About
Sandra Fitting, LMFT
I am a somatic-based licensed marriage and family therapist with decades of spiritual practice, helping people reconnect to their best selves. Life can be stressful, especially if you are carrying unresolved trauma that keeps you from feeling safe, managing boundaries, and fully living your life. Do you find that the same issues arise again and again, only with different characters and scenarios? Are you feeling stuck and unable to move to the next level or phase of your life? Every aspect of your satisfying life is already in place, awaiting your presence. I can help to guide you there.
I am a deeply, empathetic, active listener with developed intuition and many decades of spiritual practice. Using Somatic Experiencing, mindfulness, and engaging rituals to assist you with your life transitions, I can support you in reconnecting with your most authentic self and provide tools to help you keep aligned with your most rewarding life.
Activities & Affiliations
California Association for Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) – Clinical Member
Marin CAMFT – Clinical Member
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
Member, San Francisco Zen Center
Licensed by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences: Lic# 127674
Questions and Answers
FAQ’s
Q: What is Somatic Therapy?
A: Also known as somatic experiencing and somatic experiencing therapy, somatic therapy incorporates the mind, body, and spirit into therapeutic healing work. Somatic therapy aims to treat the effects of PTSD and other mental and emotional health issues through the connection of mind and body and uses a body-centric approach.
Q: How does Somatic Experiencing work?
A: Created by Peter Levine, PhD, Somatic Experiencing works on the principle that trauma gets trapped in the nervous system, leading to some of the symptoms people with PTSD or people who have experienced trauma might experience. Through this method, practitioners work on releasing this stress from the body.
Many people who have experienced trauma, especially those who have experienced physical trauma such as domestic violence or sexual assault, can dissociate or disconnect from their bodies in a “fight, flight, freeze or appease” response.
Somatic experiencing helps them have an increased sense of awareness of their internal experience and to release stored trauma.
Q: What is mindfulness-based psychotherapy?
A: Mindfulness-based therapy, along with mindful self-compassion and loving-kindness, is the core of holistic soul-centered therapy. It will assist you in being able to perceive things as they actually are, in the here and now, rather than through the illusion derived by limiting thoughts and beliefs.
Practicing the skill of mindfulness through mindfulness-based therapy, helps us become increasingly aware of old, limiting patterns of thought, belief, behavior and emotion that we’ve been conditioned into acting out and believing, due to our past wounding and hurtful abuse by others. As we practice we experience more and more clearly that these patterns of unconscious behavior are actually rooted in our inner world – and in our present adult reality and are not being caused by external circumstances and people.
In this psychotherapy, we engage difficult feelings rather than avoiding or try to extinguish them. We believe that sitting in awareness of your adverse feelings, “staying present,” will reveal the true source of our suffering. You will learn how to be fully present with the energetic charge or contraction connected to the distressing thoughts, memories and body sensations, which will then digest, dissolve or “metabolize” the contractions into wholeness.
Rumi:
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”