The SE™ Approach

The Somatic Experiencing® method is a body-oriented approach to healing trauma and other stress disorders. It is the life’s work of Peter A. Levine, PhD, resulting from his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and indigenous healing practices, together with over 50 years of successful clinical application. The SE™ approach releases traumatic shock and restores connection, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states.

SE™ 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.

For humans, trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease, and live in the here-and-now. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, racial discrimination, oppression, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear, conflict, and chronic shaming.

SE employs awareness of body sensation to help people "renegotiate" and heal rather than re-live or re-enact trauma.

• SE's guidance of the bodily "felt sense," allows the highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.

• SE may employ touch in support of the renegotiation process.

• SE “titrates” experience (breaks down into small, incremental steps), rather than evoking catharsis - which can overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the organism.