When Your Body Says No: Depth Psychotherapy and Somatic Healing

As a depth psychotherapy and somatic experiencing therapy practitioner in the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles areas, I've witnessed countless high-achieving women reach a crossroads where their bodies demand they slow down. Often, this moment arrives disguised as chronic fatigue, digestive issues, hormonal imbalances, or that persistent feeling that something essential is missing despite outward success.

This pattern of override runs deeper than individual choice—it's woven into the fabric of how we're taught to navigate the world. The very qualities that bring success can become the patterns that eventually demand we stop and listen to what we've been overriding.

The Hidden Cost of Achievement Culture

In my own journey from high-level athletics and academic striving to chronic illness in my twenties, I discovered what many women in our achievement-oriented culture face: the shadow side of success. We learn to override our physiological needs for rest and attunement until our systems demand a full stop.

This isn't a moral failing or lack of motivation—it's a nervous system response. What we often label as "laziness" is frequently a survival state, our body's wisdom attempting to restore balance after years of pushing beyond sustainable rhythms.

Beyond Traditional Talk Therapy: A Somatic Approach

When traditional Western medicine couldn't address my chronic fatigue and system shutdown, I discovered the profound healing available through somatic experiencing therapy. This approach recognizes that trauma and life patterns are held not just in our minds, but in our bodies' physiology—in that unconscious realm that exists outside linear time.

Working with EMDR therapy in Santa Barbara initially helped me process some of the stored activation, but it was the addition of somatic work that truly allowed me to unwind the trauma that had my life force stuck for over a decade. Through slowing down and attuning to my body's signals, I began to meet those parts that get lost when we focus solely on cognitive, story-based content.

The Dance of Depth and Soma

Depth psychotherapy in Santa Barbara offers something unique—a rich medicine bag that acknowledges the unconscious forces shaping our behavior, moods, and impulses. This work explores shadow material through dreams, imagination, and the mythic dimensions of our personal stories.

When combined with somatic approaches, we address both the archetypal patterns and the physiological responses that keep us stuck. No two sessions are exactly alike—it's more akin to a dance, staying present and attuned to what arises in the therapeutic container.

For the High-Achieving Woman Ready to Go Deeper

If you're a high-achieving woman in Santa Barbara who finds herself continually repeating the same behaviors despite your intelligence and awareness, you may be ready for something beyond traditional approaches. Perhaps you're:

• Struggling with patterns of highs and lows, or perpetual overwhelm

• Finding it extremely difficult to relax or attune to your body's needs

• Aware that you're playing small in areas of your life

• Sensing there's another dimension of yourself you haven't accessed yet

• Caught between perfectionism and authentic self-expression

• Navigating transitions like motherhood, relationship changes, or career shifts

Reclaiming Your Natural Rhythm

What I've learned—both personally and through years of practice—is that we all have intrinsic motivation at a soul level when we tap into our greater sense of purpose. The work isn't about developing better "work ethic," but about discovering what I call our "capacity for activity and need for rest mixed with intrinsic motivation."

In Santa Barbara's naturally rhythm-honoring environment, surrounded by ocean cycles and seasonal changes, there's a unique opportunity to reconnect with these deeper patterns. The challenge is learning to trust them again after years of override.

The Invitation to Depth Work

Therapy for high-achieving women in Santa Barbara doesn't have to mean more strategies for managing symptoms. It can mean meeting yourself at the level where transformation actually happens—in the marriage between psyche and soma, between the archetypal patterns that guide us and the physiological wisdom that sustains us.

If you're ready to explore beyond the surface, to dance with what wants to emerge rather than forcing what you think should happen, depth and somatic work offers a pathway home to your authentic aliveness.

The journey from override to authentic rhythm isn't always comfortable, but it reveals the wholeness that has been present all along—and the healer that lives within you.

Molly Mitchell-Hardt Field, LMFT, offers depth psychotherapy and somatic experiencing therapy for individuals, couples, and groups in Santa Barbara. She specializes in working with women navigating transitions, mothers seeking to break override patterns, and anyone ready to explore the deeper dimensions of healing and authentic selfhood.

Perfection: A Death Wish

Perhaps perfection is an avoidance of being fully seen. A rejection of life, aliveness, the mystery, truly an aspect of Thanatos, the embodiment of death. Perfectionism is sterile, it sucks dry life’s juicy unknown. The dark feminine. There is a tightness around the somatic experience of striving for perfection, a very tine line to walk, a very small box to inhabit. What surrounds the narrow scope of perfection's gaze, is a belief deep down stuck on repeat, that parrots, "I am not enough as I am." This belief becomes the fertile ground for judgement, competition, and comparison and underneath it all is a grief stricken child who longs for unconditional love.

There is no freedom in her perfect little box, just a hamster spinning on a wheel. Who created this box? Perhaps it is like a family heirloom, passed down through many generations, only to land in her hands. Perhaps it is the patriarchy that she was born into. A social system that systematically devalues her, fears her darkness, her wildness, her power.

Striving for perfection is what keeps her slave to the capitalist regime.

Commodified we are. Bodies bought and sold, forgetting they house souls. Yet no matter how much is bought and sold, there will never be enough to satiate the hunger of perfection. We are being fed a lie, "perfection" does not exist here, not on this earthly plane.

Yet, we live in a culture ruled by the toxic masculine, a culture that promotes and demands the impossibility of perfection, inject that there, nip and tuck this here, maybe then I will be enough. We live under a hypnosis that convinces us that we must constantly improve who we are. What if we all, in this moment hopped off the hamster wheel and saw our own power and wholeness? What a rebellion! I would imagine that capitalism as we know it would collapse.

There is an incredible well of emptiness underneath this addiction, underneath this insatiable hunger. An emptiness that can only be filled by spirit, soul. Fear is its fuel. There will never be enough accomplishment, enough beauty, enough control, enough talent to fill that empty space.

Striving for impossible perfection is what causes us to starve ourselves and slit our wrists. Driving us toward a perfection that exists only in death, the afterlife.

Let us remember the beauty in aliveness. It is in the imperfections that our uniqueness lives, our one of a kind flavor. No, you do not need to be perfect in order to be lovable, it is quite to the contrary, it is in your imperfections that there is space for love to blossom.

Article Written for Channel the Sun Magazine

Snap the Goddess Awake!

Article from Channel the Sun Magazine

Snap! The Robot Awake…aka Awaken the Goddess. The mythological Goddess has been living underground in the psyche of all Earth’s sentient beings for thousands of years. The effects of which are evident in the ailments of our modern world, ailments that I believe can be healed through Her reemergence and the marriage of masculine and feminine principles on a macro and micro level. 

The reality is that this is not a women’s issue alone; this is a human issue. Patriarchy is not synonymous with the masculine, it is a societal structure based on power and control. Women can be just as competitive and power hungry as men (Woodman, 1993, p. 120). Though the feminine in men is more damaged than in women, this is an issue that we must work on together (p. 119). As Woodman put it (1985):

The word “feminine,” as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out. (p. 10)

We are living in a time that does not have any mythological role models to ground us in a meaningful spiritual context. The challenge for women is to “flower as individuals” in the image of a woman, not a man, but “there are no models in our mythology for an individual woman’s quest. Nor is there any model for the male in marriage to an individuated female” (Campbell, 2013, p. xiv). We have to go boldly into the future and recreate our own stories, new metaphors that fit our modern paradigm, while simultaneously connecting us to our roots in ancient wisdom. “We are in this thing together and have to work it out together…in patient fostering of each other’s growth” (Campbell, 2013, p. xiv).

Herman Wirth, a lecturer and professor in the 1980s in Germany, posited “the primordial Mother Goddess as the original religious impulse of humanity…. He held that a resurgence of this impulse is now necessary, based on spiritual potential rather than external power, if our humanity is to survive” (Gimbutas, 1991, p. 50). Wirth believed that the earliest forms of society were matriarchal in structure before 2500 B.C. (p. 50). In these earlier agricultural societies, the Goddess was a symbol of regeneration not only in human birth, but in all birth in the natural world (p. 30). The gradual transformation from a matriarchal society to a patriarchal society was initiated between 4500-2500 B.C. when patriarchal nomadic tribes led by war gods began invading southeastern Europe (p. 48).  

Over time, the Goddess became repressed in the shadow of the psyche, the depth of the collective unconscious, and the masculine power structure began to take hold. As mythologist, writer, and lecturer, Joseph Campbell said:

In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. (2013, p. xxiii)

The deadness of the goddess universe is evident in how disconnected our society is from the feminine earth and from Her various forms of nourishment, our food, our forests, our landfills. Even wild, feminine nature Herself is perceived as a threat; a forlorn and terrifying place, a place that the imbalanced masculine continues to control, destroy, and exploit.

It appears that patriarchal structure, oriented around power, competition, efficiency, and status has squeezed out the unique powers symbolized by the Goddess and “left no room for feminine meandering…. The feminine isn’t interested in being at the top; she is dedicated to life in the moment (Woodman, 1993, p. 116). If we are to have faith in the natural cycles of life, our current time of overpowering patriarchy is as natural as the waning and waxing of the moon. Perhaps, we have to leave the Garden of Eden, so to speak, in order to have a divine context for who we truly are. To that end this fall from grace appears to be necessary to the evolution of humanity. 

In the meantime, as citizens of this power-driven world, we are actually far less powerful, expansive, and self-realized than we could be if the feminine were to be reintegrated into our masculine-dominated consciousness. As Campbell (2004) said, “the shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also sort of a vault: it holds great unrealized potentialities within”(p. 73). The Goddess and what she symbolizes is part of this unrealized potentiality. The potential of collaboration, presence, spontaneity, and flow. The possibility of living through the heart, deep intuition, body wisdom, and connection to the cycles of life and death. It is apparent that “if only a portion of that lost totality could be drudged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life” (Campbell, 2008, p. 12). This would trigger a rebirth in the process of restoring harmony and balance to the complimentary natures of masculine and feminine.