What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a trauma informed, holistic approach moving us towards ease, regulation and possibility in life.
Through moment-to-moment awareness of sensations in your body and using resources available to you, SE aims to gently re-establish the natural flow of your life energy, supporting the safe release of symptoms from the nervous system, putting the past where it belongs, and restoring body, heart and mind to a relaxed wholeness.
SE is based on the work of American psychologist Dr Peter Levine who believes trauma is primarily biological. His theory is based on observations of wildlife. Animals in the wild frequently face threats to their life but don’t become traumatised. When confronted with danger their survival instinct kicks in, and there is a mobilisation of energy to enable effective defensive action – fighting, fleeing or freezing. When the danger passes all that intense energy is discharged and the animal returns to full normal health. This discharge of energy may appear as shaking, deep breaths, running and heat dissipating from the body for example.
As humans we too are equipped with this same natural capacity to overcome an overwhelming experience. However as we grow up we tend to learn to override this process as if our upper rational brain ‘rejects’ the powerful primal instinct of the body. As a result we can build up huge fight/flight/freeze energy in our nervous system without releasing it. This can lead to all sorts of symptoms; sometimes immediately, sometimes not until years later.
How does Somatic Experiencing work?
SE doesn't focus on talking about or re-living trauma, rather it listens to and uses the ‘voice’ of the body referred to as the felt sense.
Felt senses could be physical sensations such as warmth, tingling, and contraction. Paying attention to these sensations moment-to-moment supports the powerful self-healing mechanisms we are born with to do their miraculous work. Trapped stress energy can be safely discharged, helping to restore equilibrium to the nervous system.
The SE process is supported by resources that will be unique to the client. Resources bring about a sense of safety and goodness to the body and mind, and can be internal e.g. sense of humour, your back’s contact with the chair, or external e.g. an object in the room, a much-loved family member, a place.
By working slowly, step by step, in this way, the distressing cycle of symptom escalation can potentially be reversed, and you can gain a steady confidence in your ability to work with the trauma in a safe, conscious and life-affirming way.
What can Somatic Experiencing help with?
The key reason for working with SE need not be an obvious traumatic event but the presence of a symptom or symptoms. Trauma is not in the event but in the individual’s physiological reaction to it. The individual response to an event will be a result of many different factors but can be thought of as anything that was too much, too soon and too quick for your system. Equally in the case of lack, trauma might be thought of as something that was too little for too long as may be the case when a child is unable to cope with a set of circumstances.
My role as a SE Practitioner is to act as an impartial, non-judgmental and compassionate support to help you feel safe, and facilitate the release of trauma through your body.
You will not be asked to tell your 'story' or examine the past although over the course of sessions this may come up and is of course welcome. Instead, you will be guided to gently release physical tensions, emotions and energy related to the trauma as they arise in the session, at a pace, and in a way that best supports you to return to a natural state of wellbeing and readiness for life.
SE may be useful amongst many other things for:
Anxiety, depression, mood swings
Feeling stuck, chronic fatigue
Chronic physical symptons, auto-immune conditions
PTSD and complex PTSD
Emotional recovery after accidents, operations etc
A greater sense of connection to life and to your body
An SE session in more detail
Typically, we will sit comfortably opposite each other, you will given time to settle, and then I’ll ask what issue you’d like to work with today.
You’ll then be guided to consciously explore related physical sensations, feelings, thoughts and images as they arise in relation to the topic. We call this Tracking and in this process highly charged energy in your body can be properly engaged and released naturally. You may typically experience tingling, warmth, twitching or other muscle movements, a gurgling tummy and yawning.
The result of this sometimes subtle mobilisation can be immediate: the trapped survival energy at the root of your symptoms is freed, allowing a new relaxation to establish deep in your body and mind.