Why I became a somatic therapist: my own journey through trauma and reclamation
I didn't come to this work because I read about it in a textbook or it was suggested to me by a career counselor, and thought “that sounds interesting.”
I came to it because I was desperate — because I was suffering. I’d 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 and was still holding on to things that my mind could not reach.
I share my own story with some care — not because I am the center of this work (you are), but because I believe deeply that the most powerful and helpful healers are the ones who have deeply 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 — in addition to my training, education, and 20+ years of 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 recognize something of yourself in it, and know I am not leading the way, I am walking right along side you.
growing up in the trenches
I grew up in what many people would describe as a classically, textbook dysfunctional family — a system shaped by alcoholism, poverty, dysfunction, abuse, 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, hyper-independence and hyper-vigilance.
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 to not be a problem. To be good.
One of my most lasting memories is how often my mom would always 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- “May our best work be done with the heart breaking or overflowing”
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 Alanon. I did rituals, ceremonies, and even 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 analyze my own behavior with impressive precision and was very proud one day when my BFF, who is psychotherapist herself, said I was the most emotionally sophisticated person she knows. But like I said before, my body was still keeping the score.
"Insight is important but it is not necessarily 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 introduction to somatic work was not dramatic. It did not happen in a single revelation. It began, as most real healing does, quietly over time — in moment after moment of noticing.
Years of meditation and other therapy had primed the pump, so to speak, 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, in this moment, as I spoke. Not what had happened then back 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 remember feeling an tightness in my chest. A constriction in my throat. 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 analyzing them, not trying to fix them 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 “good” therapy sessions, 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. And I thought: This freedom… I need more of it. And I want others to feel this too.
The long and winding road of training and Practice
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 modeled what ethical, trauma-informed care actually looks like, but more importantly, who modeled what true embodied healing looks and feels like.
Education foundation
Double major and double minor from Fairhaven College in psychology, education, women's studies, and the expressive arts — with additional training as a counselor, coach, and dance teacher. A foundation that understood healing as something that lives at the intersection of mind, body, relationship, and creative expression.
Mindfulness training
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. Twenty-plus years of personal meditation practice, including extended silent retreat in multiple traditions.
Somatic Experiencing training
Advanced level training through the Trauma Healing Institute and Somatic Experiencing Training Institute, resulting in certification as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP). This training is rigorous, multi-year, and deeply personal — practitioners are required to do their own somatic work as part of the process.
UCSF and research
Over a decade teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, and developing and teaching Mindful HEART — Healing and Embodied Awareness for Recovery from Trauma. Contributions to multiple NIH-funded mindfulness research studies exploring interventions for chronic illness and mental health, in addition to teaching within UCSF for faculty, students and staff.
Somatic sexual trauma training and Somatic Sex Therapy
Recently completed training as a Somatic Sexual Trauma Practitioner, and will begin year-long training in Somatic Sex Therapy in June— deepening the capacity to support clients recovering specifically from sexual violence and trauma and reclaim their 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 armor, the shape shifting, 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.
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, to afraid, or too exhausted to ask for it.
And 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 armor loosens. When you take a breath and actually feel it land, and realize, 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.
This is what I want for you. Not a version of yourself that never struggles or suffers — that is not healing, that is bypassing. But a version of yourself that can be present for the full range of your experience, that knows what is true for your, that inhabits your body and your life with a sense of ease, aliveness, and authentic choice. That is what I work toward, in every session, with every client. Because I know it is possible. Because I have lived it.
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.
As the poet Hafiz wrote:"If only you could see yourself through my eyes, you would realize how beautiful you are." 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
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, chronic illness and injury, sexual trauma, and bereavement, grief and loss. This lived experience, alongside her extensive formal training, is a central part of what she brings to her practice.
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, and has over a decade of experience teaching mindfulness at UCSF. She has also contributed to multiple NIH-funded research studies and recently completed training as a Somatic Sexual Trauma Practitioner. This summer Nichole will begin a somatic sex therapy training.
Is Nichole Proffitt a licensed therapist or psychotherapist?
Nichole is not a licensed psychotherapist or medical doctor — she was on a path to become a psychologist, but after a series of traumatic events that caused her to suspend her long term academic pursuits and radically changed her life trajectory, she chose not to pursue licensure in order to study and work in a broader, more integrative capacity as a alternative practitioner and mentor. She does not provide clinical diagnosis or psychiatric treatment. She works alongside and collaborates with licensed clinicians, psychotherapists, and medical professionals when appropriate, and will refer clients to licensed providers when clinical care is needed.
Why does a therapist's personal experience matter?
Research on therapeutic effectiveness consistently finds that the quality of the therapeutic relationship — the sense of being genuinely understood and met — is one of the strongest predictors of healing outcomes. Practitioners who have done their own deep 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.
How does Nichole's personal history inform her approach?
Nichole's experience of healing from her own trauma directly shapes her trauma-informed, body-centered, non-pathologizing approach to the work. She understands — from the inside — what it feels like to know your patterns intellectually but still live 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, and her deep conviction that every client is the most powerful agent in their own healing.
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