Somatic Experiencing

Have you ever

  • Felt off in a situation or around certain people, but couldn’t understand what was happening because they weren’t hurting you or endangering you in that moment 

  • Wanted to say no to someone but just couldn’t get the word out of your mouth 

  • Felt like it’s really hard to trust your body 

Somatic approaches can go beyond just talking about it.

Most therapies explore thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Somatic based approaches also include the sensations in your body. It is an experiential therapy model that helps you turn towards your body and your experiences with curiosity to understand the full picture of what’s happening in the moment.

Somatic experiencing (SE) is a psychobiological trauma resolution approach created by Peter Levine, PhD. It is based on research about the mind-body connection. Many of us are great at living in our heads and might not even realize that we have a full body connected to our head. We think about things, we rationalize things, we intellectualize things. And yet, when we only focus on thoughts, it can be challenging to create lasting change. How often do you know one thing intellectually but don’t feel connected to it or actually believe it in your heart?

SE is not about moving you away from thinking; it just helps you realize you don’t have the full story with only your thoughts. By noticing sensations, feelings, and motivations, we get to explore what’s happening below the surface so you can better understand the full breadth of your experience. When we turn our attention to those elements, we gain more awareness and are able to bridge our thinking brain and emotional brain. This allows us to have more flexibility in how we respond to things and feel calmer and more connected to ourselves and others.

Throughout sessions, we talk about what’s happening in your life.  As we do that, we will also pause to notice the full body experience (sensations, emotions, behaviors, images, and thoughts) that you may or may not be aware of. Instead of ignoring or turning away from discomfort, we’ll turn towards it. Turning towards discomfort is what allows change to happen. We do this by being curious, slowing things down, breaking things into small pieces to process, and/or bringing in something positive to help navigate something uncomfortable. This helps us feel more confident in being able to handle what used to feel overwhelming. We feel more in control when having difficult emotions and experiences. It’s easier to return to balance and feel like things are okay. We can feel more connected to ourselves and others, and also have a greater capacity for joy and happiness. 

Somatic experiencing therapy can help you

  • Feel calmer, more grounded, and more resilient 

  • Better understand yourself, your body, and your responses

  • Get out of patterns of overthinking or spiraling 

  • Resolve on-going fear responses (fight, flight, freeze, appease) 

  • Navigate strong emotions with more confidence 

  • Feel a deeper connection to yourself with more self-compassion

Do you want to think about being happy or do you want to actually feel happy?

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 FAQs

  • At their foundation, feelings are information that tell us about our needs and desires. They point to our values, highlight what we are needing more or less of, and inform our boundaries. They can also be very hard to navigate; we can either override them totally or we can get consumed by them. Therapy can help you find the middle ground: feeling them and learning how to respond to them, while also still being able to move forward. 

    Learning to feel our feelings can mean a number of things. It can be learning how to focus on the sensations of the emotion. It can be connecting the emotion to the thoughts or images you have so it’s more integrated. It can be allowing your body to move or do what the emotion is urging your body to do (in a safe way).

    Learning to feel our feelings allows us to live in our bodies, rather than just our minds. It allows us to move through the difficult emotions with more ease so we can more fully experience joy and connection.

    Learn more about how emotions show up in the body

  • Somatic experiencing is a psychobiological trauma resolution therapy that helps people resolve symptoms of trauma and chronic stress. Because we all experience stress, it can be a helpful framework whether we are specifically addressing a traumatic event(s) or not. It can help anyone learn about their nervous system, their survival response patterns (fight, flight, freeze, and appease), and how to develop deeper connection between mind and body.

  • The autonomic nervous system (ANS) connects the brain to all of our organs. It regulates our unconscious bodily functions (breathing, heart rate, digestion, etc.), survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, and appease), and regulation mechanisms to return us to equilibrium after a traumatic event. It is always trying to move us towards safety and away from danger. All of these things happen below the level of conscious thinking in our brain.

    The thinking parts of our brain are often wonderful at understanding the who, what, when, where, and maybe even the why of a situation. However, most of us are not taught to fully notice our internal experience: the emotions, sensations, and impulses that we have. We have a more complete picture of the event(s) when we can get curious about what is happening in our body and the messages our nervous system is trying to communicate to us about our safety.

    Somatic experiencing helps us build our understanding of our nervous system and learn to notice sensations in the body so we can better interpret the messages of the nervous system.