What is Somatic Experiencing Therapy?
Somatic Experiencing Therapy is a body-based therapy developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine. It is designed to help work with trauma and stress-related issues. It is a multidisciplinary approach that aims to integrate insights from neuroscience, psychotherapy, and other fields to create a comprehensive therapeutic approach. SE has been practiced for over four decades.
The basic premise of SE is that it can release traumatic shock and help a person stop feeling threatened, by pulling them out of the danger response (fight, flight, freeze) and resolving the physical states that contribute to emotional distress.
Somatic Experiencing is associated with a specific scientific approach that explains trauma as the experience of acute stress due to a threat to one’s life or due to sustained, significant stress. This affects an individual’s ability to thrive not only on an emotional level, but also on a physiological level. The body and brain react to trauma and change the way they function. Somatic Experiencing therapy aims to complete self-protection responses, release energy and tension in the body and help the person move on, physically.
The approach offers a gentle way to overcome trauma through a focus on physiological elements. This comes from studies that Peter Levine conducted with animals that were faced with mortal threats and yet did not experience trauma. The research led him to view trauma as the equivalent of the freeze response to danger, an option other than fight or flight. This reaction must stop and the energy associated with the fight or flight readiness must be released. But in cases of trauma, the response goes on and on, leading to dysregulation.
Somatic Experiencing therapy helps to release this energy intended to promote survival and conclude the freezing reaction process. In this sense, it first focuses on the body and then helps the person feel better through changing reactions to the traumatic event.
Peter Levine has made it his life’s work to develop a solid foundation for SE and to teach this approach, promoting it as a natural, body-based healing method. Dr. Levine is a doctor of medical biophysics and a doctor of psychology. He has been developing SE for over 40 years and has also worked in the field of trauma and stress. In 2010, Levine received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Body Psychotherapy Association and was also awarded the Reis Davis Honorary Chair in Child Psychiatry. He has published several books and continues to teach SE workshops.
Somatic Experiencing Therapy may be a good option for people whose symptoms are related to trauma and who could benefit from a body-based approach. For individuals who have experienced a life-or-death situation in the past that has led to a freeze response, this approach promises to provide rapid resolution through a neurally based method. SE has research supporting its effectiveness and offers a perspective on trauma that is rooted in biology, but incorporates other elements from a variety of fields.
*Keywords: PTSD, body-based therapy, somatic experiencing, trauma, body psychotherapy
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