Somatic & Attachment Coaching
Reorganizing the patterns that shape, or prevent, how you connect, toward safe, secure, and authentic relating.
Our attachment system is not separate from our sense of self. It is how we learned to be in relationship, with others, with our own needs, and with the world.
These patterns begin forming before language, before conscious memory. Long before we could make sense of our experience, it was already being organized in the nervous system, shaping how we move toward or away from connection, who we choose, how we respond, and who we believe ourselves to be.
This work integrates somatic nervous system work, attachment repatterning, relational repair, and developmental coaching to work directly with these patterns at the level where they can actually change: in the nervous system, the sense of self, and the implicit memory that organizes how we connect before we get to choose.
You are not your attachment style.
These are adaptive patterns, and they can reorganize.
This work is right for you if:
Something keeps getting in the way of the closeness you want, but you know deeper connection is possible
Relationships repeat familiar patterns despite your awareness, but you are ready to change them
Intimacy feels complicated or effortful, but you sense a more secure and authentic way of relating
Conflict, repair, or vulnerability in relationships feels out of reach, but you want to change that
You are ready to build genuine capacity for intimacy, trust, and showing up fully in connection
Vulnerability and boundaries feel like opposites, but you want to find a way to hold both
Frequently Asked Questions
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This work combines somatic nervous system work, attachment repatterning, and psychosynthesis-informed developmental coaching to reorganize the implicit patterns that shape how we connect — patterns formed early, often before language, that organize how we relate before we get to choose.
In this work, we engage the nervous system and sense of self directly, building the capacity for safe connection and creating the conditions for lasting relational change.
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Attachment patterns are not fixed identities or labels. They are adaptive strategies the nervous system developed in response to experiences of safety, closeness, and separation. Most people carry a mix of patterns that can show up differently across relationships and life areas.
The four primary patterns are:
Secure — comfortable with both closeness and autonomy
Anxious — tends toward seeking closeness and reassurance, often fearing abandonment
Avoidant — tends toward self-sufficiency and downplaying closeness
Disorganized — intense push-pull dynamics, difficulty regulating, and deep inner conflict
You are not your attachment pattern. These are adaptations, and they can reorganize.
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Most somatic work stays in sensation only, rather than mind-body connection. Embodying change means the physical body, emotional experience, cognitive mind, relational patterns, and sense of self all have to update together.
Sensation is one of five channels through which implicit experience is accessed, alongside imagery, behavior, emotion, and meaning. Experience lives across all of them, and this work moves through all of them, because genuine change requires updating not just the nervous system but our inner identity through which all perception is framed.
This matters especially for developmental patterns, which form through early attachment and shape the nervous system, sense of self, and capacity for relating. They heal the same way: subtly, relationally, and through the full depth of experience.
Every person arrives differently. The work meets you where you are.
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Within somatic healing and somatic experiencing specifically, body sensation is one of five channels, alongside images, behaviors, affect, and meaning, through which we access the unconscious. Prior to somatics, these were the five psychological functions of experience in psychosynthesis. While popular culture often reduces somatics to sensation alone or nervous system hacks, these can offer important relief but lasting change requires something deeper: a descent into the nervous system's architecture of self.
This is especially true for developmental trauma, which differs from acute shock trauma. It originates in early attachment disruptions that shape our very sense of self. Because it formed that way, it heals that way: slowly, relationally, and through the full architecture of experience, updating the 'I' and the identity through which all perception is framed.
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Somatic nervous system work engages how experience lives in the body at its most implicit levels, in the patterns of activation, protection, and organization that form beneath conscious awareness. When experiences overwhelm our capacity to process them, the system organizes around protection rather than presence. Through bottom-up, felt experience, the nervous system can complete what was interrupted and reorganize from the inside out, restoring safety, coherence, and choice.
This is not movement, fitness, or bodywork. This is capacity building work. It operates at the level of the nervous system itself, where experience, identity, and the capacity for presence are actually held.
In my practice, bottom-up nervous system work and top-down developmental and identity work operate together. Unlike other animals, human cortical architecture means we cannot simply discharge our way back to equilibrium. Meeting experience fully requires both a regulated nervous system and a coherent sense of self to meet it with. The mind-body revolution was meant to unite the two.
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Sessions are guided by attuned presence, somatic awareness, and gentle inquiry, while tracking sensation, breath, micro-movements, and emotional tone as they arise, moving carefully between activation and settling so the nervous system can process at its appropriate pace.
The work is collaborative, exploratory, and always paced by what your nervous system can meet. Sessions weave somatic work with developmental and coaching-oriented reflection, so that what emerges can be integrated into identity, choice, and daily relational life.
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Sessions are available online via live Zoom from anywhere in the world. You need a private space you're comfortable in, a video camera, and internet access. Video must be on with the chest upward visible.
In-person sessions are also available in Midtown Manhattan, NYC, on select days with more limited availability and carry a small additional fee.
Meet your practitioner
About Susan Reis
I am an integrative somatic practitioner and developmental coach based in New York City, specializing in attachment repatterning and the nervous system patterns that shape how we connect. My work bridges nervous system science, developmental and identity work, and contemplative depth, supporting clients in reorganizing the implicit patterns that determine who we become in relationship, so that connection can feel safe, genuine, and chosen. I’m a certified Somatic Practitioner, DARe Practitioner, and completing an MS in Applied Neuroscience. I work with individuals online and in-person in NYC.
Learn more about me or my approach.