Somatic ExperiencingTM, Trauma & PTSD Specialties
Somatic Experiencing® (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is a therapeutic approach that focuses on resolving trauma by gently guiding attention to bodily sensations. It emphasizes completing the body’s natural defensive responses—such as fight, flight, or freeze—that may remain stuck after overwhelming events. By tracking physical sensations, tremors, and impulses in small, manageable steps, SE helps the nervous system discharge survival energy and return to regulation.
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Somatic Science® shares with SE a focus on the nervous system’s real-time responses, but it differs in emphasis. Instead of primarily revisiting traumatic activation, Somatic Science® works with the immediate coordination of breath, heart, face, and body to support ongoing regulation and curiosity in the present. Where SE highlights trauma resolution through completing past survival responses, Somatic Science® emphasizes cultivating safety, aliveness, and openness to new experience as core organizing principles in the moment.
Our approach to trauma (the inability or great difficulty with being-experiencing here and now) relates to the present-moment nervous system state that pertains to:
1. Aperception (thoughts, images, memories, feelings, insights, meanings). This includes the capacity to make sense of these words right now.
2. Interoception (sense perceptions in the form of internal body sensations). This includes the sensation inside your throat right now, or the internal sensations resulting from your breathing.
3. Exteroception (sense perceptions of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch). This includes watching and hearing this video right now, or the sensation of pressure on your body from sitting or standing.
4. Behavior (voluntary and involuntary motor expressions)
This includes breathing and your heart beating (involuntary) and also the act of reading this text right now (voluntary).
All in connection with a perceived or actual past-moment injury. In this way we are quickly able to discern physiology or psychology (belief) as the primary sources of challenge.
Trauma is akin to a dream constantly recycled by the nervous system as it seeks to change the narrative content and thus reach the completion of the dream. When the dream ends the individual wakes up to the present - here and now. As human beings we are generally conditioned by external and internal forces to resist and block this completion.
The supreme degree of healing is love.
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Love is what guides the craft and without it no one can be called Healer. Speaking and saying nice words happen by opening the mouth. Helping and being useful happen by opening the heart.
The healer comes from Spirit, grows in the heart and is perfected with the natural light of experience. Nowhere is love greater than in the heart of a true healer.
Paracelsus
trauma (n.)
1690s, "physical wound," medical Latin, from Greek trauma "a wound, a hurt; a defeat," from PIE *trau-, extended form of root *tere- (1) "to rub, turn," with derivatives referring to twisting, piercing, etc. (see throw (v.)). Sense of "psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress" is from 1894.
healing (n.)
"restoration to health," Old English hæling, verbal noun from heal (v.). Figurative sense of "restoration of wholeness" is from early 13c.; meaning "touch that cures" is from 1670s.
expert (n.)
early 15c., "person wise through experience," from expert (adj.). The word reappeared 1825 in the legal sense, "person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts"