When talking isn't the whole story.

Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to working with trauma and stress responses, developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine. SE focuses on how experiences of threat, overwhelm and stress can affect the nervous system and how those responses can continue to influence our lives after an experience has passed.

As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), I use this approach alongside psychotherapy rather than as a separate treatment.

SE is based on the idea that trauma is not only something we remember or think about. It can also be reflected in how our bodies and nervous systems respond. From an SE perspective, experiences of threat can activate protective responses such as fight, flight, freeze or other forms of defensive responding. Sometimes, particularly when an experience is overwhelming, these responses can remain highly activated, become inhibited, or continue to influence how we respond to situations in the present.

SE therefore brings attention to what is happening in the present moment, including sensations, impulses, emotions, images, behaviours and meaning. Rather than requiring you to repeatedly retell or relive a traumatic experience, we may begin with what you notice happening in your body right now. You might notice:

• tightness or openness
• warmth or cold
• pressure or tingling
• changes in breathing
• tension or relaxation
• impulses to move, withdraw, push away or approach
• activation, settling or shifts between the two
• emotions that arise alongside physical sensations

There is no particular sensation you are supposed to find. The work is about developing curiosity and a greater capacity to stay connected with your experience.

For many people, the body is where experiences show up before we have words for them.

You may notice that your shoulders tense before you consciously realize you're anxious. You may feel yourself shutting down in a difficult conversation before you understand why. You may notice an urge to leave, become quiet, appease someone or take control.

These responses can become familiar patterns. Rather than viewing them simply as symptoms to eliminate, SE invites us to become curious about them. What is your system responding to? What does it perceive? What is it trying to protect? What happens when we slow the process down?

Patterns make sense in the context of your life.

An important part of my approach is that your body is not something I need to manipulate into healing. Somatic work is collaborative. We pay attention to what your system is communicating and allow your experience to unfold at a pace that feels appropriate.

Sometimes this involves movement. Sometimes it involves stillness. Sometimes it involves noticing a sensation for only a few seconds.

Sometimes the most important thing is simply recognizing that you have a choice.

Somatic Experiencing can, in some circumstances, incorporate touch as part of the therapeutic process. SE professional training includes education in touch skills.

As an SEP, I may offer supportive touch interventions when clinically appropriate and ethically indicated, but touch is never required for SE work and is never assumed. Any touch would be:

• discussed beforehand
• explicitly consented to
• clearly bounded
• appropriate to the therapeutic context
• within my professional scope and training
• continuously open to being changed or stopped

We can always do somatic work without touch. In fact, developing your own capacity to sense, orient, move and resource yourself is often an important part of the work.

Your autonomy comes first.

Somatic Experiencing doesn't necessarily look dramatically different from psychotherapy. We may talk. We may explore your history. We may notice patterns in your relationships. And at different moments, I may invite you to slow down and notice what is happening in your body as you talk. For example:

“As you tell me about that conversation, what do you notice happening inside right now?”

“Can we pause for a moment and notice what happens when you imagine saying no?”

“What happens in your body when you notice that you actually have a choice here?”

The body becomes another source of information—not something to analyze or fix.

You don't have to tell me every detail of what happened. You don't have to remember everything. And you don't have to prove that something was “traumatic enough.”

We can begin with what you are experiencing today. SE works with present-moment sensations and nervous-system responses and emphasizes gradual, titrated work rather than overwhelming exposure. For some people, this creates an alternative pathway into experiences that have been difficult to access through words alone.

Somatic Experiencing has been clinically used for decades and has a growing research literature, including studies, reviews and articles examining the approach.

I also believe in being thoughtful about what the research does and does not tell us. I don't present SE as a universal solution or as something that guarantees a particular outcome. Instead, I integrate SE with psychotherapy and draw from the approach when it appears appropriate for your needs, goals and experience.