What is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a gentle and highly effective trauma-informed modality developed by Dr. Peter Levine with the underlying notion that all humans have an innate capacity to heal when given the appropriate time, support, and context. The impacts of trauma (both acute and complex) can keep someone feeling frozen in time, leading to the reexperience of fear, depression, anger, or other debilitating responses to triggers in their environment that remind them of a past event, person, or experience. Trauma is not something one can think their way out of; it is a response in the nervous system and must be worked with through the body. SE works directly with a client’s nervous systems to gradually neutralize the physiological, psychological, and emotional impacts of earlier traumatic experiences in a safe, gentle, and effective manner. SE allows for the completion of responses that might have been prevented in the original traumatic event, thus allowing the nervous system to integrate physiological charge in a safe, contained space. This approach organically supports people to increase their capacity to experience stressors that might have been too much to tolerate in the past.

SE therapists gently guide clients to tune into their immediate, direct experience via the presence of bodily sensations, spontaneous images, emotions, and movements, as they discover newfound meaning. Within the context of a safe therapeutic environment and attuned guidance, clients can access, perhaps for the first time, dynamic qualities of their experience they may have previously believed were fixed, stuck, or permanent fixtures of their reality, thus restoring hope that aliveness and balance can be experienced once again. When worked with skillfully through the process of moving between a pleasant or neutral experience to a more charged experience, intensive physiological responses will organically neutralize and eventually dissipate. Clients will rediscover the vitality of living in the present moment as they attend to and strengthen their inherent, natural resiliency. When clients have these new experiences in session, they will be primed to have similar experiences outside of session as their body has this capacity and awareness.



SE is appropriate for people who have experienced:

Complex, developmental trauma

Bullying

Sexual assault

Personality disorders

High Impact and Motor Vehicle Accidents

War

Natural disasters

Medical emergencies, procedures

Anesthesia

Death of loved ones

Domestic violence

Prenatal/birth experiences