From the first phone call to the days afterward: what a dearmoring session actually involves, what release feels like, and how to know when you're ready
Most people arrive at their first session having read a great deal and have pictured almost none of it. They know dearmoring releases stored trauma. They have no idea what the room looks like, what they'll be wearing, what happens if they start crying, or what to expect.
This walks through the whole thing. The call before you book, the two hours on the table, the drive home, the days after, and what changes by the second and third session. If you want the shorter version alongside an explanation of the practice itself, that's on the What Is Dearmoring page. This is the long one
Why the first session is two hours
Two hours is the minimum I'll book for someone new, and people occasionally ask whether they can do a shorter one to test the water.
The answer is no, and the reason is structural rather than commercial. A first session has to include a real conversation, an unhurried opening, bodywork that can take as long as it takes, and enough time afterward for you to come back to yourself before you stand up. Compress that into sixty minutes and something gets cut. Usually it's the integration, which is the part that determines whether you leave feeling clear or feeling cracked open with nowhere to put it.
Armor built over thirty years does not respond to a schedule. A practitioner watching the clock starts pushing, and pushing is the one thing this work cannot afford.
There's also what the body needs before anything can release at all. It takes time to stop guarding, and longer still to reach the state where it stops managing itself and genuinely lets go. That state is worth naming carefully, because the word surrender makes people wary, and reasonably so. You are not surrendering to me. You are surrendering to yourself, to a deeper layer of your own body than you normally have access to. My work is to make that safe enough to be possible. It rarely happens in the first twenty minutes.
Before you book: the call
Nothing begins on a table. It begins on a call, fifteen to twenty minutes, no charge.
You tell me what brought you. Not your whole history, just enough that I understand what you're carrying and what you want to be different.
There's nothing you need to do to prepare for this call. No history to have organized, no vocabulary to have learned, nothing to work out in advance. Trust that I know what to ask, because I've had this conversation many times and you've had it once. What I'd invite instead is that you come to it in your vulnerability and tell me what's actually alive for you, what you're working through right now, rather than the tidied-up version. I'll take it from there. You can decline any question I ask.
Then I tell you honestly whether I think this will help. Some of those calls end with me suggesting you work with a therapist first, or that what you're describing is better served by something other than dearmoring. That isn't me turning away business. Someone who books the wrong thing has a bad experience and concludes the work doesn't help, which serves nobody.
If you're currently in treatment for a serious mental health condition, tell me on the call. It usually isn't a barrier. It does change how I pace things.
Designing the session, in two conversations
The call covers the shape of it. What you want to work with, what's happened that I should know about, how a session can go, and anything you want to ask. That conversation is discovery, and it deliberately isn't the moment you lock anything down.
The details get settled in person, sitting and talking before we begin. You reaffirm your intentions for the session, or revise them, because the person who books on Tuesday isn't always in the same place by Saturday. What's off limits permanently, and what's off limits for now. Whether pelvic work is part of this at all, and if so, whether it's part of the first one. Whether you want to be fully clothed, fully nude, or somewhere between.
The gap between the two conversations is the point. It gives you days to reconsider anything, to notice what your body does when you picture going ahead, and to arrive with final choices rather than improvised ones.
The clothing question is entirely your call. Most people choose to be fully nude, particularly when yoni massage, yoni dearmoring, or prostate work is included, because the work reaches places clothing gets in the way of. Plenty of people start clothed. Some change their mind halfway through. None of those are wrong.
The reason all of this gets settled before you're on the table is simple. You decide while you're dressed, calm, and nothing is happening to you. Not mid-session, when you're open, flooded, and least equipped to negotiate anything. A practitioner who leaves these decisions for the table has arranged things badly, and the framework I work from, Betty Martin's Wheel of Consent, exists precisely to prevent that.
Arriving
That second conversation happens here, unhurried, before anything else begins. How you've been since the call. What's present today. Anything that shifted on the drive over.
Then I explain what I'm about to do, and I give you the word.
The word is "pause"
Not "stop," and the difference matters.
If you say pause, I stop moving. My hands stay where they are. I hold space for whatever is moving through you rather than withdrawing, because withdrawing in the middle of a release can leave you more alone with it than you were a moment earlier. We check in. You tell me what's happening, or you don't, and we stay there as long as you need.
Then you choose whether to continue, when you're ready. Or you choose not to, and that's a complete answer.
You never have to explain yourself, and using it doesn't disappoint me or end the session. Most good sessions include at least one pause. The sessions that concern me are the ones where somebody grips the table and gets through it politely.
Opening the breath
The work starts with breathing. My hands are already on your body, resting, not moving. Just contact, and breath.
Full, connected, unhurried. It sounds like the least important part of the session and it does most of the lifting. Shallow breathing is how the body keeps a feeling from growing large enough to deal with, so breathing fully does the reverse, and within a few minutes people begin feeling things they weren't feeling when they walked in. That tells us both where to go. Breathwork on its own will surface material even with no hands involved.
We also begin with massage. Relaxing the body first is not a formality. Tissue that's braced against being touched won't release under pressure, it'll just defend harder.
The bodywork
I work with sustained pressure into the places where holding shows up. Jaw, throat, chest, diaphragm, belly, psoas, hips. I move through them as they present themselves rather than following a fixed sequence, because the body decides the order, not the protocol.
I hold a point and wait. Not rubbing, not working it, just steady pressure while you keep breathing into the sensation instead of bracing away from it. At some stage the muscle stops defending the position it's been holding.
That's when something arrives. Heat, shaking, tears, a memory surfacing without warning, a sound you didn't decide to make, sometimes laughter that seems to come from nowhere at all.
None of that is a problem to be managed. It's the thing we came for.
Throughout, I stay in contact, and I check in. Talking stays minimal, just enough to guide. What are you noticing. Where is it. Can you breathe into that. This isn't a conversation, and narrating an experience while it's happening tends to pull you straight out of it. What I'm doing instead is watching closely and supporting whatever comes up. I'll slow down. I'll back off entirely if you've gone somewhere you can't stay present for.
That last one is the part that separates trained work from enthusiastic work. Going quiet and going still are not the same as relaxing, and a practitioner who reads a freeze response as surrender can push someone straight back into the experience they came to release. Being trauma-informed isn't a phrase for a website. It's noticing exactly where my client is emotionally, with complete awareness to what is present in the room . . .that somebody's breathing has gone shallow and flat, and stopping . . . before a trauma response evokes.
What release actually looks like
People brace for this part more than any other, so it's worth describing plainly.
Crying is common, or even wailing, and it often arrives with no story attached. You may find yourself sobbing without being able to say what about. That's normal, and trying to explain it usually interrupts it.
Shaking is common. Legs, hips, sometimes the whole body. It can look alarming and it's the nervous system discharging exactly as it's supposed to. It passes on its own.
Sound matters more than people expect. Groaning, shouting, swearing, roaring. The sound isn't a byproduct of the release, it substantially is the release, and a silent session is usually one where somebody is still being well-mannered.
Movement completes what got interrupted. Kicking, pushing against my hands, striking a cushion. The motion your body wanted to make at the time and couldn't.
Anger surprises people the most, particularly women who were raised to find it unacceptable. It often surfaces before grief does, and it is welcome here. So is grief, so is fear, so is the strange flat relief that sometimes arrives instead of any of them. The five personality patterns predict a fair amount about which of these shows up first for a given person.
If pelvic work is part of it
Where yoni dearmoring or prostate work is included, it comes later in the session, never as an opener.
By that point your body has already released some charge and has a far better sense of whether it wants this today than it did on a phone call last week. I ask again, out loud, before anything begins. I keep asking as we work. Consent given in advance is a plan, not a permission slip.
The pelvis holds more of this material than anywhere else in the body, which is why the work goes there and also why it demands the most caution. I don't start there, and I don't go there at all if you've said no, regardless of what seems to be opening up.
What's different for men and for women
The mechanism is identical. Where the armor sits usually isn't.
Men more often arrive braced through the jaw, chest and pelvis, carrying decades of being permitted a narrow band of feeling. The release is frequently anger first, and many men have never made a loud involuntary sound in front of another person in their adult lives. That alone can be the session.
Women more often hold through the throat, belly and pelvic floor, and the material tends to surface as grief before anything else. Sexual trauma, medical experience, childbirth, and years of quiet contraction against sensation all live in the same neighborhood.
Couples ask about attending together. I generally suggest otherwise, and I've written about why that usually backfires.
Coming back
The last stretch is integration, and I don't rush it.
Breath slowing. Stillness. My hands resting rather than working. Time to lie there without anyone requiring you to describe what happened or perform being fine. Some people want to talk it through. Others need twenty minutes of not speaking at all, and I have no preference between them.
Then water, and a strong suggestion that you don't drive straight to go out on the town or catch up on your instagram. The invitation is to stay in your awareness and integrate.
The days afterward
Release keeps unfolding after you leave. Over the following few days, expect some of these:
- Deep tiredness, the kind that arrives suddenly in the afternoon
- Vivid dreams, sometimes for several nights
- Emotions arriving in waves with no obvious trigger
- A physical openness in the chest or hips that you notice when you breathe
- Occasional soreness where the work was deepest
It settles. What I suggest for that window is unglamorous: rest, water, gentle movement, and nothing demanding on the calendar the next day. Aftercare is part of the work rather than an afterthought, and I stay reachable between sessions.
What changes across a series
A single session produces a noticeable shift. People describe it as weight coming off, or breathing reaching further down than it has in years.
The second is usually different in character. The body already knows what this is, so it opens faster, and we often reach material in the second hour that took the whole of the first session to approach. People frequently find the second one harder than the first, not because anything went wrong, but because the easy layer is already gone.
By the third, the pattern underneath tends to be visible to both of us. Three sessions changes how someone lives.
Past that, it depends entirely on what you're carrying. Someone unwinding a long relationship with a narcissist is on a different arc than someone who came in numb and wants their capacity for sensation back. What reliably happens either way is that capacity for pleasure expands as the armor comes down. A body that can't hold a large charge can't hold a large pleasure either.
How this differs from a tantra massage
People book one and sometimes need the other.
A tantra massage leans toward pleasure expansion and being received. It can heal a great deal on the way, and for many people it's the better first experience.
Dearmoring leans the other direction. It's weighted toward releasing emotional blockage and sexual trauma, and the pleasure that opens afterward arrives as a consequence rather than as the aim.
They also combine well. Some of the most useful sessions I run move between the two, bringing the armor down and then letting the same body discover what sensation feels like without the guard in place. We decide that on the call.
Booking a session in Las Vegas
I practice in Las Vegas and I travel for private work and multi-day intensives.
Session lengths and current rates are on the Work With Me page. If you want to know who you'd be working with first, that's here.
Before either of those, there's the free conversation. Fifteen to twenty minutes, no obligation, no pitch. If dearmoring isn't the right thing for what you're carrying, I'd rather tell you on a phone call than have you find out on a table.