What is somatic experiencing

Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a gentle, body-focused approach to treating the effects of stress, shock, and trauma (Levine, 1997, 2010). It works by helping you complete the self-protective responses that got interrupted and stayed stuck in your body, and by discharging the energy that came with them (Payne, Levine, & Crane-Godreau, 2015). As that happens, the alarm signaling danger starts to turn off and your system can settle. Because the focus is on bodily sensation rather than only on thoughts and memories, SE offers a different route into healing from trauma and back toward a sense of well-being and connection to life.

In practice, this means a practitioner teaches you skills and you practice them together in session. It usually starts with learning how to shift your focus. We come in focused on the pain, the problem, the tension or unconsciously avoiding the problem, pain and tension. But what happens when you take control of your attention? For example, what is it like when your attention is turned outward instead of inward feel like? The natural threat response cycle your biology already uses has a part called orienting. When you focus outward with your vision (an eye exercise called, no surprise, orienting) you engage that part of the cycle that signals to your system a sense of safety and gives your nervous system a break (Payne et al., 2015). Simple looking, but powerful when practiced regularly. Though if your system is cultivated to either shut down or blow up you might feel a lot of resistance to this as it is asking your system to do something different.

Then you might turn inward. What does activation feel like on the inside compared to deactivation? From there, with coaching, you learn to track your sensations and observe them in a way that lets the natural rhythm of your nervous system come back. Attention to internal sensation, both visceral and musculoskeletal, is the primary intervention in SE (Payne et al., 2015).

That can include quivering or shaking, either in session or later on. Sometimes when people experience the quivering they report feeling out of control, or scared that something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong. Trembling is a normal part of sympathetic activation and the discharge that follows it (Payne et al., 2015). People also report shifts in digestion, with diarrhea starting or stopping. That is okay too. Your threat response system and your gut are in constant two-way communication (Mayer, 2011). Acute stress speeds up transit through the colon, which is where the diarrhea comes from, and at the same time slows the stomach's emptying (Taché & Bonaz, 2007). The deeper shutdown states that come with threat you cannot escape slow things down further still (Kozlowska, Walker, McLean, & Carrive, 2015).

There is more to it than that, but hopefully that sketches out the initial steps of how SE differs from traditional talk therapy. Yes, there is talking. There is also much more stopping, slowing down, taking cues from your nervous system, and being guided toward specific kinds of support for your body.

Another hallmark of SE is going slowly so the nervous system can avoid overwhelm. You feel a little, then back off. SE calls this titration, working drop by drop, paired with pendulation, the deliberate back and forth between activation and discharge (Payne et al., 2015). We will even interrupt a pre-conditioned pattern you may have of feeling something and flooding right away, so you can build new muscle for bite-sized portions of stress instead of all of it at once. That might look like me interrupting you and getting curious about what is happening on the inside, or asking you to stand up and move, or trying a regulation technique that runs through your body rather than your thinking.

Finally, there can be touch in SE. Fully trained practitioners have skills in using touch to aid the release of incomplete fight, flight, and freeze responses, and both practitioners and clients describe touch as one of the things that makes the work really effective (Kuhfuß, Maldei, Hetmanek, & Baumann, 2021). Touch is not where we start though. It comes later, after safety and connection are established, with your consent, and only when it is relevant to the work.

The Science Behind It

Now that I have described what it is, here is a little about why it is.

Trauma can come from intense stress, either from a single event or built up over time, and it disrupts our ability to live with ease and resilience. Accidents, surgeries, abuse, conflict, natural disasters. SE addresses these by working with the body's response to that stress.

SE's founder, Dr. Peter A. Levine, took his cue from how animals in the wild recover from life-threatening situations without carrying trauma forward. He noticed that animals naturally shake off the excess energy of the freeze response (Levine, 1997, 2010). SE applies that observation to humans, helping stuck energy move and release through a body-first approach to healing.

Like other mammals, we come with built-in protective responses to threat. We do not choose to feel threatened. It happens automatically and unconsciously, driven by instinct and long-term memory. Researchers describe these responses as a cascade: arousal, then fight or flight, then freezing, then tonic or collapsed immobility when the threat cannot be escaped, and finally a quiet recovery state (Kozlowska et al., 2015). To move through any of it, the body gathers energy, and gathering it creates dysregulation in our nervous and biological systems. That is supposed to be temporary. We spend the energy fighting, fleeing, or freezing, and the system re-regulates.

But often we cannot complete the response. We are at work, with our kids, in public, physically restrained. We cannot run, cannot let ourselves get that angry or that afraid, cannot shut down. The energy stays gathered and the dysregulation stays with it. Think of a wave that keeps building and never gets to break. Animals tend to return to baseline once the danger passes. People more often stay locked into the pattern that formed around the original event (Kozlowska et al., 2015). If that never gets tended to and completed, the dysregulation becomes the new baseline. The next time threat shows up, we are already starting from a more fragile place. If we do not complete that one either, it stacks. Over time we have less and less bandwidth for the ordinary stresses of life, and we usually start living in smaller and smaller ways. It can affect physical health too.

Who It Helps

SE is a holistic approach drawing on physiology, psychology, biology, neuroscience, and traditional healing practices. It can apply to many symptoms and needs. The bread and butter of it, though, is for people who have been through trauma: medical trauma, accidents, assaults, violence, trapped situations, and the like.

It also tends to help people who have already done a lot of talking about what happened and still feel it in their body. If you have told the story, understood the story, and your system still runs hot or still shuts down, that gap is what SE works with.

What the Research Says So Far

Somatic Experiencing is not considered a full evidenced based treatment (yet). The strongest study to date is a randomized controlled trial in which people with PTSD who received fifteen weekly SE sessions showed significant symptom reduction compared to a waitlist control group, with gains holding at follow-up (Brom et al., 2017). A later trial that added SE to physiotherapy for low back pain with post-traumatic stress symptoms found that both groups improved but that adding SE produced no additional benefit (Andersen, Ellegaard, Schiøttz-Christensen, Mejldal, & Manniche, 2020). A review of the literature concluded that the early results for PTSD symptoms are positive, and also that the evidence base is still small and does not yet meet the standards we would want for a well-established treatment (Kuhfuß et al., 2021).

So: promising, used widely, and still being studied. If you are considering this work, that is the honest picture. That said, anecdotally, solo or when paired with good psychotherapy or psychoanalysis I’ve seen SE to be life changing.

If you are wondering whether this is a fit, reach out. A first conversation is mostly about what you are carrying and what you want, and we go from there.

References

Andersen, T. E., Ellegaard, H., Schiøttz-Christensen, B., Mejldal, A., & Manniche, C. (2020). Somatic Experiencing® for patients with low back pain and comorbid posttraumatic stress symptoms: A randomised controlled trial. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1797306. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1797306

Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic Experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22189

Kozlowska, K., Walker, P., McLean, L., & Carrive, P. (2015). Fear and the defense cascade: Clinical implications and management. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 23(4), 263–287. https://doi.org/10.1097/HRP.0000000000000065

Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing: Effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: A scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1929023. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1929023

Levine, P. A., with Frederick, A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

Mayer, E. A. (2011). Gut feelings: The emerging biology of gut-brain communication. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 12(8), 453–466. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3071

Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093

Taché, Y., & Bonaz, B. (2007). Corticotropin-releasing factor receptors and stress-related alterations of gut motor function. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 117(1), 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI30085

Your Eyes Are Talking to Your Nervous System

Most people think about their eyes as the tools they use to see. What they don’t usually think about is that their eyes are part of their brain. Literally. In utero, the eyes separate from the same brain tissue that becomes everything else. The connection never goes away.

My friend and colleague, Lillian Giocondo, turned me on to following the Biology of Trauma podcast, and a recent episode with neuro-optometrist Dr. Bryce Appelbaum grabbed my attention. Not because the information was fringe or surprising exactly, but because it put language to something we work with in Somatic Experiencing all the time.

In SE, we pay a lot of attention to the eyes.

We’ll sometimes ask a client to let their gaze soften. To notice what’s in their peripheral field without turning their head. To slowly move their eyes in different directions and notice what happens in the body. Or even to track our fingers and notice when the eye sight glitches. These aren’t quirky add-ons to the work. They’re rooted in the same biology Dr. Appelbaum describes.

Two-thirds of the neurons entering the brain come through the eyes. That’s not a small number. Your nervous system is constantly reading visual input to decide whether you’re safe or in danger. And one of the clearest signals it looks for is whether your peripheral vision is open.

When the nervous system shifts into fight or flight, peripheral vision collapses. The world narrows. You stop seeing what’s beside you and start locking onto what’s in front of you. This is your threat response working exactly as designed. The problem is that for many people who carry stored trauma or chronic stress, that narrowing becomes the default. The tunnel becomes baseline.

Dr. Appelbaum describes this as the body adapting to a tunneled state. The brain stops expecting wide vision. It reorganizes. And over time, people describe feeling like they’re looking through paper towel rolls. Which is just their eyes staying in a survival state.

In SE, one type of eye work we do is called, “orienting.” When a client can slowly, voluntarily move their eyes around the room and allow their eyes stop and focus on what they see, that’s the nervous system checking in with reality and finding it safe. The body follows. Shoulders often drop. Breath often comes in a little more easily.

Dr. Appelbaum introduces three simple exercises in the episode: peripheral pointing, eye push-ups, and eye stretches. Peripheral pointing involves fixing your gaze on a point in the room and then noticing, without moving your eyes, what else is out there. Pointing to it. Then checking. It rebuilds the body’s sense of being in space rather than locked into a single threat point.

These exercises build the same capacity we’re reaching for in SE. The ability to be in a body that can take in more of the world, to have more capacity not just tolerance. A nervous system that isn’t white-knuckling.

If you’ve ever wondered why we slow things down in trauma therapy, why we ask what you notice in your body or what catches your eye in the room, or to stop and feel into your eyes, this episode offers one clear answer. The eyes are not passive recorders. They’re active participants in whether you feel okay right now.

Worth a listen.