Somatic Experiencing

Your nervous system is at the core of your lived experience.

Somatic Experiencing™ is a healing model for trauma and and other stress disorders. By healing your nervous system, you can:

  • resolve trauma

  • learn to befriend your nervous system

  • understand how your nervous system plays out in all types of relationships

  • deepen sensation and capacity for pleasure and pain

  • release pent-up energy

  • identify when you are “triggered”

  • build resiliency to stress

  • integrate the “animal” inside

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What is Somatic Experiencing good for?

Somatic Experiencing™ sessions are good for:

  • Healing trauma symptoms (such as exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, and blunted affect)

  • Chronic pain and chronic ailments such as autoimmune diseases, Fibromyalgia, Obesity, disordered eating, and others) *

  • Healing and recovery after traumatic events (such as motor vehicle collisions, falls, experiencing war, attack, etc)

  • Preparation for medical procedure and post-procedure healing and integration

  • Post-injury healing

  • Grief and loss

  • Intergenerational trauma

  • Preparation for working with plant medicines

* SE does not claim to resolve these conditions.

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”

― Gabor Maté, MD

What does working together look like?

We’ll begin with discussing what you’re wanting from working together, and any questions about the process.

You don’t have to identify a traumatic event to benefit from Somatic Experiencing. This modality is for healing your nervous system and repairing any disconnections caused by stressful events. Modern culture and society is fundamentally disconnecting, even if you didn’t experience or inherit trauma.

My experience of Somatic Experiencing as a recipient and those of my clients is a state of deeper connection to oneself in the present moment after receiving a session.

“The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul.”

― Peter Levine, PhD, creator of Somatic Experiencing

The Science and History of Somatic Experiencing

Trauma may begin as acute 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 with resilience and ease. 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.

Somatic Experiencing™ 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. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine.

The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states.

Dr. Levine was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system when he realized that animals are constantly under threat of death, yet show no symptoms of trauma. What he discovered was that trauma has to do with the third survival response to perceived life threat, which is freeze. When fight and flight are not options, we freeze and immobilize, like “playing dead.” This makes us less of a target. However, this reaction is time-sensitive, in other words, it needs to run its course, and the massive energy that was prepared for fight or flight gets discharged, through shakes and trembling. If the immobility phase doesn’t complete, then that charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective, it is still under threat. 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.

(from Somatic Experiencing™)

Trainings

It’s my goal that you feel comfortable with an understanding of my training and background in this work.