Dr. Mindy Nettifee (PhD, SEP)
I am a poet, professional teaching artist, and a somatic therapist and educator specializing in trauma healing and expression. My practice is rooted in my 30+ years of poetry practice, 20+ years of teaching creative writing and performance, and my 10+ years of training and practice in somatics and depth psychology.
In 2020, I received my doctorate in Depth Psychology with a specialization in Somatic Studies from Pacifica. The initial focus of my graduate work was exploring the mysterious relationships between the unconscious mind, the body, and the creative process. That led me to fall in love with trauma theory and trauma healing practices, but through the lens of trauma’s impact on self-expression. My dissertation Voice As Embodied Sense–Rethinking Voice and Language in Trauma and Healing documents what I discovered about that impact, and the role that voice and authentic expression play in the trauma healing and integration process.
Of all the trauma healing modalities I encountered, I found Somatic Experiencing® (SE) to be particularly effective, and I was drawn to study it formally. SE is a body-based method of trauma resolution developed by Peter Levine. I began training with Peter and other master SE practitioners in 2016, and became a registered SEP in 2022. My current practice is an integration of SE with other somatic modalities I have trained in as well as the philosophies and approaches of depth psychology and the expressive arts. I use movement, touch, voice, and sound to support clients and students in bringing their nervous systems back into regulation, and restoring access to their creative lifeforce.
I specialize in supporting people in the creative, teaching, and healing arts, and I offer both short-term and ongoing support. I have experience supporting the recovery of people of all genders and backgrounds. I see people living with complex PTSD, developmental and relational trauma, traumatic events such as car accidents or violent assault, social/cultural trauma, ancestral trauma, chronic illness, burnout, complex grief, and creative injuries of all kinds. Each session is tailored to the individual client or student. Sessions may include the use of SE® , SE® Touch, poetic and narrative methods, somatic movement and meditation, sound healing, Dream Tending®, ritual, and archetypal astrology.
More about Somatic Experiencing® (SE)
Somatic Experiencing® is a body-based, intuitive, and naturalistic approach to healing trauma at the foundation of my practice. It was developed by Peter Levine in collaboration with other neurobiologists, traumatologists, bodyworkers, and psychotherapists who have all focused their life’s work on improving our understanding and treatment of traumatic stress. Its practices help us begin to access the body’s own deep intelligence for how to move through stuck or thwarted survival responses to stressful events and environments to bring the nervous system and other systems of body back into states of balance, regulation, coherence, and flow.
SE®-informed sessions may initially focus on learning tools for regulation and coming to understand how your individual nervous system works and why its responses makes sense. Through a gentle collaborative process, we will begin to learn the language of your body, discover what it needs, and attend to creating the right conditions for those needs to be met, so healing can happen. Both verbal guidance and gentle touch support are used to support accessing and enhancing interoception–feeling inside the body. As trust and capacity are established, we find ways to process traumatic content and complete defensive responses from past experiences, so that you can move more fully into the present with greater ease and aliveness. As capacity and resilience are restored, we may complete our work and learning together, or we may turn our attention to furthering and supporting creativity and expressive endeavors.
Sessions are offered in-person in SE Portland, OR, and remotely to those around the world. Mindy is especially passionate about supporting humans healing from the impacts of developmental trauma and CPTSD that are compromising their ability access their full creative lifeforce. This includes those who have experienced religious trauma, grew up abusive or high-control households, or have been in relationships or situations where self-expression had to be carefully inhibited to stay safe. It also includes those who have experienced traumatic events or injuries connected to their creative work, and those intentionally using art to transmute personal and collective trauma. She has completed additional master classes with Peter Levine and Betsy Polatin on trauma and the performing artist, and her own doctoral research focused on the how trauma impacts the voice and expression, and how we use our voices to heal.
More about SE touch work
SE (Somatic Experiencing®) touch work is a form of body-based therapy that uses gentle, supportive touch to help the nervous system regulate and release the physical effects of trauma. Our systems are designed for this kind of connection and co-regulation, and it can help clients who have experienced trauma, particularly pre-verbal or developmental trauma, to feel more grounded, resilient, and connected to their bodies. SE touch work is done with clothes on, either seated or lying down on a massage table. Together, we attune to what your body is communicating through through its nonverbal cues of sensations, movement impulses, feelings, and more. This tells us where a touch-hold might be most supportive. This may be the shoulders and back, head and neck, joints, or feet; organs like the lungs or kidneys; or wherever tension and charge is currently bound up. Conscious attention and self-touch are also effective ways to enhance regulation and restore flow, for those unable to do in-person sessions. But many find that therapeutic touch from an SEP offers a deeper, more visceral connection, and may accelerate healing processes.
More about poetic and narrative methods
My work with poetry and storytelling is informed by decades of writing and teaching experience, as well as my research into voice and expression.
Traumatic experiences are characteristically difficult and, at times, nearly impossible to express in words. There are stages of the healing process that do not require speaking or expression at all–only listening to the body’s own language, and allowing it to work through its stuck survival responses. There are also stages of healing, and also specific kinds of trauma, that seem to require exactly that—voicing it in words. We may have to recover or develop for the first time our ability to speak honestly, express the truth as we feel and see it, and tell our story. In doing so, we integrate our healing, bring ourselves more fully into the present, and claim our birthright to be the primary author of and authority on our own lives.
I know this territory personally and intimately. And while there is some mystery to how we negotiate language in order to draw our experiences to the surface, and let ourselves be seen and heard and understood, there are concrete methods for doing so. Whether you are in the deep middle of healing your core trauma; working to integrate years of healing work so you can move forward; or on an emergent journey to make the kind of art you are called to make, I can support you in using the imaginative, poetic, and storytelling modes of language to deepen your understanding of yourself and make your process more potent and more beautiful.
More about somatic movement and meditation
Somatics is a large, exciting, and diverse field of practices. What they have in common is a devotion to the lived experience of the body, and an invitation to go deeper into our own subjectivity–to know ourselves as full subjects, not objects that our conscious mind is split from. Rather than teaching us repertoires of poses and movements to practice by rote, somatic practices invite us to slow down, get present, and notice what is arising in our field of present conscious attention. We may notice sensations, movement impulses, feelings, images, memories, thoughts, or meanings–our sometimes distinct, sometimes indistinct or entangled channels of perception. There is explicit permission in somatic practices to just experience, witness, and be moved by what is arising from within. For example, we may move as we feel a genuine impulse to move, and just allow a spontaneous, authentic movement to unfold. Movement in this context can include stillness, and curling up in a ball on the floor.
When we are new to this kind of practice, we may feel a great deal of self-consciousness. We might encounter internalized rules about how we are “supposed to move and look and act and feel,” learned from childhood, or certain kinds of movement training. But over time, we get to experience a deep kind of freedom from all that old learning. We discover our capacity how to suspend the mind-body split, enter nondual states of consciousness, and have a direct encounter of our unsplit Self. The somatic method that most informs my practice (besides Somatic Experiencing!) is Authentic Movement. I have also been taught by faculty of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s method Body Mind Centering, and Linda Lack’s The Thinking Body Feeling Mind. If you would like to explore somatic movement and meditation practices with, let me know ahead of booking a session, and I will offer some open times for us to meet at the Ground Floor studio on MLK in NE Portland.