Relationship Rebuild & Communication Support
Service Type(s):
- Couples Counselling
- Communication Coaching
- Conflict Resolution Support
Service(s) Delivered:
- Joint Intake Session + Individual Check-ins (as needed)
- 8-Session Couples Program
- Communication Frameworks & Take-Home Exercises
This case involves a woman in her mid-20s who sought Body Psychotherapy to address long-standing difficulties with asserting herself in professional and personal settings. She worked as a junior accountant in a large accountancy firm and consistently found herself intimidated by her male boss. Despite being competent and hardworking, she would go out of her way to please him, often working overtime without extra pay and overextending herself to avoid conflict or disapproval. She spoke quickly, jumped between topics, and found it difficult to express her needs or say no.
From early discussions, it became clear that this pattern of fawning and handing over her power to authority figures was rooted in her early attachment experiences with her mother. She had a younger sibling very close in age, and her mother had invested significant attention in the sibling while she was praised for being a “good” child. She learned to maintain harmony by being compliant and helpful, but she never developed the skills to assert her own needs. Although she had been a capable, cooperative, and well-behaved child, this early dynamic created a subtle but persistent pattern of self-effacement and diminished personal power that extended into adulthood.
Her lack of groundedness was reflected in her posture, breathing, and habitual movement patterns. She tended to live in her head, rarely feeling her body below the waist, and her tension manifested in high shoulders, shallow breathing and fidgeting. These bodily patterns reinforced her tendency to hand over power to others, as she had little embodied sense of her own boundaries or needs. Her natural intelligence and charm often masked these underlying dynamics, but they contributed to chronic fatigue, stress, and dissatisfaction with her work and relationships.
We used Body Psychotherapy to help establish more somatic awareness and grounding. Initially, we worked on connecting her attention to her lower body through gentle movements, breathwork, and exercises that emphasized stability and embodiment. Through this work, she began noticing habitual patterns of tension, collapse, and overextension when in the presence of authority figures. Early sessions also explored the early mother wound, helping her recognize how her need to be “good” and compliant as a child had shaped her adult relational patterns.
As therapy progressed, we used the expressive and experiential as aspects of Body Psychotherapy to help her directly experience and work with her relational patterns. These scenarios mirrored her early experiences with her mother and sibling, as well as the current dynamics with her boss. By physically enacting scenarios that reflected the power imbalances and boundary challenges in her workplace, she could feel, in real time, where she automatically surrendered her energy and how she could reclaim it.
As therapy progressed, she began to experiment with expressing boundaries and asserting her needs in a more rightful way, both in the therapy room and in her daily life. She also noticed a sense of personal power emerging, allowing her to engage in professional relationships with clarity and confidence.
By the later stages of therapy, she had strengthened her ability to assert herself and maintain healthy boundaries. Recognizing that the workplace dynamics were unlikely to shift substantially, she made the decision to move to a different company, where she secured better pay, improved conditions, and a professional environment that respected her skills and contributions.
This case demonstrates how Somatic Psychotherapy can help clients develop healthy assertion, strengthen personal boundaries, and cultivate autonomy. By allowing emotional expression, early attachment wounds, and habitual patterns of compliance, clients can transform long-standing relational dynamics and create opportunities for more empowered, fulfilling life choices.
