Unleashing Your Body’s Healing Power

In the intriguing world of healing and therapy, a method is quietly revolutionizing how we approach and address trauma: Somatic Experiencing (SE). SE, a form of therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine, operates on a notion that seems almost too simple to be true: the body knows how to heal itself. But before you dismiss this as another health fad, let’s journey into the fascinating world of somatic therapy. 

 Imagine for a moment an antelope in the wild, grazing peacefully. Suddenly, a predator appears, and the calm evaporates. In the face of imminent danger, the antelope’s body responds automatically with adrenaline-fueled fight or flight responses. And then, a remarkable thing.  If the antelope is lucky enough to escape the predator, it will literally ‘shake off’ the event and resume everyday life, seemingly unfazed by the traumatic experience.  

 Humans, on the other hand, aren’t so lucky. In our complex, civilized societies, we often override these natural responses, trapping our trauma within the body. This unresolved tension can emerge as stress, anxiety, or other mental and physical health problems. SE is a unique healing tool that works with this trapped energy, allowing it to complete and find our way back to flow and health.  This is true whether the trauma is stress at work, a car accident, an assault, or painful events during childhood. 

Resolving Trauma and Stress 

 The core benefit of SE is its potential to resolve trauma and mitigate stress. During a traumatic event, the body’s defense system often becomes dysregulated. If the body doesn’t return to its pre-trauma state, the individual may experience a host of stress-related symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, chronic fatigue, and insomnia. SE helps reestablish the body’s equilibrium by guiding individuals to move through their body’s instinctual fight, flight, or freeze responses. This can lead to a significant reduction in the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other stress-related conditions.   

 In practice, an SE therapist will help you locate your uncomfortable feelings in your body, and then in small incremental ways will ‘pendulate’ between the area of greater discomfort and a place of lesser discomfort.  This titrated approach allows the mind to gradually access, open up, and reconsolidate the painful memories. 

Enhancing Emotional Regulation 

 Somatic Experiencing aids individuals in developing a deeper understanding of their emotions. By using techniques that focus on the body’s reactions, people can identify and respond to their physical cues related to emotions. This increased self-awareness enables them to manage their emotions better and respond appropriately to stressful situations, which ultimately leads to healthier relationships with others. 

The Body Talks – It’s Time to Listen 

 Somatic Experiencing encourages a deep connection with one’s body. Through SE, individuals learn to tune into their bodily sensations and listen to the signals that their body sends. This enhanced body awareness can lead to healthier habits, as individuals become more attuned to their body’s needs for rest, nourishment, movement, and connection. 

Bouncing Back from Life’s Curveballs 

One of the primary aims of SE is to increase resilience – the ability to bounce back from adversity. Through guided therapeutic sessions, individuals develop a deeper understanding of their stress responses and learn techniques to navigate through life’s challenges more effectively. 

Unleashing Your Inner Superhero 

 The empowerment that comes from understanding and controlling one’s physical and emotional responses can significantly boost self-confidence and self-efficacy. Individuals who practice SE often report feeling more in control of their lives and are better equipped to handle future stressors. 

The Physical and the Phantom 

Ever experienced pain that just doesn’t have a logical explanation? Chronic physical conditions, like unexplained aches or digestive issues, can sometimes be the manifestations of unresolved trauma. By tackling trauma at its roots, SE offers a new pathway to relief. 

 Somatic Experiencing isn’t a magical panacea that can erase trauma overnight. But it offers something arguably better – a safe, progressive method to reset your body’s natural rhythm. It’s a gentle yet potent approach that nudges you towards a state of balance, resilience, and vitality. 

 In a world where the norm is to ‘think’ our way out of problems, SE is a refreshing deviation, beckoning us to ‘feel’ our way towards healing. By leveraging the wisdom of our bodies and releasing trapped trauma, we can unlock a more balanced, healthier, and peaceful version of ourselves.   

 Remember, though, that SE is not a one-size-fits-all solution. As with any therapy, it’s crucial to consult with a mental health professional who can guide you to the best-suited treatment based on your unique circumstances. So, are you ready to tap into the wisdom of your body? 

The GoodTherapy Registry might be helpful to anyone experiencing trauma. We have thousands of Therapists listed with us who would love to walk with you on your journey. Find the support you need today.

“I don’t know why, but every time I start dating someone new, I lose interest after three or four dates—even if they are really cool.”

“This time of year just makes me miserable. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me drink more just to be able to stand it.”

“I’m so discouraged by these panic attacks. I never know when they’re going to hit. They’re ruining my life.”

“I’m 30 years old, and I haven’t ever seriously dated anyone because of my social anxiety. It just gets in the way, all the time.”

These are a few of the typical complaints I hear when I meet with someone for the first time. These problems all sound pretty different, don’t they? Chances are, however, that they share an underlying process. We can credit Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, for clarifying this process for us. His life’s work synthesizes vast amounts of research, therapy practices, and worldwide cultural traditions with his own original contributions. [fat_widget_right]

Dr. Levine calls this underlying process “over-coupling.” Over-coupling takes place when trauma energy sticks two things together that shouldn’t be. Our brain perceives some stimulus, one that could be innocuous to others, and then has this lightning quick reaction based on its learned history: “If there’s this, there’s also going to be that—and that is really bad, so let’s rev up the fight or flight energy!”

How Over-Coupling Works

Over-coupling involves the parts of the brain known as the limbic system, or our emotional/threat response, and the reptilian brain, which is in charge of body regulation. When these systems perceive a potential threat, they go into a stress response. Trauma can occur when that threat feels overwhelming or bigger than our ability to effectively cope with it, and the energy from that stress response gets stuck in our systems, under the surface. The unconscious layers of the brain and body want to avoid any situation like that ever happening again. So when something feels similar to the big, bad thing that happened in the past, our reptile brains lock into the same threat response as the previous time. This happens whether or not the logical mind is aware of any similarity between the previous and current situations.

That is over-coupling. Like a creaky old suit of armor, it’s meant to protect us, but what it really does is get in our way, preventing us from freely living our lives.

When our limbic, or emotional/threat response, and reptile, or body regulation brains perceive a potential threat, they go into a stress response … The unconscious layers of the brain and body want to avoid any situation like that ever happening again.

Over-Coupling Examples

Let’s explore the above examples with this new awareness of over-coupling.

• In the first example, a new love interest equals a threat. This could be rooted in the emotional damage caused by an old love interest or parent, both of which might cause the body and attachment system to shut down. This dynamic is usually at the core of avoidant attachment.
• Different seasons of the year come with certain environmental cues that remind us of an original difficult period or event in our lives. The angle of the sunlight, the feeling in the air, the temperature, and the way the plants look and smell might all act as subconscious cues. These cues may or may not stir up anxiety or panic; many people simply feel malaise and dread around over-coupled times of the year. Grief anniversaries are one example. Alcohol is one strategy frequently used to turn off these feelings, even if it only works for a brief time. However, as a central nervous system depressant, it can often worsen problems with mood.
• Panic attacks become less of a mystery once these subconscious coupling dynamics are understood. Panic attacks are essentially the body’s emergency alarms going off at the wrong time: “This is not a drill! We’re going to die, right now!” They consist of a lot of flight, or sympathetic nervous system, energy coursing through the system all at once. The body is mobilizing to get out immediately because it thinks it’s going to die. Many people try to repress panic attacks, but this can be like holding a lid on a pot insistent on boiling over. Somatic therapy has developed many alternate ways to work with panic that essentially turn off the figurative stove, allowing the water to cool and settle.
• Social anxiety occurs when the threat response system is convinced, from previous felt experience, that a social environment is going to cause emotional or social harm. This can happen whether or not the current social environment is similar to the one that caused damage. Social anxiety comes with varying levels of conscious acceptance of the message the limbic and reptile brains are sending. When there’s more conscious acceptance of the belief, “I’m no good/not desirable,” it often carries a developmental aspect. Here, the person’s compromised self-esteem may reinforce the over-coupling message. Regardless, the subconscious mind is convinced the social environment is not safe, and it often refuses to deactivate until the person gets away to be alone or with a few trusted others.

Since these conditions usually involve the body’s unconscious trauma energies, which can be tricky and powerful, treatment is best left to someone with specific training in this area. Personally, I will always be grateful for my own continued training in somatic psychotherapy and for Peter’s contributions in the area of coupling dynamics.

In a future article, we will examine under-coupling, which occurs when something feels so overwhelming that the body numbs it out. Under-coupling is even more tricky, as it usually takes place beneath the level of the person’s conscious awareness and shares a special relationship with over-coupling. In the meantime, I invite you to start having compassion for any over-coupling you might notice going on in your own system. As frustrating as it might be, it is trying to protect you!

References:

1. Levine, P. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
2. Practitioner training manual. (2007). Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute/Foundation for Human Enrichment: Boulder, CO: Foundation for Human Enrichment.

A racing heart and a roiling stomach. Panic attacks, nightmares, or fatigue. The body has myriad ways to manifest the many faces of trauma and fear. And for many people, getting help to cope with the symptoms of emotional distress means going through “talk therapy”—a kind of psychotherapy based on verbally processing thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Now, though, the rapidly growing field of somatic psychotherapy is shifting the paradigm from talking to feeling—and this approach is offering new promise for healing trauma through body-centered techniques, such as Somatic Experiencing.

Somatic Psychotherapy Is Body-Centered Psychotherapy

Somatic psychotherapy—also called body psychotherapy—focuses on the complex and profoundly powerful connections between body and mind and how those connections affect how we process and recover from trauma and other emotional distress. Somatic psychotherapy arises from the premise that, along with thinking about the world and how to respond to it, humans engage with others and the world through sensations, movement, and expression.

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In response to situations and stimuli of all kinds, the body’s core response network, or CRN, is activated. This network, which is made up of the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and other regulatory functions, is responsible for organizing and generating an immediate response to challenges presented by a person’s environment, such as the well-known “fight, flight, or freeze” response to stressors and perceived dangers.

In that kind of situation, the CRN signals the body to release a flood of stimulant chemicals, such as adrenaline and cortisol, creating a surge of energy that throws the system temporarily out of balance.

When animals are faced with threats—say, from predators—they experience those responses too. But once the threat has passed, they typically discharge that “survival” energy with movements such as shaking, sighing, or stretching before returning to normal behavior. For them, that kind of event is generally experienced as an isolated incident and causes no lingering symptoms.

But for humans, returning to “normal” after a traumatic experience is not so simple. People who experience sudden or ongoing trauma or other kinds of distressing events typically don’t have ways to clear their systems of the survival, or arousal, energy produced in response to those situations. That energy lingers in the body, and if unresolved, may result in conditions including posttraumatic stress (PTSD), depression, phobias, muscle aches and pains, irritable bowel syndrome and other digestive issues, insomnia, and autoimmune disorders.

Somatic Therapy Is Not “Talk Therapy”

The goal of psychotherapy is to help people resolve issues that trigger emotional and physical distress. With approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, people seeking help are encouraged to talk about their experiences in order to gain insights into patterns of negative thinking, identify harmful behavior patterns, or learn new ways to cope with triggers for stress. This kind of “talk therapy” might also include activities such as journaling, poetry, and other kinds of writing, and even art and drama therapy.

But these approaches place heavy emphasis on cognitive functioning and verbal expression—and while a person in this kind of therapy might talk about physical symptoms of trauma or distress, engaging the responses of the body itself might play a fairly limited role in the therapeutic process.

Somatic Experiencing Brings Completion

Somatic psychotherapy begins with the body, working to discover how and where trauma is being physically experienced—and finding ways to safely “discharge” the energy related to that trauma.

Somatic psychotherapy begins with the body, working to discover how and where trauma is being physically experienced—and finding ways to safely “discharge” the energy related to that trauma.

While traditional “talk therapy” encourages people to think about traumatic experiences and express their feelings in words, the somatic approach focuses instead on fully feeling the body’s sensations and the emotions that accompany them. People are encouraged to engage with the body’s responses to memories, experiences, and surroundings. Somatic Experiencing, created by Dr. Peter Levine, is one somatic psychotherapy modality.

In recent work published in Frontiers in Psychology, Levine, in collaboration with Somatic Experiencing practitioners Peter Payne and Mardi A. Crane-Godreau, reviews the broad range of applications for this approach and its potential for supporting recovery from trauma caused by combat, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

Somatic Experiencing employs three core strategies for resolving trauma-related energies:

• Resourcing helps a person experiencing the effects of trauma to create resources for feeling safe and secure while working to resolve the trauma. These might include memories of good times or loved ones or thinking about a valued object or activity. One goal of therapy is to help people discover and build a supply of resources for support.
• Titration exposes a person to small amounts of trauma-related distress at a time in order to build up tolerance and avoid becoming overwhelmed by traumatic memories. In therapy, people pay close attention to the sensations they experience when revisiting a traumatic event and gradually become less affected by them.
• Pendulation, also called “looping,” involves switching between resourcing and titration, allowing a person to move between a state of arousal triggered by a traumatic event and a state of calm. This helps the body to regain homeostasis—a state in which the body’s systems are regulated and working in balance.

Mindful Movement Supports Somatic Therapy

Somatic psychotherapy often incorporates movement to help regulate the autonomic nervous system and bring about a state of “biological completion” in which trapped arousal energy has been resolved and the system is restored to balance. Breathwork and “moving meditations,” such as qigong, yoga, and tai chi, can help to engage the vagus nerve and ease bodily symptoms of trauma, such as muscle pain and headache.

Somatic psychology draws from ancient mind-body practices as well as ongoing research in psychology, biology, and the neurosciences. With the support of new insights into the intimate and profoundly powerful connections between the body and brain, the field of somatic psychotherapy continues to grow, creating more opportunities to help the body heal itself from trauma—one step at a time.

June is National PTSD Awareness Month. For help with trauma and related issues, contact a therapist in your area.

References:

1. Barratt, B. B. (2013, January 10). The emergence of somatic psychology and bodymind therapy. London: Palgrave McMillan.
2. Gold, P. (2014, November 1). Somatic psychology: The complementary nature of qigong and counseling. Retrieved from http://www.portlandtherapycenter.com/blog/somatic-psychotherapy-the-complementary-nature-of-qigong-and-counseling
3. Ogden, P., Pain, C., Kekuni, M., & Fisher, J. Including the body in mainstream psychotherapy for traumatized individuals. Retrieved from https://www.sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/article%20APA.html
4. Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015, February 4). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology. Retrieved from http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093/full
5. Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015, April 14). Corrigendum: Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology. Retrieved from http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00423/full
6. Somatic Psychology – Body Psychology. Retrieved from http://usabp.org/somatic-psychology-body-psychotherapy/
7. What Is Somatic Psychotherapy? Retrieved from https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/somatic-psychology