What is Somatic Trauma Informed Coaching?

“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”* Unlike therapy, coaching focuses primarily on the here, now, and near future. Coaches honor and respect the past and will discuss the past with their clients in order to make sense of their story. However, the larger focus is on working with the client’s current obstacles in order to achieve their goals. Coaches meet their clients where they are at and view the client as whole, unbroken, resourceful, capable, and as the subject matter expert of their life. Coaches are aware of their scope of practice and refer out to other professionals when needed. They do not give advice, diagnose, or treat.

As a Trauma Informed Coach, the coach utilizes the same values and principles of coaching, but approaches the coaching conversation through a trauma informed lens. The Trauma Informed Coach understands what trauma is, how it presents in a coaching session, and how to respond within the established coaching boundaries and contractual agreements while maintaining client safety.* A Trauma Informed Coach prioritizes holding the space and maintaining client safety above all else. They have the training, sensitivity, and awareness to prevent re-traumatizing clients. Trauma Informed Coaches have been educated on the effects trauma can have on the brain and within the body. They work with clients to get the body out of survival mode and into a more regulated nervous system. It is the responsibility of a trauma informed coach to integrate their own healing, to pursue continuing education and training, to be held accountable by qualified mentors or organizations, and to address their privilege and systems of oppression.

Somatic Coaches understand that when it comes to healing trauma, putting language to our experience can be helpful, but is not always accessible. We can’t always process and heal on an intellectual level. So, we start in the body first. Once we find safety in the body, then the mind is usually able to come online and we can find connection and integration between the mind and the body.

I consider myself a Holistic Coach that specializes in somatic post-traumatic growth. Holistic coaching is multifarious in that it uses a variety of techniques to approach all parts of you. Healing on the level of the mind allows for shifts in our internal dialogue and mindset. From this place we can set goals, create healthy routine and practices, heal relationships, and so much more. However, this style of coaching takes it a step further in exploring and integrating the body and the soul’s felt experience, so that sustainable healing takes place on all levels of our being. Coaching provides a space for us to be heard, seen, understood, to put language to our experience in order to make sense of our story, and to create shifts within us to live our most thriving and beautiful life.