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

Why Panic Can Feel Like It Comes From Nowhere

One of the strangest things about panic is how often it arrives without a story attached. There's no clear reason, nothing you can point to, just the alarm going off in the middle of an ordinary moment.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about panic as an attachment alarm rather than a fear response. Panic isn't your brain asking "am I in danger?" It's an old, loud signal built to maintain connection, telling you that you're disconnected right now, or convinced that disconnection is about to happen. That system, which researchers call PANIC/GRIEF, runs on different chemistry than fear does and directly affects your breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity, which is why the alarm shows up as a full-body event rather than just a thought.

What I want to get into here is a different question. Why does the alarm so often go off with no obvious trigger? Why does it feel like it's coming from nowhere?

Two kinds of attention

I think part of the answer has to do with how the two halves of the brain handle information differently, an idea the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent much of his career working out.

His argument isn't the old, oversimplified version you may have heard, that the left brain does logic and the right brain does creativity. McGilchrist's case is that the two hemispheres aren't divided by subject matter at all. They're divided by the kind of attention each one pays to the world. Both hemispheres are involved in most of what the brain does. They just interact with experience in different ways.

The right hemisphere takes in the whole picture at once: context, relationship, body state, the things that are true but haven't been put into words yet. It's comfortable holding something ambiguous without rushing to resolve it. The left hemisphere works differently. It wants the explicit, the categorized, the already-known. It's fast and confident, and according to McGilchrist, it doesn't know what it doesn't know. If something doesn't fit a category it already has, the left hemisphere tends to filter it out rather than sit with the uncertainty.

McGilchrist also argues that the right hemisphere is more closely tied to the body, to reading relational and emotional cues, and to intense emotional states in general, especially the harder ones like fear and distress.

A signal with nowhere to go

Put those two pieces together and it starts to make sense how you can know something and not know it at the same time.

It's entirely possible for your right hemisphere to pick up on something real: a shift in someone's tone, a withdrawal, a relationship that's fraying, a sense that you're more alone in a room full of people than you should be. All of that can register well before it can be put into words or sorted into a category the left hemisphere will accept. If the left hemisphere can't find a clean, explicit story for what's being sensed, it may not integrate the signal at all. The information doesn't vanish. It just doesn't make it into the version of events you're consciously telling yourself.

So the body notices something and signals it, but the signal has no way into the ordinary channel of thought and language. This might be part of why Freud paid such close attention to slips of the tongue, words that come out unintended and seem out of place, and to dream interpretation, even though he wouldn't have described it in these terms. Both were attempts to reach content that was present but blocked from conscious, verbal access. The PANIC/GRIEF system doesn't need permission from your conscious narrative to act. If the felt sense of disconnection is strong enough and the explicit story isn't catching up to it, the alarm keeps escalating until it's loud enough that you can't ignore it. That's one way to understand why panic so often hits with no obvious trigger. The trigger was there. It just didn't pass through the part of the brain that explains things to you in words.

Why this matters for treatment

This is a contested area of neuroscience. McGilchrist's broader claims about the hemispheres have real critics, and some argue he overstates how cleanly these functions divide. So know that this isn't settled fact.

But the narrower point, that something can be accurately sensed in the body and in relationship before it's consciously articulated, fits well with what's already known about how the PANIC/GRIEF system works. It doesn't wait for you to have a sentence ready. It acts on what's felt, not on what's been said yet.

That has a practical implication. If the original signal never passed through the part of you built to name, define, and explain things in words, then reassuring yourself in that same verbal mode is less likely to help than something that can reach the signal where it actually lives. You can tell someone, accurately, that there's no danger in the room, and it can still miss the point, because the alarm was never about the room. This is a big part of why somatic and body-based approaches tend to reach panic in a way that talking alone doesn't. The work isn't just building a better explanation. It's helping the part of you that senses things before it can name them learn, slowly, that it's not as alone as it fears, and that it now has more capacity to handle grief and aloneness than it did back when it first learned to be afraid of them.

Reference notes: McGilchrist's claims about hemispheric attention styles, the right hemisphere's role in holding ambiguity and context, the left hemisphere's tendency toward premature categorization and closure, and the right hemisphere's closer relationship to bodily and relational awareness, come from his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and his 2021 follow-up The Matter with Things. These claims are influential but not uncontested. Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College, published a critical assessment in 2019, "McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment," in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, arguing that recent meta-analyses do not support the sweeping, oppositional picture of hemispheric difference McGilchrist describes. The connection between this framework and panic attacks specifically is my own synthesis, drawn from putting McGilchrist's model of attention alongside the PANIC/GRIEF research of Jaak Panksepp covered in the companion piece, not a claim McGilchrist has made himself.