Somatic Experiencing (SE) seeks to resolve symptoms of trauma through working with the body. It’s fortunately becoming more common for people to understand that reactions to trauma occur on a physical level, and those reactions get stored in the body. The idea is that when we respond to a situation with fight, flight, freeze or fawn, these nervous system survival strategies get encoded into our bodily memory as tensions, heaviness, constriction and activation. When we are triggered to re-experience these sensations, it can end up causing a lot of dysfunction and distress as we try to navigate the world.

The developer of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, recognized that animals in the wild tend not to become “traumatized,” even after having experienced something life-threatening. He noticed, for example, that a possum who “played dead” (freeze response), would shake off his nervous system’s wise response once the threat had passed, and did not carry a sense of inappropriate reactivity beyond that experience. This led him to think about how we as humans can also be encouraged to process our trauma through our bodily system, by allowing these trauma reactions to fully complete themselves.

While the wisdom of SE is primarily used to resolve the lingering impacts of shock trauma, it can also be applied to support healing from developmental, relational trauma and other forms of C-PTSD.

What I find most useful about SE is that it expands our capacity for healing by wisely involving the body in the therapeutic process. Although we call it “mental health,” we need to understand that what happens in the brain is connected to what is happening in our body, too.

When we slow down and scan our bodies in the midst of an emotional response, such as anxiety, embarrassment, doubt, fear, joy, relief or satisfaction, we will notice that those feelings are in the body.

Our feeling of “anxiety” is inseparable from certain sensations in the body. And there are many times where we have felt something before we have cognitively understood it. Developing more awareness of our body sensations is key to living a more conscious and present life that supports healing and growth.

• Expanding our tolerance for and curiosity about sensations in the body
• Becoming more comfortable with “completing” an emotional process rather than thwarting it (like when we might stop ourselves from crying because it’s uncomfortable)
• Identifying ways to contact our emotions in a titrated fashion, so that they don’t overwhelm us.
• Focusing on and describing what it feels like to be an embodied human.

I am SE trained, Beginning Level.