because each person comes back to the joint conversation clearer about what they actually want, rather than negotiating from a vague sense that something is wrong.

When it is better to wait

There are times when this is not the right thing yet. In the immediate aftermath of an assault. In the middle of a mental health crisis. When you are so tired that another appointment would be one more thing to get through rather than something you want.

It will still be here later. I would rather say that plainly than take a booking, and if we speak and I think the timing is wrong, I will tell you.

How to work out whether it fits

Have a conversation. Bring the questions you think are stupid. Ask what a session involves, ask what happens if you freeze, ask whether your particular situation is something I have worked with before. It almost certainly is.

And if you cannot tell whether you want this or not, that is a normal place to be, and a perfectly good reason to talk rather than to decide.