You might not call it trauma. Maybe it's the tightness in your chest that never fully goes away. The anger that rises faster than it should. The relationships that keep playing out the same way no matter how much you understand them. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. The injury that never healed.
ERT is hands-on bodywork for people who have done the talking — and still feel stuck.
It works with a well-supported premise: that unprocessed emotion doesn't disappear. It gets stored. And what the body has stored, the body can release.
For most of the 20th century, trauma was treated as a cognitive problem — something you could talk through, analyze, and eventually understand your way out of. Decades of research have since overturned this assumption. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, demonstrated that traumatic experiences are not merely psychological events. They are profoundly embodied ones — encoded in the nervous system, the muscles, the fascia, and the cellular tissue of the body long after the event has passed.
When the nervous system encounters something overwhelming — something it cannot fight, flee, or fully process in the moment — it does what it's designed to do: it protects you. The survival response activates. Stress hormones flood the body. Muscles brace. Breath shortens. And if the threat cannot be resolved, that activation doesn't simply switch off. It gets locked in. The body stays in a state of partial mobilization — braced, waiting, vigilant — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades.
This is not a psychological metaphor. It is a physiological reality. The body develops what some researchers call armoring — chronic patterns of muscle tension that are unconscious defenses against emotional pain, manifesting as poor posture, limited mobility, restricted breathing, chronic pain, and the persistent, vague sense that something is not quite right. The body isn't betraying you. It's trying to protect you. These patterns were adaptive once. The problem is they've become stuck.
Dr. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how the autonomic nervous system continuously scans the environment for cues of safety or threat, and automatically shifts the body between three states: social engagement and connection, mobilization and defense, and shutdown and dissociation. The critical insight is that healing cannot happen from a defended state. The nervous system must first register safety before it can release what it has been holding.
This is why the relationship between practitioner and client — the quality of presence, the attunement, the non-judgmental witness — is not incidental to ERT. It is the mechanism. The body will not open what it has been guarding unless it trusts that it is safe to do so. Every session begins at the heart — establishing connection and presence before anything else.
Van der Kolk's research demonstrated that the parts of the brain responsible for clear thinking and self-observation are significantly disrupted by trauma. The traumatic imprint lives in areas of the brain that are below language — in the subcortical regions that govern survival, sensation, and automatic response. This is why talk therapy alone often cannot fully reach it. Healing that is only cognitive addresses the roof of the house while the foundation remains cracked.
Fascia is the three-dimensional web of connective tissue that surrounds and permeates every muscle, bone, nerve, blood vessel, and organ in the body. Current research describes it as a living, dynamic, highly communicative tissue — and one of the primary places where emotional experiences are physically encoded. When the body braces against pain — physical or emotional — it does so through the fascia. These bracing patterns can persist long after the original threat is gone, creating areas of density, restriction, and held tension throughout the body.
Research has also found that cells throughout the body encode emotional experiences and respond to them physiologically long after the mind has attempted to move on. This is why seemingly small triggers can produce responses that feel wildly disproportionate to the present moment. The response isn't to now. It's to then — and the body is still there.
ERT is a heart-based bodywork practice created by Pat Jackman, who has practiced and taught this work for over 30 years. At the center of the method is a map of points throughout the body — called doorways — that function as access points to where emotional densities are held.
These doorways are found in the muscles and on the bones. They are places where the body's connective tissue has crystallized around unexpressed emotion — where grief that was never cried, anger that was never voiced, fear that was never discharged, has compressed itself into held tissue over years and decades. When pressure is applied to these points alongside breath and awareness, the blockage is brought to the surface of consciousness. The client is guided to enter into what is there — not to analyze it, not to narrate it, but to feel it. And in feeling it fully, to let it move through and out. This is not analysis. It is completion.
You lie on a table. Every session begins at the heart — the practitioner holds this place first, establishing connection before the work begins. The heart is both the primary emotional center of the body and the location where most people carry their deepest armoring. Opening it first creates the conditions for everything else to follow.
From there, the body communicates where it most needs attention. The practitioner reads and responds intuitively, moving through the doorways as they present themselves. Firm, intentional pressure is applied while you are guided to breathe deeply into those areas — to stop managing, stop bracing, and allow what is there to surface and be expressed. Releases can look like tears, deep sighing, shaking, laughter, sound, heat, or a wave of emotion with no clear story attached. All of it is information. All of it is welcome.
You do not need to know what happened. You do not need to have words for what you are carrying. The body knows. Your job is simply to breathe, to feel, and to allow.
ERT was developed by Pat Jackman — a counselor, somatic practitioner, and workshop leader with over 30 years in this work. Jane is currently a practicing student training directly with Pat Jackman toward full certification. She is offering private sessions at Primal Coherence in the DMV area on a donation basis during this time, with a minimum of $40. ERT is complementary to traditional therapy and does not diagnose or treat clinical mental health conditions.
All ERT clients are required to complete a waiver before their session. Please fill it out in advance — it ensures we're aligned on what to expect and keeps our time together focused on the work.
Complete ERT Waiver →Start with a free 20-minute discovery call. We'll talk about what you're carrying and whether ERT is the right place to begin.