My clinical work is most strongly influenced by the work of Peter Levine and the wisdom of somatic experiencing.
What is SOMATIC EXPERIENCING (SE) and what can it offer us?
According to the Somatic Experiencing Training Institute, “Somatic experiencing is a body oriented therapeutic approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders. The theory comes from the multidisciplinary studies of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, medical biophysics and indigenous healing practices. The "SE" approach releases traumatic shock which transforms PTSD and heals wounds of childhood trauma and everyday anxiety and stress.”
Originally developed as a therapeutic method of resolving shock-trauma, the wisdom and techniques of SE are now more broadly applied to many challenges in living, including depression, anxiety, addictions, attachment problems, syndromes, and developmental trauma.
I see SE as having two intertwined components: a precise understanding of the physiology of trauma and a therapeutic methodology that applies this understanding to facilitate the healing, or renegotiation of trauma. Though detailing the scope and intricacy of SE’s method is beyond our purposes here, there are several key elements of SE that all clients can reasonably expect during their therapy. First, SE practitioners support their clients developing a “felt sense” of their bodies. The felt sense provides the experiential ground for SE and allows the entire process of trauma healing to unfold. The felt sense can be defined as our internal awareness of physical sensation. Persons suffering from symptoms of trauma and chronic stress have been forced into a tenuous, distant relationship with the immediacy of their experience, especially their experience of their bodies. I understand the felt sense as consciously contacting our nervous systems. It is a direct antidote to the dissociative nature of overwhelming or chronically painful experience. Engaging the felt sense also strengthens our nervous systems over time, increasing our capacity to safely navigate intense experiences that previously felt overwhelming. Developing the felt sense also involves identifying and (when useful) articulating different kinds, qualities and areas of sensation.
Secondly, SE supports clients in “tracking” their internal experience. Tracking is the practice of maintaining a continuous awareness of our immediate experience over a period of time. Continuous attention to our immediate experience allows our psychobiology to move in new and different ways, rather than in patterns that have become automatic and largely unconscious.
Tracking sensory experience when recalling a stressful events shifts us from the often overwhelming intensity of emotional and narrative processing to sensory processing, or from story into the nervous system. Tracking allows us to directly perceive what symptoms are trying to do; that is, to directly perceive the function and impulse within painfully repetitive thoughts, feelings and sensations. We are then able to allow our experience to naturally unfold according its organic intelligence, a process that often involves the completion of deeply held responses to previously overwhelming events. As traumatic material is processed directly through the nervous system, traumatic shock and chronic stress are released.
Through engagement with the felt sense and tracking our immediate experience, SE supports us to develop an awareness and vocabulary of our body’s sensory experience. Working in this manner allows painfully repetitive and dissociated experiences to lose their overwhelming charge and gradually integrate, yielding vital energies and capacities now consciously available to us.