Healing at the Root
A Six-Month Online Group Exploring the Trauma Beneath Addictive Behavior
Addiction is not the problem. It's the body's answer to a problem—usually trauma, usually pain that never had anywhere safe to go.
This group works at that root. Each weekly session includes grounding practice, teaching, discussion, and experiential work—and each month builds on the last.
Month 1: Safety First—Your Nervous System 101
How the nervous system works, why willpower can't override a body that senses threat, and a foundation of grounding, orientation, and mindfulness practices you can use immediately.
Month 2: Addiction as Adaptation
Addictive behavior as the best strategy a hurting nervous system could find.
Drawing on Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy (IHRP), developed by Dr. Andrew Tatarsky: the stages of change, meeting ambivalence with curiosity, and the decisional balance. Every positive step counts.
Month 3: Riding the Wave—Cravings & Overwhelm
Practical skills for the hardest moments: Urge Surfing, Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP), and distress tolerance tools for meeting cravings and overwhelming states without reaching for the old strategy.
Month 4: The Body Remembers—Somatic Experiencing
How trauma lives in the body—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—and SE's core tools for working with it:
Pendulation: Moving between activation and ground to build real capacity for stress
Titration: One drop at a time, never flooding
Resourcing: Reliable places of safety in the body
Plus an EMDR-informed understanding of how traumatic memory heals.
Month 5: Befriending What We Feel—ISP & Inner Parts
Emotional expansion from Integral Somatic Psychology: when shame, grief, or rage has us stuck, we widen the feeling through the body—and what gets room, moves.
Then Inner Relationship Focusing for the parts in conflict—the part that wants to use and the part that doesn't—learning to listen to what each protects and gently making contact with the younger, traumatized parts who first learned to cope alone.
Month 6: Living It—Boundaries, Connection & the Road Ahead
Boundary-setting and assertive communication, Radical Acceptance for what we cannot control, self-compassion as daily practice, and a personal, sustainable plan for the road ahead.
Come as You Are
One standing agreement, all six months: no shame, no force, no one-size-fits-all sobriety test at the door.
Everything is invitational. Come as you are—we'll start where you are.
Program Details
When: Saturdays at 10:00 AM ET, beginning October 3rd
Location: Online
Cost: $25 per session; sliding scale available
Register: somaticrecoveryny@gmail.com
Website: www.somaticrecovery.com
Facilitated by David McNamara, SEP, CARC, ISP