Dr Sharon Stanley

Dr Sharon Stanley is a psychotherapist, educator and writer living on Bainbridge Island, Washington. As a long time student of Allan Schore, she has integrated a number of somatic practices for healing trauma into an elegant, cohesive, relational and phenomenological model of psychotherapy, Somatic Transformation.

At the core of Somatic Transformation is the practice of feeling into another’s inner world: a bodily based attunement, connectivity and inquiry that animates the intersubjective field and guides the use of somatic interventions and reflection. Sharon has taught this model to hundreds of practitioners over the past 20 years.

She continues to explore somatic ways of knowing, relating and psychological processing from a phenomenological perspective through the lenses of her own clinical practice, neuroscience and nature-based practices.

In addition to her in-depth courses for practicing psychotherapists, Sharon has worked extensively with First Nations people in Canada, studied Afro-Brazilian practices of healing the residue of the trauma of slavery in Brazil and is currently on the faculty for Antioch University in Seattle. In 2016, Routledge published her book: Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma: Lifting the Burdens of the Past. (2016) Routledge.