Somatic Experiencing Therapy in London with Rebecca Porteous

Rebecca Porteous Somatic Experiencing Therapist London

Rebecca’s Contact Details
rebeccamaryporteous@gmail.com

We experience everything, including what’s going on in our minds, through our bodies. These experiences can leave their traces in the form of physical and mental patterns or behaviours that, while often useful at the time, may not always help us in the long-term.

With Yoga, the Trager® Approach and Somatic Experiencing therapy as the foundations of my practice, I encourage my clients to develop conversations with their bodies that give them more choice about how they might engage with and respond to the world around them.

Each of the three approaches I draw on engages with a person’s disrupted nervous system. I work with all sorts of suffering: acute and chronic pain and discomfort, both physical and psychological, including that which arises with anxiety, depression, PTSD and developmental trauma and during pregnancy.

Yoga, Trager^® Approach and Somatic Experiencing Therapy

Using Postural Yoga

With postural Yoga we get the mats out and explore floor-based (or sometimes chair-based) physical movements and traditional Yoga forms together. With our breath as our guide, we work towards a balance between strength and fluidity, stability and flexibility. I encourage you, the client, to build up a home practice to help integrate and deepen the work.

Using the Trager^® Approach

The Trager Approach brings a focussed quality of attention to gentle movements that are both active and received passively through hands-on work. Through compressions, elongations, weighing and gentle movements, unconscious patterns come into conscious awareness and the body finds its way to release, groundedness and connection.

Using Somatic Experiencing Therapy

In Somatic Experiencing (also referred to as Somatic Therapy) we also bring close attention to physical sensations. When we can safely allow these sensations to move through us, and allow for our nervous systems to discharge and integrate the process, it becomes possible to tolerate even difficult feelings. Then we can move beyond the habitual patterns of action and reaction that are causing us pain or unhappiness.

Combining the three approaches

What is common to every session with me, whether the focus is postural Yoga, the Trager Approach or Somatic Experiencing therapy, is that together we bring our attention to the feelings, sensations and images that arise in your body. Slowly and safely, states of overwhelm or freeze release, allowing the innate inclination of every living system towards restoration and resilience to make itself felt. Old patterns of holding and reactivity, with their associated discomforts and behaviours, can then let go, leaving room for a newfound aliveness and receptivity to the world.

Another aspect common to every session is the joyous recognition that in every living system there is more that is functional than dysfunctional. We are working with how we’ve survived rather than how we are broken.

I invite you to let me know if you have a preference for one of the three approaches, or we can mix and match, and together explore what works best for you. For Yoga and Trager loose clothes are usually more comfortable than tight or formal clothes.

Areas I work with:

Stress and associated symptoms
Anxiety and panic attacks
Chronic pain ranging from stiffness to debilitating musculo-skeletal pain
Phobias and other avoidance behaviours and patterns
PTSD, Complex PTSD and Developmental Trauma
Syndromes including fibromyalgia, migraines and IBS

My Journey

I had been teaching an individualised, Scaravelli-inspired style of Yoga for ten years, was training to be a Trager practitioner, and raising my young family in Downtown Cairo when the Arab Spring of 2011 rose up on my doorstep.

By 2012 I was suffering from physical symptoms which I addressed through a combination of trauma-informed body-based work and psychotherapy. As the revolution ebbed and flowed around us, I set about learning how to use my new-found understanding of trauma and the body to help others, initially through my skills as a Yoga teacher and Trager practitioner, more recently adding Somatic Experiencing therapy to my tool-box.

I have worked with individuals of all ages, in groups and one-to-one, both long-term, short-term and in one-off workshops since 2001. From 2015 -2019 I also taught weekly trauma-informed Yoga and movement awareness classes to adolescents at the Banati Foundation, a residence for street children, while running a private practice. In 2019 I returned to London, my home town.

I offer therapy in Egyptian Arabic as well as English and have a comfortable working knowledge of French.

“Am I suffering from trauma?”

It took the excitement, fear and drama of the Egyptian uprising of 2011-13 for me to recognise that the coping strategies my body and mind had developed for managing stress were not always working in my best interests. It was at least a year before I learned to recognise the physical symptoms I was suffering from as ‘trauma’.

In many ways the label was irrelevant, except that it helped me find the therapy that worked for me, and to develop a more effective way for me to work with clients and students. But we don’t have to have gone through ‘trauma’, to benefit from developing a more articulate and coherent relationship with our bodies; how they hold and process our experiences and how we might have more choice about that.

My Training

Yoga teacher training with Mary Stewart, London 1999-2001
Registered Senior Yoga Teacher with AIYP and IYA
Licenced Trager^® Practitioner, Cairo, 2013, Registered with Trager^® UK and Trager^® Egypt
Principles of Yoga Anatomy with Leslie Kaminoff, USA, 2013-14
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Training with David Emerson and Jen Turner, USA, 2014
Yoga Therapy and Mindfulness for PTSD with Heather Mason, London, 2015
One Year Foundation Certificate in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Coaching from the New School of Psychotherapy and Coaching, London, 2017
Somatic Experiencing Therapy Practitioner, Edinburgh, 2017-2020

Before becoming fascinated with the stories our bodies tell, I worked in the London publishing industry as a literary editor and project manager.

Contact:

Please email me with an initial enquiry about my availability or any questions you might have about the process.