Somatic Experiencing

WHAT IS SOMATIC EXPERIENCING?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is not talk therapy. SE involves focused awareness on your present-moment, physical and sensory experience. The aim is to help you access the body’s memory of the event, not the story. We rarely spend a lot of time talking about what happened.

Talk therapy typically engages the thinking brain (neocortex) and the feeling brain (limbic system); SE primarily affects the reptilian/survival-oriented brain (brainstem), which rules our involuntary nervous system and instinctual responses.

SE offers a gentle approach to treating trauma. Rather than reliving or re-enacting the trauma, SE supports you to develop body awareness and renegotiate the way your nervous system responds to certain triggers and experiences.

Each SE session is specific to your present-moment state of being, and is ultimately guided by your bodily sensations and the activity of your nervous system. Thus, SE is experienced as your own journey of self-empowered healing, rather than someone else "healing you."

WHAT DOES A SOMATIC EXPERIENCING SESSION LOOK LIKE?

The Somatic Experiencing® trauma resolution method does not require a re-telling or re-living of the traumatic event, although sometimes we will go into content around the event or during the event so that your system can feel some activation. From this place, SE® offers the opportunity to engage, complete, and resolve, in a slow supported way, the body’s instinctual fight, flight and freeze responses. When appropriate and with consent, SE® touch will be used, to support and facilitate the release of trauma throughout the body.

WHAT KIND OF THINGS CAN SE TREAT?

SE works with shock trauma (car accidents, falls, assaults, etc) and developmental trauma (attachment wounds, emotional neglect, abuse, etc)

IS TELEHEALTH AN OPTION?

I have used telehealth for SE and have had positive results.