Somatic Art Therapy for Healing Trauma, Chronic Stress, & Anxiety
Alyssa Jurewicz-Johns, Trauma-Informed
Can words alone express a trauma, whether personal or collective, or should we explore other forms of expression to fully convey the complexity of our human experiences?
Somatic Art Therapy with Alyssa Jurewicz-Johns
There is a vast world of sensation happening within your body that is impacting your life.
Somatic Art Therapy for Deep Healing, Trauma Recovery & Lasting Change
It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve tried everything—talk therapy, medications, self-help books, lifestyle changes, and alternative therapies like reiki, acupuncture, and massage —just to be still left struggling with the same familiar relationship challenges, physical pains, emotional instabilities, mental health diagnoses, chronic illnesses, and overall feeling like your needs aren’t being fully met.
Despite many people’s best efforts and full awareness of their struggles, they stay stuck in symptom management rather than getting to the root of what brings them to therapy in the first place. Somatic art therapy goes beyond symptom management by including the body in the healing process, working with the nervous system to address the root causes of stress, trauma, and pain for lasting emotional and physical healing. Want to know what is somatic art therapy? Click here to learn more about it.
“Everything about working with Alyssa felt fated. Her guidance through the rooms of my own body, mind, and soul took time but has been powerful. The combination of somatic and expressive art practices she utilizes in sessions are perfect for me — I'm continually met with new revelations after each one.” ~ Kate G.
Unlock Healing: Body-Based Somatic Art Therapy
Your Body is a Vehicle of Awareness.
Trauma and chronic stress are not just a psychological event but a physiological experience that is stored in the body — often manifesting as chronic pain, tension, emotional overwhelm, auto-immune issues, brain fog, and other physical ailments like digestive issues and insomnia.
If left unresolved, trauma and chronic stress dysregulate the nervous system keeping you stuck in patterns of stress and emotional reactivity.
Using a body-based approach to somatic art therapy, Alyssa helps you become aware of your body’s learned nervous system responses, shaped by early life experiences. By working with your autonomic nervous system—the source of you survival responses—and integrating new non-verbal creative practices like movement and art to express and process your personal stories and traumas, somatic art therapy uses your body’s own innate wisdom to repattern your reactions to stress and emotional triggers, leading to lasting change and emotional resilience.
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Trauma is not just an emotional experience but a physical disruption in the body’s nervous system that occurs when we are unable to fully process or integrate an overwhelming experience.
When trauma occurs, the body’s natural ability to regulate itself is compromised, often leading to physical manifestations such as chronic pain, inflammation, digestive issues, or tension. These responses are the body’s attempt to protect itself, but when unresolved, they can become chronic states that affect a person’s ability to connect with themselves, with others, and with life as a whole.
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The two main types of physical traumas:
Blunt force trauma: when an object or force strikes the body, often resulting in concussions, deep cuts, or broken bones.
Penetrating trauma: when an object pierces the skin or body, usually creating an open wound.
These types of traumas may result from accidents, surgeries, physical abuse, chronic illnesses, childbirth complications, and other events that cause people to lose trust in their bodies and feel feel their bodies have failed them as a result of a radical physical change.
Somatic art therapy is a pathway to restoring trust and connection with your body.
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Chronic stress disrupts the nervous system, keeping the body in a constant state of tension and imbalance. It leads to symptoms like anxiety, depression, sleep issues, digestive problems, and chronic pain, while also increasing the risk of illness.
Somatic art therapy helps release stored tension, restore balance to the nervous system, and invite deeper healing, allowing you to move through life with greater ease, vitality, and a renewed connection to your body’s wisdom.
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Traditional therapy often focuses primarily on verbal communication and cognitive processes, sometimes overlooking the crucial connection between the body and mind. Somatic therapy recognizes and addresses this connection, understanding that emotional experiences are often held and expressed through bodily sensations, movements, and postures.
Some clients may struggle to articulate their thoughts and feelings through words alone. Somatic art therapy offers alternative forms of expression, such as movement, art, and other creative modalities, allowing clients to communicate and process their experiences in nonverbal ways.
Rather than solely relying on insight-oriented dialogue, somatic therapy emphasizes experiential learning and direct engagement with bodily sensations and emotions. This approach can lead to deeper insights, transformative shifts, and lasting change.
Alyssa’s Somatic Art Therapy Focus Areas
How somatic art therapy is tailored for your healing journey
Healing Unresolved Past Trauma
Unresolved past trauma lives in the body, shaping how we respond to stress, emotions, and relationships. Somatic art therapy helps rewire your nervous system for healthier, more balanced responses.
Healing Chronic Stress, Anxiety & Depression
Somatic art therapy helps manage chronic stress, anxiety, and depression by addressing physical symptoms and building emotional resilience through a deeper connection to your body.
Healing Functional Illness & Chronic Pain
If you're struggling with chronic pain, inflammation, fatigue, or digestive issues, somatic art therapy helps uncover the connection between your physical symptoms and stress, emotional overload, or past experiences, offering a path to healing and relief.
Body Trauma + Pre & Post Operation Counseling
Somatic art therapy helps rebuild trust in your body after surgery, a diagnosis, or physical trauma by using evidence-based methods to reduce anxiety, support recovery, ease pain, and reclaim resilience.
Somatic Art Therapy: A Grounded Approach to Deep Healing
Somatic art therapy is the difference between expressing yourself and explaining yourself.
Alyssa’s approach to somatic art therapy combines deep knowledge of Trauma-informed Polyvagal Theory, the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, and 5Rhythms® to work directly with your body and nervous system.
This isn’t talk therapy alone.
Using body based somatic art therapy, Alyssa guides you through body-based sessions to better understand your learned responses and sensations, gain insight that help you bridge how past experiences affect your current life, and gently shift habits that no longer fit the identity of the person you want to become.
Together, you’ll use movement, art, breathwork, psychokinetic imagery, and nervous system mapping to process trauma, reduce anxiety, ease chronic tension, get to the root of what brings you to somatic art therapy in the first place, and find a real sense of balance beyond symptom management.
This is about lasting change—grounded in science yet expanded to account for the vast wholeness of the human experience.
Work with Alyssa Jurewicz-Johns: In person & Online Somatic Art Therapy Sessions
Somatic art therapy is your path to repairing trust and safety in the body.
“Through the dance practice and1:1 work with Alyssa, I’ve become calmer, more excepting of how my life moves along — dynamic and ever-changing, but not so overwhelming. I’m learning about boundary setting, dealing with expectations, accepting my emotional way of being, accepting myself as I am.” ~ Zo R.
Meet Alyssa Jurewicz-Johns: Somatic Art Therapy
Alyssa brings over a two decades of experience in movement-based therapies and the mind-body connection, including extensive training with the Tamalpa Institute both as a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist, Tamalpa Life/Art Process facilitator, a certified 5Rhythms® teacher, certified 200-hr yoga instructor, as well as a Masters in Social Work with a decade long career working with Pittsburgh’s most underserved communities.
Her somatic art therapy expertise combines these modalities with trauma-informed care and Polyvagal Theory to offer a deeply creative approach to healing through movement, nervous system awareness, expressive arts, and psychokinetic imagery—a process that uses visualization to release trauma, connect with internal resources and work through pain, even when physical movement isn’t accessible.
The foundation of Alyssa’s approach to somatic art therapy is rooted in the belief that our bodies hold our entire life experience, and movement is the primary language of the body. She believes that that each client is already whole as they are and, even in the midst of healing, there is nothing to be fixed, only discoveries to be made.
Are you ready to begin your somatic art therapy healing journey?
