Senior Clinical Psychologist (Somatic Therapy) / Somatic Therapist

The Norfolk Community Eating Disorders Service (NCEDS) is an innovative team always looking to ensure that services offered are appropriate and beneficial to our service users. To this end, we are currently developing an Embodied Trauma pathway to provide somatic therapies to support clients in building healthier relationships with their bodies and food.

We are therefore looking to recruit an experienced somatic therapist / Psychologist to work collaboratively with the multidisciplinary team to provide body‑focused therapeutic interventions aimed at helping individuals reconnect with their bodies, regulate their nervous systems, and process trauma stored in the body. This post could be appointed at Band 7 Somatic Therapist or Band 8a Somatic Clinical Psychologist – please state which post you are interested in in your application.

The ideal candidate will either be a fully qualified somatic therapist or a clinical psychologist with specialist somatic training, for example sensorimotor psychotherapy. The therapist might use techniques such as somatic experiencing, body awareness exercises, mindfulness practices, and movement therapy to help clients recognise and release physical tension and emotional blocks. Their work would focus on fostering a sense of safety, bodily autonomy, and self‑compassion, supporting clients in building healthier relationships with their bodies and food. Additionally, they would provide education about the mind‑body connection and trauma, contribute to care planning, and offer tailored strategies to support long‑term recovery.

Qualifications:

• Fully qualified somatic therapist, or clinical psychologist with specialist somatic training (e.g., sensorimotor psychotherapy).
• Experience with somatic therapies such as somatic experiencing, body awareness, mindfulness, and movement therapy.
• Interest and knowledge in eating disorders.
• Capable of working within a multidisciplinary team and contributing to care planning.

Responsibilities:

• Provide group and individual interventions aimed at helping individuals reconnect with their bodies, regulate their nervous systems, and process trauma stored in the body.
• Provide specialist clinical formulations, assessments, evaluations and interventions as required and contribute a somatic psychological perspective to multi‑disciplinary reviews and discussions.
• Provide support and supervision to other members of the clinical team, and to trainee clinical psychologists.
• Develop psychological formulations of presenting problems or situations that integrate information from assessments within a coherent framework that draws upon psychological theory and evidence and incorporates interpersonal, societal, cultural and biological factors.
• Develop and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
• Be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family, carers or group.
• Provide a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.
• Undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management in line with Trust and inter‑agency policies and procedures.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust is a health and social care organisation dedicated to providing high‑quality care with compassion to improve the health and wellbeing of the people we care for, as well as supporting and empowering them to lead a fulfilling life. Our clinical teams deliver many NHS services, not only via inpatient and primary care settings, but also within the community, including children’s, adult and older people’s mental health, forensic and specialist mental health, learning disabilities, primary care and liaison psychiatry, substance misuse, social care, research and development.

As an equal opportunities employer, we encourage applications from all sectors of the community, particularly from under‑represented groups including people with long‑term conditions and members of our ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities. Please be advised we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than the closing date should we receive sufficient applications. Regrettably, we cannot offer sponsorship for all our job roles. If you apply for a role that we cannot offer sponsorship for, unfortunately, your application form will be rejected from the process.

For further information on CPFT, please visit our website at www.cpft.nhs.uk. Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of responsibilities.