Somatic Experiencing ®
“Our bodies contain our histories. Every chapter, line, and verse of every event and relationship in our lives.” Caroline Myss
WHAT IS SOMATIC EXPERIENCING®?
Somatic Experiencing (SE™) is a body-oriented therapeutic model for healing trauma and other stress disorders. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades.
The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight, or freeze responses and provides tools to resolve these states.
The Science and How It Works
Trauma may begin as stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.
The Somatic Experiencing approach facilitates the completion of “stuck” responses. “Stuck responses” may look like not being able to fight back when we were attacked, not being able to run when we needed to escape, or not being able to speak when we wanted to say no. Essentially when trauma occurs, particularly in our society, it is often suppressed and an intense amount of energy gets bound in our nervous systems and bodies. This bound energy becomes what we call trauma symptoms. These may include: hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts or images, fear and avoidance of situations, people, places, things, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, depression, etc. Releasing energy that has been stuck in the body with the SE approach is gentle and helps individuals increase tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and emotions that may have been suppressed for years.
The Body’s Stress Response
Dr. Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing®, was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system. He realized that animals are constantly under threat of death, yet show no symptoms of trauma. When animals experience threat or near death experiences, if they cannot fight or run, they freeze or “play dead” as this makes them less of a target. When they are no longer in danger, they begin to shake and tremble as they are discharging the massive energy that the body built up to save the animal’s life. If this last step of discharging the energy does not get to occur, the charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective it is still under threat. This explains why we can be sitting in our living room safely, we see something from a scene in a movie that triggers us on TV, and before we know it our body is in full alarm telling us we are in danger when in fact nothing has changed in our environment at all. The Somatic Experiencing® method works to release this stored energy and turn off this threat alarm that causes severe dysregulation and dissociation. SE helps people understand this body response to trauma and work through a “body first” approach to healing.
“Talk is certainly a part of Somatic work, but the goal is to add another dimension to the conversation, to root it in the person’s immediate bodily experience, in a way that brings them more FULLY and VITALLY into the present.” Peter Levine
— Squarespace