Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented approach to heal trauma and stress-induced symptoms.

Originally created to address PTSD specifically, it is nowadays widely used for developmental trauma and other types of trauma including intergenerational trauma. SE is developed by Dr Peter Levine, who has made it his life's work to advance our understanding of trauma and healing. He points out that ‘trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event’. Luckily, the body has an innate capacity for healing and resilience. SE works with the body’s natural self-regulating system. In an SE session, the goal is to discharge activation from the body. So in this sense, it is less about the story and more about what the body is still holding on to.

Most likely everyone has experienced some level of trauma in their life. It’s the situations where something that happened was too fast, too much, too soon, we just couldn’t cope with it. So we experienced overwhelm and our survival responses couldn’t successfully complete. Overwhelm in the nervous system puts us into freeze. As a result, coherence of our experience becomes fragmented. In essence, our trauma experiences create both, rigidity and over-flexibility in our response to events in our current life.

SE has developed a great tool to explain what goes on in this state of fragmentation. It’s called SIBAM. SIBAM is an acronym for elements of an experience, namely: sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning. In a healthy state these elements connect to each other in a fluid way, we easily move from affect to meaning to sensation. And so on. But with trauma, some channels of perception become more or less available, because of coupling that happens. For example, in a panic attack, affect and sensation dominate (over-couple), while other elements become less available (undercouple). In an SE session, you are led into repeated cycles of activation-deactivation, where these connections start to re-organize in a self-regulatory way. This can feel like a relief and often makes way for new awareness. This kind of whole-person approach to bring in coherence and fluid connection between our perceptive channels is one of the central parts of the SE journey.

It is easy to see, given this framework, that some other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, disregard the importance of somatic elements of our experience and therefore lack the depth to renegotiate traumatic activation. When working with material that has been stressful to a level, where cognition is inhibited, where we were highly emotional, or in a survival response, we need to look at somatic elements to complete the cycle of self-regulation. If we talk about the activation, it is like pointing to it from distance, while it needs to be worked through bottom-up, using felt sense - in a gentle, safe, step-by-step way. Once this groundwork is done, we will inevitable once again become more present and available for a fuller range of experiences.

The long-term goal of SE is to support you to live a rich and full life, by building more capacity to contain intensity while teaching the nervous system new positive experiences in the felt sense. This shift will take time, Peter Levine says: “Taking time is very important—body time is much slower than cognitive time or emotional time.” With SE work we are fundamentally changing the way we connect to felt sense, which in essence is what life feels like to us.