Reset the System: Body-Based Therapy for First Responders
I offer professional, confidential, and individually tailored counselling services to first responders, integrating gentle, body-oriented Somatic Experiencing® techniques with practical, goal-directed strategies. I offer sessions in person in Salmon Arm and virtually throughout B.C.
As a former wildland firefighter and crisis support worker, I have lived experience of the physical toll the work can take on the body—chronic pain and tension, insomnia, hyperarousal, and emotional numbness—and of how it impacts relationships and quality of life.
My approach comes alongside the operational culture of crisis response and the need for tactical vigilance while helping to clear high-stress incidents out of the nervous system. I bring a calm and steady presence, always leaving room for levity and humour.
How We Work Together:
Move beyond talk therapy into direct body awareness, which doesn’t require the retelling of difficult incidents.
Work at your pace to build and maintain functional resilience, tactical capacity, and sustainable post-critical incident habits.
Safely and gently discharge trapped survival energy, developing tools to help you down-regulate after a shift.
Grounding and Establishing Safety (Resourcing)
Working in the present: I help you anchor into the room and into the present moment, checking in on how your body feels right now rather than diving straight into work.
Building resources: I guide you in identifying internal or external anchors—such as a supportive memory, a strong physical point of contact with the chair or floor, soothing self-touch, or a neutral/safe area in your body—to use if things feel too intense.
Tracking Sensations and Developing Greater Body Awareness (The Felt Sense)
Scanning the body: I support you in bringing gentle awareness to physical cues (e.g., tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, a racing heart, shallow breathing, or a heavy stomach). I also encourage you to notice and bring awareness to images, emotions, and your sense of meaning.
Observing without judgment: Instead of trying to fix or push away any physical discomfort, you learn to track how the sensations and emotions move, shift, or change on their own.
Titration (Processing in Small Doses)
Breaking it down: I help guide you to dip your toe into a stressful memory or uncomfortable sensation in small doses, so as not to overwhelm your nervous system.
Preventing overwhelm: I help guide you in learning how to ease up on the attention to the stressful memory, difficult emotion, or uncomfortable experience before your nervous system spikes into overwhelm or shuts down, helping to teach your system that it can be with and process stress.
Pendulation (Oscillating Between Stress and Safety)
Moving back and forth: I help guide you in bringing your attention smoothly from an area of tight activation or discomfort to an area of relative ease or neutrality.
Restoring natural rhythm: This teaches your nervous system that it can move out of a locked fight, flight, or freeze state and safely return to baseline.
Discharge and Completion (Discharging Trapped Survival Energy)
Completing the response: First responders are frequently required to suppress natural physical defenses (like the urge to run, push away, or cry) while on duty. SE lets the body complete those thwarted motor responses in a gentle and supported way.
Organic physical shifts: As the nervous system discharges bound survival energy, you may spontaneously experience deep sighs, yawning, muscle tremors, subtle shaking, warmth, or a deep sense of physical relaxation.