What if your body isn't the problem?.
Somatic therapy for body image struggles and disordered eating. Supporting adults and teens in Marin County and throughout California.
You've spent too long trying to make peace with your body. Maybe you've also spent years trying to control it; monitoring what you eat, how you look, how much space you take up. The noise around food and your body might be so constant you've stopped noticing it's there. The noise has become you and that’s devastating.
Underneath the behaviors and the body criticism is almost always something much older and much more painful: a deep sense of not being safe in yourself. You’ve been too and not enough all at once. You’ve had to manage and control your body because the world, or the people in it, felt unmanageable and uncontrollable.
Disordered eating and body image struggles are not issues of vanity. They are survival strategies. And they deserve to be met with the depth, compassion, and clinical seriousness they require.
Why somatic therapy for body image & disordered eating
How I work with body image & disordered eating
My approach to body image and disordered eating is non-diet, weight-neutral, and deeply attuned to the complexity of these experiences. I am not here to tell you what to eat or how to look. I am here to help you find your way back to a relationship with your body that is characterized by trust, curiosity, and care rather than control, shame, and warfare.
We work with the somatic experience of eating and body awareness. We’ll track what arises in the body around food, fullness, hunger, and appearance with compassion rather than judgment. We explore the emotional and relational roots of these patterns, often drawing on Internal Family Systems (IFS) to work with the parts of you that learned to use food and body control as a way of managing pain, anxiety, or a need for safety.
We also work to rebuild what I think of as embodied self-trust: the felt sense that your body has wisdom, that its signals can be heard, and that being in it can feel safe rather than threatening.
What clients often discover
This might be for you if:
At its core, a troubled relationship with food and the body is a troubled relationship with feeling safe. Often there are issues with what the body feels, what it needs, and whether it can be trusted. Most conventional approaches focus on behavior change or cognitive reframing, which can be somewhat helpful. But they often miss the deeper layer: the way the body has been experienced as something to be managed, punished, or escaped rather than inhabited and trusted.
Somatic therapy works at that deeper layer. Rather than treating the body as the problem, we treat it as the path to healing by learning to listen to it, to feel safe inside it, and to gradually rebuild the trust that disordered eating so often erodes.
This is especially important for the many people whose body image struggles are rooted in trauma, attachment wounds, or a chronic sense of shame. These are experiences that live in the body and require body-based healing.
Clients working on body image and disordered eating frequently experience:
A significant reduction in food noise (that constant mental chatter around eating, calories, and body size that exhausts and isolates).
A growing capacity to listen to and trust their body's signals around hunger, fullness, and need.
A softer, more compassionate relationship with their physical self, which is not necessarily loving every part of their body, but no longer warring with it.
Freedom from behaviors that were once felt necessary but have become harmful or exhausting.
A deeper understanding of the emotional roots of their patterns and genuine healing at that level (not just symptom management).
You struggle with chronic dieting, restriction, bingeing, purging, or any pattern around food that feels out of control or deeply distressing.
You have a painful relationship with your body (constant criticism, avoidance, shame, or a sense of profound disconnection from it).
You suspect your relationship with food is connected to anxiety, trauma, or difficult early experiences.
You've tried nutritional approaches or CBT-based programs and found they addressed the behavior but not the underlying pain.
You're ready to explore a more compassionate, body-centered path toward healing.
Please note: I work collaboratively with dietitians, physicians, and eating disorder treatment teams when appropriate to ensure comprehensive care. For clients in acute medical distress, a higher level of care may be recommended before or alongside outpatient therapy.
