The Restore Method™: What Happens When
Therapy Goes Deeper Than Talk
By Saloumeh DeGood and Courtney Smith
Most people who find us have already tried something. Weekly therapy. Massage. Maybe a sound bath or a meditation class. They are doing the work. And still they feel stuck.
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That feeling, the sense that you have been circling the same thing for a while without getting through it, is exactly where the Restore MethodTM is designed to start.
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We are Saloumeh DeGood, a licensed clinical psychologist, and Courtney Smith, a licensed massage therapist and Reiki practitioner. We created the Restore Method because we kept running into the same problem: the things that help people most do not talk to each other. You see your therapist on Tuesday. You get a massage on Saturday. Each of those experiences is good. But none of them know what happened in the others, and you are still being understood in pieces.
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We kept asking ourselves: "Why does the client have to come and see me in psychotherapy for an hour, and then go over here for a massage, and never should the two meet?" So we built a session where they do.
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What the Session Looks Like
A Restore session runs about two hours. You come in, we cover some history and background, and then we ask you one question: what is the one thing weighing on you right now? What is the thing you cannot seem to get past? It can be emotional, relational, or something that lives in your body. It just needs to be real.
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Then we leave the room, you undress, and get on a massage table. The lights go down. Music is playing. And before anything else starts, the three of us meditate together. Saloumeh guides a meditation rooted in Sufi Psychology and oriented toward self-knowledge. All three of us focus together. This is not ceremonial. We tested the method both ways, with and without the group meditation, and when we skipped it, the session was clunkier. When we included it, we were all in the same room in a way that goes beyond being physically present.
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After the meditation, the experiential part of the session begins. Saloumeh talks with you. Not problem-solving, not techniques, not reframing. More like moving underneath whatever you came in with, toward where the issue is actually being held. At the same time, Courtney is doing bodywork, but not from a set protocol. "It's almost like a magnet," she describes. "I'm drawn to a certain part of the body, and I allow that to lead me." When she senses something dense or stuck, she brings in sound therapy: singing bowls and tuning forks at specific frequencies to help that energy move.
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The two of us communicate throughout. We are regularly arriving at the same place through completely different means. The session is guided not by a script but by you, by what your body and your words are telling us. As we always say: "We are being informed by the client in the session. So it's very patient-informed and no two sessions are alike."
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The experiential part runs about 45 minutes. When we sense we have reached the core of what you came in with, and you have some sense of it too, we stop. And then we leave.
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The Part That Surprises People
We do not wrap things up. We do not give you a tidy resolution before we go.
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The room you are left in was designed for this moment. Comfortable seating, a journal, a teapot with soothing teas, a blanket, a soft stuffed animal if you need something to hold. Soft lighting. No phone. No demands. Just the experience, still fresh and unprocessed, and space to sit with it.
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You have 20 to 30 minutes alone with whatever just came up. You can lie there. You can make tea. You can sit on the floor. And then you write. It is "a protected time and space before you have to go out into the world." Because we have not closed things off and handed you a neat answer, everything is still accessible. The journaling in that room is part of the session. Some of the most important things people realize happen there, without us.
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We come back after that time. We share what we noticed. You share what came up. We talk through next steps: things to try when certain feelings surface, ways to work with the energy in your body, or something to bring into your regular therapy if you have a therapist.
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What This Feels Like
One client told us the session felt like what people describe when they talk about psychedelic experiences. Not the substance part. The other part. The jarring, clarifying kind of moment that some people seek from those experiences. That was not what we set out to build. But we understood what they meant.
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What happens in a Restore session is a disruption. You come in wearing every layer of defense, habit, and pattern that you carry through your daily life. Over the course of the session, those layers come off. Not because we force anything. More because the conditions of the session: the vulnerability of the table, the meditation, the simultaneous work from two different directions simply do not give those layers much to hold onto.
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"It's kind of like you have a table filled with all sorts of things, and someone comes and takes the tablecloth and just shakes it. Everything flings out of order. And it gives you that moment to re-evaluate and put things back."