Jenifer Fennell, PhD, SEP

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” -- Carl Rogers
Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) is a form of trauma therapy that involves paying attention to your nervous system as well as your words. Words are important in the work we do together, but they are just one way bodies communicate, and sometimes our thinking minds offer up stories that are not true. Learning to listen to other aspects of ourselves can deepen our understanding of what's happening for us neurologically, beneath the interpretation offered by the mind. This new knowledge helps us accept and have compassion for what we've experienced and the ways our bodies learned to cope. Value judgments have no place here -- you are not "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong" for having a physiological threat response. It's your survival system doing what survival systems do. But we can learn to recognize and understand that systemic response, identify what's happening for us at a given moment, and learn how to respond in a new and wiser ways.
Change and healing happen as you dig into and explore your embodied experience and your patterns of conscious and unconscious reaction, which fuel each other. It takes practice but over time, you will find that your body knows how to heal and as you slow down and allow it to move through release, you'll organically gain new understanding and awareness about yourself and your life.
SE, which is focused on nervous system recovery from traumatic and challenging experiences, is the training I draw on most consistently. I also have formal training in Narrative Therapy, Counseling Psychology, and Adlerian depth psychology, though it's important that I emphasize here that I am not a traditional therapist. This means I don't diagnose and nor do I rely on the idea that your struggles are "symptoms" of something that has gone wrong inside you. Instead, I start from the understanding that while we all struggle to feel good and safe and well in our bodies, we can all learn how. With practice life becomes easier and we grow in well-being. We're all are shaped by the lives we've lived; the harder those lives have been, the more likely it is that we'll feel unsafe and unwell, both physically and mentally. But all of us, no matter what we've been through, can learn to feel more calm and ease and joy.
My PhD is in English, which means I have expertise in analytical reading. I studied English because I passionately love reading and because, when things were hard in my life, stories offered me not just an escape but a deep sense of possibility. Reading taught me all the ways the world and my life could be different. I read widely and voraciously, and I use my background in analytical reading to keep myself learning about the fields that are relevant to the work I do with others. Probably the most important of these is Polyvagal Theory, which offers a map of our nervous system and explains why we suffer and how we can initiate change. There is new work coming out practically daily on the impacts of traumatic experience on our brains and nervous systems and what we can do to heal, but learning in many other fields also feeds the work I do. I love physics and neuroscience, cosmology and the way mathematics informs our understanding of music and fractals, studies of the ways trees and mushrooms communicate, memoirs and fiction. I've also been practicing meditation for two decades and am grounded in Buddhist psychology, mindfulness, and insight, all of which depend on the power of presence, practice, starting over, and finding out for yourself.
Finally, I view the work we do together -- and the world -- through an intersectional, social-justice, trauma-informed lens. This means I take seriously the impacts of all the ways discrimination, oppression and erasure impact the bodymind. People, societies and nation states have endless ways of keeping boots on the necks of others; some of the most common are racism, sexism, systems that keep people in poverty, homophobia and transphobia, imperialism, ageism, ableism and so on. I am comfortable and have decades of experiences working with BIPOC folks, women, immigrants, refugees, members of the LGBTQ+ community, adoptees, people who've experienced living unhoused and unsheltered, survivors of the foster care system, and people and the families of people who've been jailed or imprisoned.
Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) is a form of trauma therapy that involves paying attention to your nervous system as well as your words. Words are important in the work we do together, but they are just one way bodies communicate, and sometimes our thinking minds offer up stories that are not true. Learning to listen to other aspects of ourselves can deepen our understanding of what's happening for us neurologically, beneath the interpretation offered by the mind. This new knowledge helps us accept and have compassion for what we've experienced and the ways our bodies learned to cope. Value judgments have no place here -- you are not "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong" for having a physiological threat response. It's your survival system doing what survival systems do. But we can learn to recognize and understand that systemic response, identify what's happening for us at a given moment, and learn how to respond in a new and wiser ways.
Change and healing happen as you dig into and explore your embodied experience and your patterns of conscious and unconscious reaction, which fuel each other. It takes practice but over time, you will find that your body knows how to heal and as you slow down and allow it to move through release, you'll organically gain new understanding and awareness about yourself and your life.
SE, which is focused on nervous system recovery from traumatic and challenging experiences, is the training I draw on most consistently. I also have formal training in Narrative Therapy, Counseling Psychology, and Adlerian depth psychology, though it's important that I emphasize here that I am not a traditional therapist. This means I don't diagnose and nor do I rely on the idea that your struggles are "symptoms" of something that has gone wrong inside you. Instead, I start from the understanding that while we all struggle to feel good and safe and well in our bodies, we can all learn how. With practice life becomes easier and we grow in well-being. We're all are shaped by the lives we've lived; the harder those lives have been, the more likely it is that we'll feel unsafe and unwell, both physically and mentally. But all of us, no matter what we've been through, can learn to feel more calm and ease and joy.
My PhD is in English, which means I have expertise in analytical reading. I studied English because I passionately love reading and because, when things were hard in my life, stories offered me not just an escape but a deep sense of possibility. Reading taught me all the ways the world and my life could be different. I read widely and voraciously, and I use my background in analytical reading to keep myself learning about the fields that are relevant to the work I do with others. Probably the most important of these is Polyvagal Theory, which offers a map of our nervous system and explains why we suffer and how we can initiate change. There is new work coming out practically daily on the impacts of traumatic experience on our brains and nervous systems and what we can do to heal, but learning in many other fields also feeds the work I do. I love physics and neuroscience, cosmology and the way mathematics informs our understanding of music and fractals, studies of the ways trees and mushrooms communicate, memoirs and fiction. I've also been practicing meditation for two decades and am grounded in Buddhist psychology, mindfulness, and insight, all of which depend on the power of presence, practice, starting over, and finding out for yourself.
Finally, I view the work we do together -- and the world -- through an intersectional, social-justice, trauma-informed lens. This means I take seriously the impacts of all the ways discrimination, oppression and erasure impact the bodymind. People, societies and nation states have endless ways of keeping boots on the necks of others; some of the most common are racism, sexism, systems that keep people in poverty, homophobia and transphobia, imperialism, ageism, ableism and so on. I am comfortable and have decades of experiences working with BIPOC folks, women, immigrants, refugees, members of the LGBTQ+ community, adoptees, people who've experienced living unhoused and unsheltered, survivors of the foster care system, and people and the families of people who've been jailed or imprisoned.