What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a body-oriented and nervous system based therapeutic approach to healing trauma and other stress disorders. SE is the lifetime work of Peter Levine, PhD, and is the result of his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, with more than 45 years of successful application.
Somatic Experiencing® takes you out of your head and into your body, reconnecting you to your body’s innate wisdom. SE helps heal your nervous system, change deeply ingrained survival patterns that are keeping you stuck and resolve symptoms of stress, shock and trauma that are trapped in your body and nervous system.
Stress, shock and any type of trauma (in utero, early developmental, physical, medical, emotional, spiritual, social, environmental) often result in large emotional and physiological reactions. When you don’t have the safety and support to effectively process and release these reactions they can get stored and trapped in your body and nervous system.
The state of your nervous system affects every muscle, organ, tissue and cell. SE focuses on how stress, shock and trauma impacts your nervous system and how nervous system dysregulation affects your daily living, from chronic muscle tension, migraines and gastrointestinal issues to the survival patterns (fight, flight, freeze) you might be stuck in.
SE slowly heals nervous system dysregulation in small, titrated ways, supporting the release of stored traumatic stress, the completion of the stress response cycle and the resolution of PTSD. It’s through these releases and completions that deeply ingrained survival patterns can be altered and healed.
Unlike other trauma healing modalities, SE focuses on the sensations you are experiencing, not the story or event you may replay or retell over and over again in traditional talk therapy.
SE reconnects you and your body to the present moment, helping you to live in the here and now, with a more embodied human experience.
Learning the language of your nervous system aids in rebuilding a foundation of safety and ease in your body, bringing you out of a state of survival and hypervigilance. It’s this sense of safety that allows you to feel safe with yourself, feel safe with others and feel safe in the world.
As your sense of safety grows, you begin to experience more freedom and flow in your life and a greater connection to others and the world around you. You begin to experience the world in a whole new way and things that you didn’t think were possible, become possible.
Somatic Experiencing® may be a key modality to help you heal and change your life, especially if other modalities haven’t worked for you.
🔥 Heather