What is Somatic Experiencing (SE)?
Simply put, Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to healing. It is a naturalistic and non-pathologizing approach to the resolution of post-traumatic stress reactions, offering a new and hopeful perspective of trauma. Somatic experiencing normalizes the symptoms of trauma (e.g., hypervigilance, restlessness, disconnection, etc.), while helping clients to understand their body’s response to trauma.
How does it work?
Using a “bottom-up” approach, somatic experiencing facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, allowing clients to address and respond to the root cause of the trauma symptoms in the present moment.
To do this, the SE approach gently guides clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions to release this traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Somatic experiencing offers a framework to identify where and assess how a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses, while providing clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states.
The SE tools treat trauma and other issues by gently working to release traumatic stress, access and release suppressed emotions, and move through developmental plateaus to build more resilience and empowerment.
The development of Somatic Experiencing
Animals in the wild are rarely traumatized even though they are routinely threatened. Nature has instilled in all animals, including humans, a nervous system capable of restoring equilibrium. When this self-regulating function is blocked or disturbed, trauma symptoms develop as ways of binding the undischarged arousal or activation. So, to help unblock or uncouple, SE sessions involve the introduction of small amounts of traumatic material and the observation of a client’s physical responses to that material, such as shallow breathing or a shift in posture.
Learn more by visiting the Somatic Experiencing International’s website.