SE teaches awareness of body sensations to help you renegotiate rather than re-live trauma. In trains you to consciously participate in your own recovery. - Somatic Experiencing titrates, or breaks up into manageable parts, your experience. It is the opposite of evoking catharsis, which can (re)overwhelm your nervous system and potentially add to your symptoms.
- Gentle guidance in tracking the bodily 'felt sense' allows highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged. SE supports you to fully face and feel your feelings in a manageable, healing way. Ultimately, the pain/fear etc. has to be metabolised through the body in order to the gain the freedom you seek.
- It can, in most cases, be successfully used alongside other body and psychotherapy-based treatment.
Trauma healing offers: - Lasting freedom from debilitating symptoms of stress and traumatic reactions through gentle self-regulation rather than intense emotion.
- Restoration of a sense of physical, emotional and spiritual wholeness.
- An education in how to work with your body and mind's self-healing intelligence to increase your capacity for vitality, intimacy, relaxation and enjoyment of life.
- A rational understanding and resolution of stressful symptoms and behaviour that conventional medicine and/or alternative therapies have failed to stop in you.
- A fundamental and permanent transformation in your quality of life. Clients typically report a greater sense of resiliency, self-confidence.
Dr Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing has been used successfully with rape survivors, violent assault, grief, near-drowning, auto accidents, surgical trauma, chronic pain, epilepsy and even infants who’ve suffered traumatic births. The
Foundation for Human Enrichment website tells you more. As does this
fascinating interview with Dr Raja Selvam, my training tutor alongside
Dr Larry Heller.