The Greek word soma is defined as ‘the body experienced from within’ and the word “somatic” means ‘of and with the body.’ 

It will mostly look and feel like how you probably imagine talk therapy sessions. However, over the first few sessions your provider will teach you how to orient to the activation and settling sensations in your nervous system and throughout your body. Establishing these initial conditions is a new skill and it might be challenging at first, but gets easier with practice. As sessions progress your provider may ask you to slow down or pause to attune to the felt sense of what you are sharing, this is the important work of experiencing your story somatically.

As an SE client you learn to track both activation and settling in your nervous system. This is the “felt sense” of your experiences, both past and present. Learning to track the physiological sensations can help you to identify more control over how you respond to these sensations, but it can also allow stored energy from traumatic experiences to move through and out of the body. Both of these benefits can assist you to expand your capacity to cope better with past traumas, but also to have more resilience in meeting current challenges.

The addition of somatic work to talk therapy is an effort to move away from the dualistic splitting of mind from body, towards a model of integrated functioning of the whole person, psyche and soma. However, this work is not new, it has roots that go back to the mid-1800s., italics or bold, and add links.

Yes! Somatic work shares common origins with ancient healing, yoga, meditation, and shamanic practices from every part of the world. What they all have in common is the experience of the embodied self, or the integrated body-mind, as being important to the process of healing. 

First, it’s really understandable that you wouldn’t want to talk about some of the most traumatic parts of your story. That can be overwhelming, and SE is about going slow and NOT overwhelming your nervous system. What is interesting about Somatic Experiencing is that you don’t have to speak the most difficult parts out loud if that’s too much. You can merely think about them, in the supportive environment of therapy, and track the felt sense of those experiences in your nervous system responses that unfold as you revisit those memories.

SE works within the client’s current range of resiliency, but also works toward expanding resiliency, in order to facilitate healing and recovery. Instead of pushing through “resistance” or promoting emotional catharsis or painful discomfort, SE works “around the edges” of what is tolerable to increase capacity and slowly heal more and more. 

That’s okay. SE works in the here and now, and focuses on the sensations, body memories and resources occurring in the present. In SE we work predominantly with the “felt sense,” accessing physical sensations, imagery and motor patterns…your body tells the story…with less emphasis on cognitive (thinking) and emotional processes. Of course, because your therapist is trained in psychotherapy as well as Somatic Experiencing we can use all of it!

Somatic Experiencing is slow and gentle, it is not pathologizing of symptoms, and most clients gradually notice a reduction in symptoms. Expanding a person’s tolerance of their bodily sensations helps them to trust in the innate wisdom of the body and begins to uncouple, or separate out, the fear, anxiety, stress, etc. experienced during a distressing event.

Yes! Somatic Experiencing International is where you can find a good overview and even watch some videos.

The books Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in A Search for the Living Past were both written by Dr. Peter Levine, the originator of the Somatic Experiencing method. They are a good introduction as well.