Somatic Experiencing®
Somatic Experiencing® is a biobehavioral approach to the resolution and healing of trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine. It is based upon the observation that wild prey animals, though threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized. Animals in the wild utilize innate mechanisms to regulate and discharge the high levels of energy arousal associated with defensive survival behaviors. These mechanisms provide animals with a built-in ‘’immunity’’ to trauma that enables them to return to normal in the aftermath of highly ‘’charged’’ life-threatening experiences.
Scientific evidence indicates that the dynamics of traumatic stress and its symptoms have significant biological components. Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a powerful method for addressing the psychobiology of stress and trauma. Dr. Levine has studied and observed traumatic stress in humans and animals for over thirty years and has developed a deep understanding of human survival energy’s function.
This approach understands that traumatic stress symptoms are often expressions of incomplete or fixated lower brain functions of fight, flight, and freeze. SE helps people complete these responses and restore their inherent self-correcting, self-regulating mechanisms. Integrating lower psychomotor processes with higher brain processes of cognition and feeling creates a more flexible neurological system, and enhances a person’s capacity to enjoy a wide spectrum of human experience.
Somatic Experiencing® is appropriate for anyone working in the field of trauma: physical therapists, psychotherapists, physicians, psychologists, nurses, bodyworkers, psychiatrists, educators, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, social workers, martial artists, vocational counselors, and others.
The first year of the basic three year training includes the basic concepts, principles, theory and interventions of Somatic Experiencing. In the second year specific categories of trauma are addressed. In the third of Advanced year we look at how chronic distress contributes to and leads to medical syndromes combined with depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc. and how to integrate basic touch work with the basic concepts.
Somatic Experiencing Master Classes
These classes take a deep dive into a more detailed and refined understanding of, and working with come of the categories of trauma:
Eye Of The Needle is a 2 part master class working with near death experiences, altered states of consciusness, out of body experiences and anesthesia..
Depression, Aggression and Life Force looks at a more detailed understanding of depression and its trauma roots.
Chronic Pain and Syndromes extends the material from Advanced 1 of the basic three year SE training which addresses the basics of trauma related medical sydromes. Click here for a link to an interview about Chronic Pain, Syndromes and Trauma.