What is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-centered approach to healing that helps release and settle the physiological activation stored in the nervous system. This process often reduces stress and supports a greater sense of regulation, resilience, and ease in daily life.
Through SE, you’ll learn how to gently notice and work with uncomfortable sensations in your body, allowing them to gradually unwind through mindful awareness. Because so many stress-related symptoms are rooted in the body, SE can be especially effective in managing stress and restoring balance.
SE also addresses unresolved trauma by releasing traumatic shock, which is central to healing PTSD and the effects of emotional or developmental trauma. It provides a framework to identify where someone may feel “stuck” in fight, flight, or freeze responses, and offers tools to resolve these states so the body and mind can return to equilibrium.
"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 state. It is difficult, if not impossible, to function normally under these circumstances."
- Peter A. Levine (Founder of Somatic Experiencing)
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