In my words, Somatic Experiencing (SE) is based on an understanding that your nervous system knows how to heal, it wants to, and it can, with support.

Somatic Experiencing, from Somatic Experiencing International, is Dr. Peter Levine’s Western-therapy-friendly remix of various long-standing healing practices from around the world and of the science of neurobiology and psychology.

The story goes that he got the idea because animals in the wild deal with scary stuff all the time, but usually don’t have the trauma symptoms we see in pets, zoo animals, and humans.

Why is that?

When the stress happens, they do something: fight it, flee it, or freeze in the face of it. After freeze, they shake off all that big energy and after each they return to the relative safety of their herd, of whichever social group.

Those aren’t great options for us for a lot of our stressors in our civilized lives, and when we don’t get to do the thing we need to do to be okay, that I’m ready to do something big energy stays in the nervous system. It gets stuck. And stuck leads to yuck — stagnant waters don’t get clean, and stuck energy can’t join the rest of our energy pool. Stuck limits our options.

We’re adaptable! We make it work! You survived - you’re here right now. And, it can be easier, We can get our energies back and decrease our symptoms, get more tolerance back in our nervous systems.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) helps to restore access to the way we’re designed to heal and cope. The healing work — relearning what the nervous system can do and how it communicates, getting trauma patterns unstuck, etc. — happens within an island of relative safety with a trained person who can attune to you and your nervous system.

In a session, we work with just a little bit of stuckness at a time, connecting more to the moment right now, more to what is going well, and processing so things can happen differently. Just a little at a time — there are no small things. Small is all. And these patterns of stuckness tend to happen again and again, so every part we can transform, every small shift, can catalyze larger shifts and capacity building.

There are a lot of ways to do this — talking is great, and it’s not the only way or necessarily required.

We are designed to do hard things — we are designed to heal — we are designed to be in community.