Why I Became a Somatic Therapist: My Own Journey Through Trauma, Healing, and Reclamation
“I didn't come to somatic therapy because it looked interesting on paper. I came to it because I was desperate — because I was suffering. And what I found on the other side changed everything, not just for me, but for the way I now hold space for every woman who walks into my practice”
I didn't come to this work because I read about it in a textbook or it was suggested by a career counselor who thought it sounded interesting.
I came to it because I was desperate, because I was suffering. I would had what felt like one too many dark nights of the soul. Meditation and talk therapy had taken me far, and I was a master at understanding my wounds intellectually. But my body was still really keeping the score and it wasn't looking good. Trauma: 10, Nichole: nil.
I knew my nervous system had a tenacious grip on things that my mind could not reach.
I share my own story with some care not because I am the centre of this work (you are), but because I believe deeply that the most powerful and helpful healers are the ones who have explored their own healing journey. I am not a neutral technician dispensing therapeutic tools. I am a woman who has survived things, who has done and is still doing the hard and often back-breaking work of her own healing, and who brings that lived experience into every session I hold.
So this is my story. Not all of it because, ya know, boundaries. But hopefully enough that you might recognise something of yourself in it, and know: I am not leading the way. I am walking right alongside you
Growing Up in the Trenches — Where It All Began
I grew up in what many people would describe as a classically, textbook dysfunctional family, a system shaped by alcoholism, poverty, dysfunction, abuse, and mental health issues, and the particular kind of neglect that looks like fed, clothed, and housed, but in the shadows lived cavernous aloneness, early childhood parentification, and my old friend: hyperindependence and hypervigilance.
I learned early what so many of the women I now work with also learned: how to make myself small, how to manage other people's emotions, how to read a room before I walked into it, how to need nothing and give everything. I learned that my job was not to be a problem. To be good.
One of my most lasting memories is how often my mom would tell me I was "such a good baby. You never cried, never made a fuss."
I was extraordinarily good at all of it. On the outside, I handled things. On the inside, I was scared, alone, and left to my own very faulty devices.
This is the invisible wound of growing up in dysfunction: you don't know you're wounded because the wound is the water you swim in. You think everyone feels this way. You think the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the inability to rest, the constant sense that something is about to go wrong , you think that's just what it means to be human.
The Things That Broke Me Open
Like many people, my healing journey did not begin by choice. It began by necessity when life presented me with circumstances I could no longer manage through sheer force of will and performance.
Over the years, I navigated chronic illness and debilitating physical injury. I survived sexual trauma. I moved through grief and loss that cracked me open in ways I did not see coming. I found myself in relationships that mirrored with uncanny precision, the dynamics I had grown up inside of, because that is what unhealed trauma does: it finds its reflection.
I did talk therapy. I meditated till the cows came home. I went to Al-Anon. I did rituals, ceremonies, and explored healing traditions from other cultures. I was a diligent, insightful client and student. I developed tremendous understanding of my patterns, my wounds, my family system, my psychology. I could analyse my own behaviour with impressive precision.
But like I said before: my body was still keeping the score.
"Insight is important but it is not the same as healing. You can understand everything and still be living inside the wound. That was the gap I needed to cross. And somatic work was the bridge."
The Moment Everything Shifted — My First Somatic Experience
My introduction to somatic work was not dramatic. It did not happen in a single revelation. It began, as most real healing does, quietly in moment after moment of noticing.
Years of meditation and therapy had primed the pump. But it was in one particular session with a practitioner who asked me, in the middle of a story I was telling about something painful, to pause. To take a breath. To stop narrating.
To notice what was happening in my body right now not what had happened back then, in the historical moment of my story. What was happening now.
I was invited to get out of my head and drop into the felt sense of my own body. And when I did, when I actually landed there, something shifted. I felt a tightness in my chest. A constriction in my throat. A beating in my heart. She asked me to stay with it. To resist the urge to go back into story.
And then something remarkable happened. As I stayed with those sensations not analysing them, not trying to fix or explain them, just being present with them with a quality of curious attention, they began to shift. To soften. Something released that I had been holding, without knowing I was holding it. My body relaxed.
And then I started crying. Not the familiar, somewhat performative tears of a "good" therapy session but something older and more animal. A letting go that felt less like an emotion and more like a physical discharge.
I walked out of that session feeling different in my body. Not fixed. Not healed. But different — lighter, softer, more present in my own skin. More free.
The Training That Followed - Years, Not Weekends
What followed was not a quick certification weekend. It was years of my own deep personal healing work, of formal training across multiple disciplines, of mentorship, of sitting with teachers and practitioners who modelled what ethical, trauma-informed care actually looks like. More importantly: who modelled what true embodied healing looks and feels like.
Academic Foundation — Fairhaven College
Double major and double minor in psychology, education, women's studies, and the expressive arts — with additional training as a counsellor, coach, and dance teacher. A foundation built on the understanding that healing lives at the intersection of mind, body, relationship, and creative expression.
Mindfulness Certification — UCLA & IMTA
Certification in mindfulness facilitation from the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior (CMF), followed by certification as a Certified Mindfulness Teacher – Professional (CMT-P) through the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. Supported by 20+ years of personal meditation practice, including extended silent retreat across multiple traditions.
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP)
Advanced-level training through the Trauma Healing Institute and Somatic Experiencing Training Institute, resulting in full certification as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). This training is rigorous, multi-year, and deeply personal, practitioners are required to engage in their own somatic healing work throughout the process.
UCSF Osher Center — Over a Decade of Teaching & Research
Teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health for over a decade, and developing and teaching Mindful HEART — Healing and Embodied Awareness for Recovery from Trauma. Contributions to multiple NIH-funded mindfulness research studies on chronic illness, mental health, and trauma.
Somatic Sexual Trauma Practitioner (Recent)
Recently completed training as a Somatic Sexual Trauma Practitioner, with a year-long Somatic Sex Therapy training beginning in June deepening the capacity to support clients recovering specifically from sexual violence and reclaiming embodied pleasure and vitality.
What my own healing taught me about yours
The most important thing my own healing has taught me is not a technique or a theory. It is this: healing is not about becoming someone different. It is about coming home to who you actually are, underneath the masking, the armour, the shapeshifting, the survival strategies, the performative 'got my shit together-ness.”
The woman I was before I began this work was not broken. She was extraordinarily resourceful, remarkably resilient, and doing the very best she could with the resources she had. She deserved so much more tenderness than she gave herself.
And so do you.
What I know from the inside
I know what it is to feel like your body is not safe to live in. I know what it is to understand your patterns completely and feel at a loss for how to heal them. I know what it is to perform 'got my shit together-ness' while quietly losing your shit. I know what it is to need help and to be too ashamed, too afraid, or too exhausted to ask for it.
What I also know
I know from the inside, not just from the textbooks what it feels like when something finally begins to shift. When the nervous system softens. When the armour loosens. When you take a breath and actually feel it land, and realise, maybe for the first time: oh. This is what it feels like to be present. This is what it feels like to be home. This is what it feels like to be safe.
My Commitment to You
When you work with me, you are working with someone who has done her own work and who continues to do it. I am not a finished product, not a guru, not someone who has arrived at some perfected state of enlightenment. I am a woman who is still learning, still growing, still occasionally surprised by what her body holds. And I bring that understanding into the room.
What I offer you is not expertise deployed from a distance. It is full presence, genuine care, honest reflection, and the particular quality of attunement that comes from having walked a road that resembles yours. I will see you. I will support you every step of the way. And I will never ask you to go anywhere I have not been willing to go myself.
"If only you could see yourself through my eyes, you would realise how beautiful you are." — Hafiz
That is the vision I hold for every woman who sits across from me. You are not your wounds. You are not your survival strategies. You are not your shame. You are something far more luminous than any of that and I do this work to help you find your way back to it.
Frequently Asked Questions — About Nichole Proffitt
Has Nichole Proffitt experienced trauma herself?
Yes, Nichole is open about the fact that her path to somatic therapy was shaped by her own lived experience of trauma, including growing up in a dysfunctional family system marked by alcoholism and neglect, chronic illness and injury, sexual trauma, and grief and loss. This lived experience, alongside her extensive formal training, is a central part of what she brings to her practice and to the quality of attunement she offers every client.
What qualifications does Nichole Proffitt have?
Nichole is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) with advanced-level training through the Trauma Healing Institute and Somatic Experiencing Training Institute, and a Certified Mindfulness Teacher – Professional (CMT-P) through the UCLA Semel Institute and the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. She holds degrees in psychology, education, women's studies, and the expressive arts, has over a decade of experience teaching MBSR at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health, and has contributed to multiple NIH-funded research studies. She recently completed training as a Somatic Sexual Trauma Practitioner and is beginning Somatic Sex Therapy training.
Is Nichole Proffitt a licensed therapist or psychotherapist?
Nichole is not a licensed psychotherapist or medical doctor. After a series of traumatic events that significantly altered her life trajectory, she chose not to pursue licensure in order to work in a broader, more integrative capacity as an alternative practitioner and mentor. She does not provide clinical diagnosis or psychiatric treatment. She works collaboratively alongside licensed clinicians, psychotherapists, and medical professionals when appropriate, and refers clients to licensed providers when clinical care is needed.
Why does a somatic therapist's personal experience matter?
Research on therapeutic effectiveness consistently shows that the quality of the therapeutic relationship, the felt sense of being genuinely understood and met is one of the strongest predictors of healing outcomes. Practitioners who have done their own deep healing work bring a quality of attunement and presence that is difficult to replicate through training alone. Personal experience does not replace professional training, but it meaningfully deepens it, particularly in trauma-informed and body-based work where the practitioner's own nervous system regulation is part of what creates safety for the client.
How does Nichole's personal history inform her approach to somatic therapy?
Nichole's experience of healing from her own trauma directly shapes her trauma-informed, body-centred, non-pathologising approach. She understands from the inside what it feels like to know your patterns intellectually while still living inside them to feel estranged from your own body, and to begin the slow, courageous work of coming home to yourself. This informs her pacing, her attunement, her deep non-judgment, and her conviction that every client is the most powerful agent in their own healing.
What is Nichole Proffitt's approach to working with women?
Nichole works primarily with women navigating trauma, codependency, dysfunctional relationship patterns, sexual trauma, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and disconnection from the body. Her approach integrates somatic experiencing, MBSR, mindful movement, creative expression, and nature-based practices into what she calls Wild Reclamation, a body-centred path back to presence, aliveness, and authentic self. Sessions are available online and in-person in San Francisco.
If Nichole's story resonates with yours, if you recognize in her path something of your own — she would love to talk. A free consultation is a relaxed, no-pressure conversation about where you are and what working together might look like.
By Nichole Proffitt, SEP, CMT-P · Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Certified Mindfulness Teacher