Claire Haiman (she/her)

As a clinical psychologist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, my area of specialty is somatic psychotherapy.  In my previous role as Director of Counseling Services at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, I created the Postdoctoral Psychology Training Program in University Counseling: Trauma and Somatic Studies that focuses on issues of embodiment and intersectionality in psychotherapy with an eye toward the impact of trauma, whether that be acute trauma, developmental trauma, and/or structural trauma, such as racism, transphobia, and the like. 

I am not a bodyworker and do not use touch in my practice.  Rather, I offer an embodied psychotherapy approach which anchors therapeutic work in awareness of sensation and uses the body as a touchstone in guiding the process.  Inquiry into sensation and bodily experiences is interwoven with dynamic narrative exploration.  We identify and build out that which is psychophysiologically stabilizing and then explore experiences that tend of be avoided and/or unconsciously repeated.  Titrating between these two with a steady eye toward autonomic nervous system activation facilitates an embodied working through.  A felt sense of emergent movement, possibilities, and vitality is the hallmark of successful treatment.

Designed for working with trauma, somatic psychotherapy is also good with people who tend to have somatic symptoms (like panic attacks, headaches, back pain) as well as those who need help accessing affective states (intellectualized, obsessional, compartmentalized, or anhedonic types).  With presenting issues like panic attacks, headaches, etc., I work with the person’s capacity and tendency to hyper-focus on sensation (e.g., increased heart rate, pain) to start tracking positive sensations that correlate with ease and seeking out experiences that promote these states.  This helps diminish vulnerability to triggers as well as building the capacity to notice early-warning signs and de-escalate responses.  With people who need help accessing emotion, focusing on sensation often facilitates accessing internal states that they may otherwise be defended against - sort of the psychological equivalent of the art exercise of drawing with your nondominant hand as a means toward side-stepping performance anxiety.

As Director of Counseling Services at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, I have had extensive experience working with physicians and other healthcare providers and trainees and the issues they often present with: anxiety, perfectionism, imposter phenomenon, burnout, moral distress/injury, and vicarious trauma.  In my experience, healthcare providers are particularly amenable to somatic psychotherapy, because they well understand the psychophysiology of stress response in which the model is rooted. They are also highly responsive to the approach, because it focuses on building resilience in short, deep bursts.  This pacing, akin to High Intensity Interval Training, creates personalized opportunities for rapid restoration that facilitate quick return to demanding, high-stress environments.

In addition to working as a primary treatment provider, I also provide adjunctive support to patients who are engaged in ongoing treatment with their primary therapist.  Adjunctive therapy may address trauma as well as somatic symptoms (e.g., flashbacks, panic, hypervigilance, numbing) processing the physiological charge and establishing equilibrium while freeing up the primary therapist-patient dyad to continue depth-oriented/long-term work.