Somatic Integration and Processing
If this sounds familiar
You have the training. What holds it together?
Skilled EMDR and trauma therapists keep meeting the same wall. The protocol is clear, but the case conceptualization underneath it is too thin for complex trauma, shame, dissociation, attachment wounds, somatic survival responses, and relational enactments. Most of us are trained in many methods, EMDR, IFS, somatic and parts work, and still end up practicing them as disconnected fragments.
The tools are not the problem. Nothing is holding them together.
The case conceptualization layer
You don't need another modality. You need a way to hold the ones you already have.
Somatic Integration and Processing (SIP) is an integrator: the case-conceptualization layer that lets the modalities a therapist already uses, EMDR, parts work, somatic work, attachment work, cohere into one picture of the person in the room. It draws on interpersonal neurobiology, attachment and neurodevelopment, somatic psychology, the Adaptive Information Processing model, memory reconsolidation, and parts and ego-state theory. Modalities cannot integrate themselves. SIP is the layer that makes them work as one.
SIP is not another modality. It is not a rival to EMDR, IFS, Somatic Experiencing, AEDP, or the relational and psychodynamic traditions many of us also work inside. SIP is the layer beneath the modality: the case-conceptualization ground that lets us name what is happening in the room, especially when the protocol we are trained in has stopped telling us what to do next.
SIP never asks anyone to abandon their training. It gathers what many clinicians are already holding, attachment and neurodevelopment, the body, memory and how memory updates, and the relationship all three of those live inside, and gives it back as one working picture. Not a puzzle to assemble. A constellation to pick up.
The three lenses
Relationship. Body. Memory.
Three lenses on the same person, grounded in safety and co-regulation, and held inside the relationship between client and therapist. In the walkthrough, each lens picks up a different part of one case, and the treatment plan falls out of seeing all three at once.
Lens 01 · Relationship
Attachment and neurodevelopment
The formative relationships that taught the body its first lessons, the adult relationships that repeat their shape, and the therapy itself.
"Once you can see it that way, the Relationship sphere is not context. It is the material."
Lens 02 · Body
Somatic psychology
The nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do, on schedule, including the dissociation that shows up when activation gets big.
"The Body sphere is asking to be listened to before it is asked to do anything."
Lens 03 · Memory
Adaptive Information Processing and memory reconsolidation
Not only what happened, but the lesson stored with it, and what has to be true in the room before any of it can update.
"The Memory sphere is not asking for reprocessing faster. It is asking for the conditions under which any of these memories can update at all to be built first."
The deepest differentiator
Most models look at the client. SIP looks at the whole room.
SIP is a three-person psychology: the client, the therapist, and the relationship between them. A window and a mirror. It explicitly includes the person of the therapist, their own parts, nervous system, and use of self, as equally present in the room. None of what the lenses pick up is visible outside a relationship, and what the therapist does with the case's invitation is the treatment.
The most powerful shift was never learning one more technique. It's learning to see yourself in the room.
What it gives you in the room
One shared language for the case
A client's core wound, the strategy that once protected it, and the belief that still holds the symptom in place, with the nervous system underneath. Conceptualization becomes clear, relational, and repeatable across every modality you use.
Core wound
The injury
Strategy
The protection
Pro-symptom belief
What sustains it
Somatic correlates
The nervous system
Symptoms read as protective strategies rather than disorders. That is the treatment plan before there is a treatment plan: it de-shames every symptom, makes the network legible, and gives client and therapist shared language for what any future target is actually about.
What you will learn
Training objectives
01
Increase conceptualization skills with an emphasis on interpreting symptoms and behavior through a developmental and nervous system informed perspective.
02
Teach participants a clinical approach to case conceptualization that is trauma informed and focused on the impact of past experience on present behavior.
03
Prepare participants to anchor clients in the safety of a co-regulated relationship before beginning therapeutic processing of past traumas and life experiences. Prepare participants to utilize the theory and tools of SIP to track client's progress in sessions and over the course of the therapeutic relationship.
Who it is for
The experienced, multi-trained clinician who feels integrative but fragmented
Someone who needs the coherence their other trainings assumed but never taught. SIP has deep roots in relational EMDR and the walkthrough workshops an EMDR case, and the way of seeing is portable: it translates into whatever modality a clinician carries into the room.
Free resources for therapists
Read SIP before you train in it
Three PDFs that describe the framework in Bridger's own words. No form, no email. Take them into your next consultation.
A Window and a Mirror: Somatic Integration and Processing for Case Conceptualization
Chapter 9, adapted from Falkenstien, B. (2025), in D. Polidi (Ed.), IFS-Informed EMDR: Creative and Collaborative Approaches. Routledge.
SIP as both a clinical map and a relational process: a window into the client's lived experience and a mirror reflecting the therapist's own subjectivity within the therapeutic relationship.
SIP and Self Schema: The Wound, the Strategy, the Belief
A research brief by Bridger Falkenstien, PhD, LPC, NCC, written for students of SIP.
Archetypal examples of core wounds, where they come from, the strategies that grow up to protect them, and the pro-symptom beliefs that keep the symptom in place. A guide, not a diagnosis.
Video Companion Worksheet: Follow the case. Then bring your own.
A companion worksheet for the SIP introduction video, with Bridger Falkenstien. Twelve pages.
Pages 1 through 7 follow the composite case as the video walks it through the three spheres, arrives at one shared sentence, and builds an EMDR plan from periphery to center. Pages 8 through 12 hand the same way of seeing to a case of your own.
Train in it
SIP 1: the three-day training
Everything on this page is taught live in SIP 1: three consecutive days with one cohort, in person in Springfield, MO, or on Zoom. Registration runs through the Beyond Healing Course Calendar; dates, credits, tuition, eligibility, and faculty live on the training page.
Format
Three consecutive days of live training. Hybrid: in person in Springfield, MO, or live on Zoom. Current dates are on the course calendar.
Available credits
SIP 1 is credentialed for the following hours: 21 NBCC Hours and 10 EMDRIA Advanced Training Hours.
Please confirm with your governing agencies which hour types you are able to apply to your continuing education requirements.
Investment
$700
Full price. Pay in full discounts and payment plans: pay now $650, or 6 payments of $116.67.
Questions
Frequently asked
Is SIP a therapy modality?
No. SIP is not another modality competing with EMDR, IFS, Polyvagal, Somatic Experiencing, or ego-state work, and it never asks anyone to abandon their training. It is the integrative case-conceptualization layer that lets the modalities a therapist already uses cohere into one picture of the person in the room.
Do I need to be trained in EMDR?
SIP has deep roots in relational EMDR, and the walkthrough on this page workshops an EMDR case because EMDR is Bridger's modality. The framework itself is portable: trauma-focused clinicians of any modality use the same way of seeing inside the work they already do.
Is there a shorter introduction before committing to three days?
Yes. The walkthrough at the top of this page runs one full case through SIP. There is also a free one-hour training that gives a brief overview of the full three-day training: watch the one-hour overview.
Where do I register for SIP 1?
On the Beyond Healing Course Calendar, where every Beyond Healing Institute training registers: see SIP 1 dates and register. The SIP 1 training page carries the credits, tuition, eligibility, and faculty.
What comes after SIP 1?
SIP II: Healing the Fragmented Self and Complex Trauma takes the framework into complex trauma and the fragmented self. Each training is three days and carries 21 NBCC hours and 10 EMDRIA Advanced Training hours.
Ready when you are
Your training gave you the tools. SIP gives you a way to think with all of them at once.
Walkthrough transcript
Read the walkthrough
A lightly edited transcript of the video above. Select a timestamp to jump to that moment in the player. The composite case includes childhood sexual abuse and dissociation, so take it at your own pace.
If your caseload is anything like mine, it's filled with people carrying complex trauma, dissociation, and a deep, exhausted wish for the pain to just go away. Some of what we offer them works, and some of it works better than we could have ever hoped for. But still, some problems persist over time. Trouble in relationships, chronic depression and anxiety that just won't seem to lift. Body image struggles, disordered eating, sleep that does not restore, the list, as you know, keeps going. That gap between the tools working and the person still hurting is what this conversation is all about. There are a lot of trauma-focused, evidence-based therapies out there, and in my experience, a majority of them are genuinely excellent. But for the complex trauma caseload, having a good set of tools is not the entire answer. We also need a way of understanding how all of those tools can work together inside one treatment plan, especially when our favorite tool or intervention just isn't helping the client.
That is what Somatic Integration and Processing is all about. SIP is not another modality. It's not a rival for EMDR, IFS, somatic experiencing, AEDP, or the relational psychodynamic traditions many of us also work inside. SIP is the layer beneath the modality, the case conceptualization ground that lets us name what is happening in the room, especially when the protocol we trained in has stopped telling us what to do next. It gathers what a lot of us are already holding and paying attention to, with attachment and neurodevelopment, the body, memory and how memory updates, and the intersubjective field or the relationship that all of those other aspects live inside.
And it gives it back to us in one working picture, not a puzzle to assemble, a constellation to pick up. This is what we teach, three days with clinicians learning it first in themselves, then for the people they sit with. In this conversation, I'm going to run through a composite case through SIP together with you. This is an EMDR case because EMDR is my modality and my background, and it is where I feel most fluent workshopping. So if EMDR is not yours, that is completely okay. What SIP shows us in this case is portable. It'll go into any of the modalities that you're trained in to work with populations like this. One thing before we start though, this is a composite case. It is not a single client. The shape of it is one many of us have seen more than once. Some of the details are intense though, sexual abuse and childhood dissociation, a family that would not hear a disclosure of those things. So take this video at your own pace. Pause it if you need to. Come back to it when you feel ready.
Here's the case a colleague or a consultee could easily bring to a consultation. This is a client in her twenties, autistic, diagnosed as an adult after a long stretch of masking, quiet, articulate, careful with her words. She came in for anxiety and bad relationships. Three months in, what her therapist knows is that she was sexually abused by a family member from about age nine to 12. She disclosed once to her mother in her teens and was told the family would not survive the accusation. She has not spoken of it since until she spoke of it in this therapy. She was raised in a high control religious tradition, purity culture, obedience framed as love. She left their tradition in her early twenties. Her family is intact, warm on the surface and the abuse is not spoken of. She dissociates on the drive home from every holiday or forced or obligated interaction. She's had two long relationships that ended in the last four years, each time before her partner could end it first.
Sex became something she performed and then dissociated through. She works fully remote as a technical writer. She used to like it. Now she cannot make herself open the laptop most mornings. She has not left her apartment for anything but groceries in three weeks. When something in session gets, in her words, too big, she goes somewhere else. Her EMDR preparation went well. She could build a container. She could rate her SUDs honestly.
And then the session moved into target identification. And something happened. The protocol did not tell the therapist what to do with. Her voice went flat and precise. She described a scene she had told the therapist she had never spoken aloud before. And she rated it a two. The therapist's own body registered it as a nine. Between sessions, her functioning got worse. She stopped opening her laptop.
She canceled twice. She came back apologetic and composed and said she thought she should probably just push through. If you've done EMDR with complex trauma, you have been in this exact room. It is the room where keep running the protocol or abandon the protocol. Both feel wrong. And where neither of those feels like clinical judgment or the choice you want to make.
This is where SIP really comes in. Not by handing you a third technique or saying instead of that, do this. By handing you a way of seeing the case and yourself in it. The layer beneath the modality in which the move the case is asking for becomes so much more clear or even obvious when you look at all of the pieces. Your modality of choice does not go away.
EMDR is still going to be the vehicle. What SIP offers first is a picture that lets us pick up each part of what is happening here and let the case tell us what it needs. So let's do that together. The first sphere we're going to look through of SIP is relationship. So the formative relationships in her life taught her one lesson and her body learned it early. Love was conditional on not being a problem. When she made herself small, she got to keep the people she needed.
When she told the truth about her body or her experience, she lost them. The one time she disclosed the abuse, the person she disclosed to protected the family and not her. Her adult relationships have repeated a shape. She gets close. She senses the withdrawal. She is expecting. She leaves first. Her partners have not always earned that ending. The pattern persists and the therapy itself belongs in this sphere too. The therapist is now the first person she has ever told the thing she was told never to tell. That flat, precise voice in the target session was not disconnection from the memory. It was the exact adaptive move that has kept her alive in every important relationship she has ever had. Say the true thing in a way that cannot cost you the relationship. The therapist's nine was her nine. The side that she felt was a nine instead of the two being held by the only nervous system in the room that was allowed to feel it.
Once you can see it that way, the relationship sphere is not context. It becomes material. It's alive in the room between you and the client. The next sphere that SIP looks at is body. So we know about this case that it's an autistic woman and a nervous system that has been shaped by that throughout her life. Sensory load from an ordinary day is high before anything clinical happens. Interoception can be uneven. She may know she is dissociating only after she has been gone for a while. Purity culture and childhood sexual abuse have taught her body the same thing from two different directions. Pleasure and danger arrive in the same package. The correct response to a bodily signal is to override it. Her body has learned that being obeyed by her is not safe.
Three weeks without leaving the apartment is not laziness or depression in the abstract. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do. Find the smallest perimeter in which the body does not have to perform and stay inside it. The apartment is the one place her body has been allowed to be a body. The dissociation when activation gets big is not a failure of the work. It is the competent on-schedule execution of the strategy that kept her alive at nine. It is not going to stop being useful to her until something in the room shows the old lesson a different ending. It doesn't have to go that way.
The body sphere is asking to be listened to before it is asked to do anything. The third sphere that SIP looks at is memory. The abuse memories are not stored in her networks as quote-unquote what happened to me. They are stored as what happened to me and what happens when I say it. Any target that touches the first without holding the second reactivates the original lesson. That speaking is what makes it worse. What gets updated is not the memory, it is the lesson. The religious framing added a layer underneath the abuse. Her body signals were tagged with shame at the encoding step not just at retrieval. The abuse memories are stored inside that shame. Adult relationship endings have updated the same network in the direction the original lessons predicted. Every preemptive ending has been evidence for the lesson and something is already updating quietly. This therapy is the first relationship in her life in which she disclosed and was not told she misunderstood or asked what did she do to put herself in that situation. That is new information her memory system is already receiving.
It is fragile. It will not survive a session in which the protocol overrides the therapist's felt sense that she has just gone somewhere else. The memory sphere is not asking for reprocessing faster. It is asking for the conditions under which any of these memories can update at all to be built first. So none of what we just picked up is visible outside a relationship. Her flat precision was data because someone was there to notice it.
The therapist's sense of this SUD is actually a nine was clinical instrument not contamination. The therapist sensed the disconnect in the reported SUD versus what actually seemed to be showing up in the room. And when she came back after canceling and said, I should just push through. That was the case asking the therapist to become the next person who confirms her only option is to override herself. What the therapist does with that invitation is the treatment. Before I get anywhere near a target list, what I want with a client like this one is one sentence that we share one way of talking about what happened and what we're going to do about it. Not a diagnosis, not a formulation or case conceptualization that I hand over to her, just a sentence, some language in her language, refined together that names what her whole life has been organized around for a case with this shape.
It might sound something like this. When I made myself small enough not to be a problem, I got to keep the people I needed. When I told the truth about my body or my experience, I lost them. My body learned to survive by disappearing before anyone could send me away. And now it disappears from the apartment, from my partners, from my work, and from me.
Once she has that sentence, the apartment, the remote job, the intimacy, and the disclosure stop being four different problems. They become four expressions of one adaptation. The apartment is the only place her body is allowed to be a body. The remote job is the same perimeter with a different name. The preemptive endings are the one move that has ever given her agency in the sequence. The dissociation during sex is the same move executed by the body when the relationship cannot yet be ended. And the disclosure memory is the master lesson underneath all of it.
That sentence is the treatment plan before there is a treatment plan. It de-shames every symptom, it makes the network legible, and it gives us shared language for what any future target is actually about. Since this is my modality, let me walk you through how I would workshop that in EMDR from what SIP showed us. If you carry a different modality, listen for the shape of the reasoning, not the letters, the acronym of the modality. The same shape lives inside whatever you do. The first move I would make is resourcing before targeting. This is common in EMDR. SIP can really help us sharpen this. I would use resourcing, but not necessarily for safe place and not for a generic protector. I would build one specific resource. The felt sense of speaking a true thing and being met. In SIP, we call this a resource of a disconfirming experience. That is the exact experience her network has never had, and it is what every subsequent target is going to need to pair with. I would search with her in this order.
An adult moment, she said a true thing and was believed, even small. A friend, a co-worker, a book that named her experience. If lived material is hard to reach, I would use this therapy relationship itself. The recent session where she said something she had never said before and the room didn't collapse. Constructed figures only if the lived stuff is not there. They install more weakly in general, and I want the strongest install that I can get.
I would do short sets, low intensity, tracking her body continuously. The moment she goes flat and precise, we stop. Flatness in this case is the network defending, and the resource does not install through it. I know I have the resource when she can bring it up from a settled state and feel a shift in her body without dissociating. The second move is where I would float back from.
The default reflex would be to identify the worst abuse memory and float back from there. In this case, I would not because the abuse memory is guarded by the disclosure lesson and the network will defend. I would float back from the symptom moments instead. The places the network is already active and already accessible without needing the abuse content to be touched directly. The moment before she opens the laptop, the guilt, the flat refusal, the body not moving, when was the earliest time your body felt exactly like this? Like moving would cost you something you could not afford. The moment she reaches for the doorknob and does not leave the apartment, when was the earliest time your body knew that being seen outside was not safe?
The moment in a recent intimate encounter, she began to go away. Not necessarily sex itself, but the transition. When was the earliest time your body learned that going away was the way to stay? And the moment in the target session, her voice went flat and precise while telling the truth. When was the earliest time you said a true thing and your body had to make it safe to have said it? Some of those will land on the disclosure memory, some on purity culture moments being told her body was wrong before it was ever touched, some on the abuse itself, some on adult relational endings. What I'm doing is mapping the network from its available edges rather than from its guarded center. The third move is how I would sequence the targets from periphery to center. I find this especially important in complex trauma where going directly at the target will generate an entire sequence of challenges. Perhaps the client might appease and people please, but in general I think there's a lot of dissociation that enters cases like this wherein it's making good sense to go towards the periphery and not the center. So I would approach this in generally four phases with roughly 10 targets. Subject to revision, of course, as the floatbacks actually land on relevant memories, but this is just for workshopping, not a manual for a case like this. So phase A would be to update the disclosure lesson.
For me, these targets are often the gate. I do not move past them until the lesson speaking makes it worse has been updated by lived, processed evidence that it does not. Not here, not now. So target one, the disclosure to her mother. The moment of speaking and being told she misunderstood, not necessarily the abuse, the disclosure. For positive cognitions, I would be looking for my experience is real and speaking it is allowed. This target will take multiple sessions likely. It will open grief and that the abuse targets will not in general. This is the memory of losing her mother in real time, realizing what likely was already bubbling up to the surface that this relationship has a conditional love inside it. Target two, the earliest purity culture moment. Her body was named as wrong chronologically before the abuse and the moment her body first learned that its own signals were untrustworthy. Positive cognitions I'd be looking for here are my body signals are information, not sin or bad things. This updates the encoding layer shame. The abuse memories are stored inside of. So target three, the recent session moment her voice went flat while telling the truth. The disclosure shape happening now in a room where the outcome is different.
Positive cognitions I'd be looking for here or something like I can say the true thing and stay in the room. I'm using the therapy itself as reprocessing evidence, turning a live enactment into installed learning. Only after phase a has actually shown some traction that we've gotten movement. Now the abuse memories are approached with the disclosure lesson, hopefully already updated. The body signals no longer shame tagged and the empowered voice installed and rehearsed. These are new resources as we're experiencing the change in some of those earlier feeder memories or tertiary memories that surround what the distress is actually doing in her body. So target four is the earliest abuse memory she can access without dissociating from a resourced state. She chooses not by chronology, not by worst for first. Positive cognitions that I'm looking for here are what happened to me was not my body's fault and not my speaking's fault. Standard EMDR empowered voice paired to every set and a pre-agreed signal for going flat that pauses the set rather than pushing through, really sensitively tuning into the dynamic between the therapist and the client for the stop signal, the pause signal in some way communicating that that is good to communicate in that way. Target five, a representative middle period abuse memory, the one that carries the most chosen after target four has processed target six, the last abuse memory and the memory of its ending, including the memory of the abuse stopping, which often carries its own complex guilt and confusion and rarely gets targeted. Positive cognition territory that I'm looking for here is it ended and I'm here now with the abuse network processed. The present day symptoms are no longer being fed by the same source. These targets install the new lesson into her current life.
It's target seven. This is a recent intimate moment she dissociated through. I can be in my body with another person and stay is a positive cognition that I'd hoped to arrive at. Target eight is the apartment threshold of the fear of leaving the apartment. So pick a recent moment she chose not to leave. I can be seen outside and remain myself is the direction that I'd want to head there. Target nine, a recent moment at the laptop where she struggles to even log on anymore. The work as it currently is, is how I'd want to find my way in and I'd be looking for positive cognition somewhere around. I can be legible to others without disappearing from myself. I would not start phase A tomorrow. The next two or three sessions do the work that makes phase A possible. I share the through line sentence. We build it together with her as a hypothesis and we refine it in her language as we go. When it feels right, she recognizes it rather than agrees with it. She can actually feel it. We build the empowered voice. We do not proceed to a target until it installs from a settled state without her dissociating. I find it really important to name the entire trajectory of the plan out loud in sequence so she knows the abuse memories are on the plan and are not the first thing. It gives us opportunity to talk about pacing, to build more resources, and to approach it when the client is ready. Being willing to say we are not going there first, and here is why, is itself a piece of the disclosure lesson update. It's not to say we're never going to get there, but we're going to go at it at the pace that will actually feel supportive to you and help you feel resourced and prepared to do so. We would establish the flat precision signal.
Either of us can name when her voice goes flat and precise and naming it pauses whatever is happening. That gives her in advance the agency the original disclosure moment did not. It also communicates that we as a therapist are there to support her in not just pushing through it and not running away from it. Going at it in pace, connected and together. I keep the apartment, the job, and the intimacy symptoms off the target list for now. They will move as the network moves, targeting them directly before phase A would replicate the pattern of asking her body to perform change before the conditions for change actually exist. The therapist in this case arrives stuck somewhere between keep doing the protocol and abandon the protocol. SIP did not give her a third technique. It gave her a way of seeing the case in which the move the moment was asking for became much more obvious, grounded and nameable inside the modality that they were already using. Once you can see a case this way, you already know what the next session needs to hold. That's one of the beautiful pieces about SIP. It believes so deeply that the what to do next will come naturally, intuitively, between the two of you when we are on the same page about what's really going on, where did it come from, and how is that showing up now.
Getting on that page together is what we teach. If you'd like to learn more about somatic integration and processing and see when our next trainings are, head to connectbeyondhealing.com slash SIP.
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