What is trauma?
“Trauma is incomplete self-protective responses waiting to be completed.”
Dr. Peter Levine
Dr. Peter Levine created Somatic Experiencing (c) but what does he mean by “Trauma is incomplete self-protective responses waiting to be completed”? Think of it this way:
A threatening moment (could be emotional overwhelm or an outside threat to our safety) causes an automatic reaction towards trying to keep you alive. We usually think of these as fight, flight or freeze.
These are are meant to “complete”. Meaning they are meant to cause us to feel certain emotions & take certain actions until we register that the overwhelm or threat is gone or done.
When we don’t allow our system to complete* those fight/flight/freeze reactions get stuck in our systems and cause problems (like depression/anxiety/and more)
Somatic Experiencing therapy can help the body safely complete these cycles and let go of the enormous amount of energy that is being used by the stuck fight/flight/freeze attempts and bring order back to your nervous system.
*Reasons we don’t allow our systems to complete fight/flight/freeze are numerous. For example, we might be in a car accident or something else extreme and there’s not enough time to move our bodies to protect ourselves like we want to (I fell off a tall ramp skateboarding at 39 broke my elbow and had this experience) , emotionally we might feel a murderous rage in reaction to a co-worker or a boss but we can’t act on that so we squash it and dissociate from our rage because we don’t know how to handle it without feeling out of control. Another emotional example is we receive heartbreaking news but are in public or with our young kids and don’t feel we can truly cry and grieve in that situation so we squash it and dissociate from the grief and the pain. A final example is as children we may not have felt safe to express our fear to our parents or teachers or peers and we learned to squash it and dissociate from it.