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The Body Leads the Way

“Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them…One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.”
– Antonio Damasio

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a unique and focused method of addressing trauma, stress, illness and physical pain. Years of psychobiological research lies behind this approach. SE recognizes that we suffer when our self-protection system fails us at a crucial moment such as a car accident, a bullying incident at school, sexual assault or childhood abandonment and neglect, or even surgery. When the nervous system programs around a frightening experience, it creates fight, flight and freeze responses that appear automatically and prevent us from living a smooth, well-regulated life.

When we experience a constant state of hyper-awareness, stress or freeze, our bodies eventually start to breakdown and symptoms appear to let us know that we need to complete the rewiring or we’ll suffer long term trauma. SE training allows the therapist to assist in the neural rewiring that is important to bring about healing in the nervous system and elsewhere. “Trauma is a fact of life, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence,” says Peter Levine, founder of the SE Trauma Institute (SETI).

“A traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one’s past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring.”
– Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers:
The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment.

SE researchers and therapists have identified numerous symptoms that benefit from this approach including: chronic fatigue, immune system failures, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, asthma, skin disorders, digestive problems, depression, blunted emotions, attention deficits, isolation, lack of motivation and goal orientation and even excessive shyness.

During SE sessions, we work to release trauma and stress that is stored in the body. These sessions do not require you to retell or relive the events of the trauma itself. SE mobilizes the body’s self-protective responses to complete the processes that were interrupted at the time of the trauma. By engaging every body system–smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight and sound–as well as the autonomic nervous system, the large protective muscles, the SE approach is able to reorganize human experience. SE gives us back a well programmed safety system. It allows us to live again with flow and without fear.

Before we get started with SE work, we’ll discuss what kinds of approaches you are comfortable with, including touch. Then we’ll work within your comfort level to bring integration of body and mind.
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It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment. - Andrew Wyeth — It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.
– Andrew Wyeth

Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself. - Marion Woodman — Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself.
– Marion Woodman

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Ralph Waldo Emerson — Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. - Rudyard Kipling — The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
– Rudyard Kipling

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One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. - William Shakespeare — One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
– William Shakespeare

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Feelings aroused by the touch of someone’s hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith -- all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well. - Dr. Bernie Siegel — Feelings aroused by the touch of someone’s hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith — all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.
– Dr. Bernie Siegel

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