Pat Ogden

Professional Life
Pat Ogden is the innovative force behind Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. She founded the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, located in Boulder, Colorado, and acts as the director of the school that focuses on educating clinicians in the various somatic approaches used to address developmental, attachment and trauma issues. She also co-founded the Hakomi Institute with Ron Kurtz and offers her expertise as a consultant to The Naropa University. Ogden spent years teaching and has applied her psychotherapeutic and somatic techniques to various groups of people, including prisoners, trauma victims, and psychiatric patients. She uses her three decades of experience as she lectures internationally and trains therapists in the discipline of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. She has written several articles, and her best known work is the book she published in 2006, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy.

Contribution to Psychology
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a somatic psychotherapy created by Pat Ogden that is influenced by the Hakomi Method, developed by Ron Kurtz. After realizing that many of her clients experienced a distinct dissociation from their physical bodies, Ogden began to explore techniques that would merge the physical and mental in order to help her clients overcome the ensuing symptomology resulting from the dissociation. Having studied various body therapies, Ogden began integrating elements of somatic therapy and psychotherapy and eventually developed Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, which integrates facets of somatic therapy, cognitive approaches, neuroscience, and attachment theory.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy enables a client to identify their unconscious psychological and physical responses and behaviors. These responses create their experiences, good and bad. By focusing on mindfulness, and becoming fully aware of both the physical and psychological sensations and responses to emotions, a client learns how to change maladaptive responses. By engaging in simple activities, a client is able to uncover unconscious behaviors, understand them, and change them. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy has been found to be extremely useful in helping individuals transform emotions and attitudes resulting from trauma.