Somatic Experiencing And Somatic Therapy
What is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing brings the body into the therapeutic process by helping you understand your nervous system's natural self-protective responses — fight, flight, and freeze. Trauma and chronic stress aren't only stored as memories; they can live in the body as tension, bracing, or a nervous system that stays on high alert long after the original threat has passed. Through awareness of body sensations, movement impulses, and internal cues, Somatic Experiencing helps your nervous system complete the protective responses it wasn't able to finish in the moment, so it can find its way back to a felt sense of safety.
This work draws on a few key elements:
Body awareness: Learning to notice which parts of the body feel pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and internal sensations that may be present.
Pendulation: Moving attention back and forth between calm, grounded states and the more activated feelings connected to a difficult experience, so the nervous system learns it can move through activation and return to ease.
Titration: Working through a difficult memory in small, manageable pieces, tracking the body's response along the way, rather than reliving it all at once.Resourcing: Drawing on memories, people, places, or moments in your life that bring a sense of calm and safety, and strengthening your ability to access them when needed.
Discharge: Allowing the body to release stored survival energy — through trembling, deep breaths, or spontaneous movement — that may not have had the chance to complete at the time.
The Slinky Presentation, demonstrated in this video by Dr. Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing. This demonstrates the effects of trauma on the nervous system using a practice called titration which is a slow release process of compressed fight or flight energy to reintegrate it back into the nervous system.
More on Somatic Experiencing
In session, this work can help you:
Build a felt sense of safe and ok enough
Slow down and check in with your body, noticing sensations and emotions as they arise
Tune in to your body's signals and learn to trust them
Access a more intuitive sense of what you need next to feel present, connected, and engaged
Widen your capacity to tolerate and move through difficult emotions without becoming overwhelmed
Reconnect with a sense of agency and choice in your own body
Unlike approaches that rely primarily on talking through an experience, Somatic Experiencing works with the understanding that the body often holds what the mind can't yet put into words — and that lasting change happens when both are included in the healing process.
If you are interested in Somatic Therapy, contact Dani Fluhr, LCSW, using the button below.