Somatic Experiencing is a body awareness therapy designed to resolve trauma. It works to bring awareness to the felt sense of the body to help people renegotiate and heal trauma rather than focusing on the "story" or the event which can evoke catharsis and further deepen the destress.
Psychologist Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice, developed this model based on the way animals in the wild overcome frequent life-threatening situations and are not traumatized by the events but carry on thriving. Processing and recovering from threat is something they, and we as mammals, are hard wired to do because, as Peter discovered, trauma is held in the autonomic nervous system of flight, fight, freeze and not the actual memory of the event itself. Memory can be tricky, and there has been lots of research questioning our ability to recall events, but the body holds our history from conception on.
This powerful, survival-based mechanism found in all animals can get thwarted in humans for various reason having to do wth the neocortex or level of overwhelm. We have a lifetime of varying degrees of difficult experiences, some get resolved through this innate regulatory mechanism while others bypass our body's natural defense system and are carried as "charges" in our nervous system unable to naturally cycle through our bodies.
Somatic Experiencing works with slowing down and being present. Clients are clothed and sit across from the therapist while we talk and sometimes hold certain parts of the body. We work with " titration"- a technique of slowly allowing in those highly aroused survival energies in the body so that they can be safely experienced and therefore gradually discharged throughout the system to restore self-regulation and return a sense of aliveness, relaxation and wholeness. Our resiliency and capacity to deal with future events increases. Therefore, we don't have to relive or reenact a traumatic event but work with the nervous systems ability to discharge the held charge and regulate the nervous system bringing it back to homeostasis.
Somatic Experiencing is known to help with: ~ any type of shock trauma, car accidents, falls, birth trauma, trauma during preverbal states, etc. ~ physical syndromes, such as fibromyalgia, migraines, chronic pain, allergies, etc that can manifest as a result of long held trauma. -developmental trauma