AMY HAGERSTROM

Amy Hagerstrom, LSW, SEP, comes to FRG with eleven years of facilitating mind-body healing, first as a yoga teacher and massage therapist and now as a somatic therapist.  She is a Licensed Social Worker in IL, having moved here recently from WA state.

Amy blends Somatic Experiencing with a developmental and attachment lens. Her graduate school education at the Erikson Institute was grounded in child development as well as Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.  She has found this knowledge base to be greatly beneficial in her work with all clients, of all ages.  She firmly believes that emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are understandable when looking at the whole picture of a person’s life experiences, biology, and cultural context.

Amy’s work is warm and empathic, never stuffy or impersonal.  She incorporates the body into this work in ways that are accessible, simple, and actually pretty fun!  Healing work can sometimes be quite heavy, so she believes that humor, some light-heartedness, and work towards self-compassion is really important. Although she only works remotely, Amy finds herself incorporating movement into sessions, often alongside clients, for both nervous system regulation, and processing specific events.   She also can re-work sound irritability, sensory sensitivity, and early attachment ruptures with Safe and Sound (SSP), a listening technology on the cutting edge of the field.  With her somatic methods, clients gain new tools for resourcing and regulating outside of sessions.

Amy particularly loves working with people who have found talk therapy to be limiting or those who look forward to bringing the body into their therapeutic work. She has strong compassion for parents and children, as well as those who struggle with emotional reactivity followed by shame. She’s also had a number of clients who do talk therapy with a different therapist and focus only on the somatic or somatic parenting work together with great results.

Outside of work she absolutely loves city nature, audiobooks and podcasts, and spending quality time with her wife. She also recently has started collecting houseplants; however, the jury is still out on whether she has a knack for keeping them healthy.