“Somatic Experiencing (SE™) aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies.

When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and become more resilient.

It is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied in multiple professions and professional settings—psychotherapy, medicine, coaching, teaching, and physical therapy—for healing trauma and other stress disorders.

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 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.”

— from the Somatic Experiencing® Institute website, traumahealing.org

You can read more about my approach to SE sessions HERE.

“Trauma represents a profound compression of “survival” energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action.

When in the therapeutic session, this energy is gradually released or titrated and then redirected from its symptomatic detour onto its natural course.”

— Peter Levine from In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

“My trauma was worse than yours or your trauma was worse than mine. One of the things that I’ve learned in working with people for 50 years is there’s no such thing as that.

We all have our injuries. I mean that’s the Latin word for trauma is injury, wound.

And, we all have our wounds. We all have our stories to tell.”

— Peter Levine from Sounds of SAND podcast episode #82

“The embodied or survival-based habits cannot be changed through conversation or thought alone.

The language centers in the brain have very little influence over the survival centers in the nervous system and brain.

At the same time, language and thought are important. In the big picture we want to align the head, heart, gut, and actions.

From a neuroscience perspective, the body is the easiest doorway into working with those reactions, emotions, and memories that are primarily run by the reptilian brain, and the limbic and stress centers in the brain. This is an integral part of the somatic transformation process.

Through somatic opening, change is revealed from the body up, not from thinking down. New thinking appears from changes within embodied patterns.

Trying to use new thinking alone to change embodied patterns tends to be unsuccessful and unsustainable.”

— Staci Haines from The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice

“Embodied healing means we can make choices based on what we care about, rather than react from survival strategies, even under the pressures of living, loving, and social justice work.

Somatics allows us to heal, find wholeness, and be on a purposeful path of transformation.

It does much more than help us understand what happened to us and why we are as we are. It lets us live, choose, be, and act differently. It lets us get better at loving and being loved, at generating safety, and at taking bold purposeful action.

It pragmatically and authentically helps us know how to build more trust together, and work with conflict in a way that’s generative. It helps us to heal shame and internalized oppression.

Somatic awareness involves learning to both pay attention to, and live inside of, our sensations and aliveness. This means connecting to sensations like temperature, movement, and pressure, in an ongoing way.

Through increased somatic awareness, sensations become sources of information. You can think of sensations as the foundational language of life. Overriding or numbing sensations, while a good survival strategy, leaves us disconnected from a key source of information and satisfaction.

Feeling our organic aliveness lets us connect with ourselves; feel what we care about and long for; build empathy and connection with others; and feel what needs to be attended to, acted upon, or healed.”

— Staci Haines from The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice

“Any transformation is happening within a social context or social conditions. We are shaped by and embody the social conditions in which we live. These conditions include the political, economic, and social systems as well as the cultural beliefs and practices we inherit, live, and function within daily.

The institutions and social norms we are surrounded by are currently shaping and have historically shaped us. We embody these just as we are shaped by and embody our family practices and culture, those of our communities, and the land and environment. We are in both a current social and political moment, and strongly shaped by the flow of history before us.

When we are looking at transformation, social context is one of the most influential shaping forces, whether we are focused on personal, community, or systemic change. The impact of the shaping from these broader forces is often what we are looking to heal from and transform, individually and collectively.

Somatics, with a social analysis, challenges this norm. It holds that all bodies, all people, have aliveness, form, a shape, the impulses to live, connect, and make meaning. That all bodies, all people, have adaptations to their experiences that leave them with more and less choice.

The socially constructed objectified and narrowed idea of body leaves us with less aliveness and an attempt to adapt to a norm that is not possible for most people. This also leaves us with less of a sense—and for many, actual lived experience—of safety, belonging, and dignity.

While somatics has much to offer in healing, a somatic approach without an analysis of social and economic institutions, unequal distribution of power, and use of violence and coercion, excludes some of the largest forces that shape us.

Without a social analysis much of the trauma that people withstand is either left unnamed—racism, gender oppression, homophobia, class oppression—or only partially addressed.

Even when somaticists and somatic therapists are well meaning, without this analysis, we often do not explore how we too embody oppressive and individualistic ways of being, and can perpetuate this through the work.”

— Staci Haines from The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice

“Trauma is going to happen in a human being’s life because that’s just what life is like. You’re going to lose somebody you love. Something’s going to happen catastrophically. You will have that experience.

But when we have systems designed around care, when we have culture and ritual designed around care and processing what happens in a body, in a group, in a collective, then to me that’s healing-centered, that’s care-centered, tending to the process that is biological, that is communal, of our need to process things that are sometimes overwhelming.”

— Prentis Hemphill from the Finding Our Way podcast Season 2 Episode 12