Somatic Experiencing®

What Is Somatic Experiencing®(SE)?

Somatic Experiencing (SE™) is a body-oriented therapeutic model designed to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies and nervous systems. Trauma, from an SE lens, is focused on how it shows up in the nervous system and how that dysregulation impacts your life. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us transform, recover, and become more resilient. 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. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine.
The SE approach transforms traumatic shock, which is key to changing patterns that get stuck and impact people’s daily life. It can be used to support the resolution of PTSD and 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.

The Affects Of Trauma May Show Up In Your Life As

  • Addictions of all kinds

  • Eating disorders

  • Migraines

  • Gastrointestinal disorders

  • Chronic pain

  • Trouble paying attention

  • Sense of feeling disconnected

  • Trouble setting boundaries

  • Sense of feeling unexplainable separate

  • Depression

  • Panic and Anxiety

  • Autoimmune diseases

  • Numbness

  • Fear of intimacy

  • Hyper vigilance

  • Nightmares

  • Difficulty sleeping

  • Shutdown or freezing up as a knee jerk response

How Does Trauma Get Stuck In Your Mind-Body Connection?

We can best understand how trauma happens and resolves by understanding the biology of the body.

During a traumatic event the body experiences a surge of intense energy that can often stay stuck in the system. It’s as though this stuck energy freezes there, costing us our vitality and strength and replacing it with often debilitating symptoms.

This freeze response holds the key to understanding trauma. Once aroused, our survival responses of fight or flight need to come to a successful completion in order for our nervous systems to come back to a state of rest and harmony.

When we are unable to complete these responses, our nervous systems become frozen. This freeze or immobilized state may look calm on the outside, but internally/physiologically the state can be compared to what happens in a car when we step on the brake and the gas pedal at the same time. The mind-body connection is revving, creating the symptoms of trauma.

Somatic Experiencing is a gentle therapy for resolving and transforming unresolved survival responses, thereby healing the symptoms of trauma.

The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word, they have become stuck in an aroused survival state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.”

~ Dr. Peter Levine, Founder of Somatic Experiencing®, author of Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma

What To Expect With SE™ Sessions:

  • Ways to safely and gradually come out of the freeze state

  • Building felt-sense resources ie: experiences which help us feel joy, optimism, freedom, and love

  • Developing awareness of emotions and sensation

  • Skills in settling. ie: getting “out of your head” and “into your body”

  • Moving through stress, anxiety, gried, and anger in safe and healthy ways, without getting stuck

  • Learning to be present with yourself and others, both in silence or in conversation

  • Internal and external boundaries; how to say “yes” and “no” effectively

  • Transforming knee-jerk reactions and identifying and addressing underlying healthy needs

To resolve trauma we must learn to move fluidly between instinct, emotion and rational thought. When these three sources are in harmony, communicating sensation, feeling and cognition, our organisms operates as they were designed to. In learning to contact bodily sensations, we begin to fathom our instictual reeptilian roots. We become human animals, naturally collaborative and loving. Fierce warriors, gentle nurturers and everything in between.

~ Dr. Peter Levine, Founder of Somatic Experiencing®, author of Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma

Is SE Talk Therapy?

SE is not talk therapy, however we will talk. I will invite you to share with me what is most currently most stressful, what keeps you ip at night and what is troubling you. I’m compassionate to your humanity because I know what it’s like to suffer, to not have your life working the way you need it to, to feel unhappy. I respect your courage to desire change and asking for help.

In the SE approach to healing and resolving trauma, it is important to gradually bring a sense of reconnection to our bodies through a felt sense of one’s real time experience.

My expertise is in creating a felt sense of safety and watching for opportunities to delve deeper into becoming more aware of your emotions and sensations. My teachers and my experience have taught me that this is the most direct path to healing trauma, childhood neglect, abuse and CPTSD.

A SE session often feels life-giving as you remember that your body and nervous system is your most trustworthy medicine.

Sessions are available on Zoom or in-person and are $150 usd ($180 cad)for a 75 minute session.