The Insight Out Group

Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) is a body-oriented therapeutic model that helps heal trauma and other stress disorders. Developed by Peter Levine, Ph.D., it is the result of the multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, with more than 45 years of successful clinical application.

 

Somatic Experiencing aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and recalibrate. It is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied in multiple professions and professional settings — psychotherapy, medicine, coaching, teaching, and physical therapy — for healing trauma and other stress-related issues. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine.

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The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD as well as chronic stress from early life or working in high risk environments.  It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. 

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SE provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others.

THE SCIENCE
Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease.

Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse,  war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.

HOW IT WORKS
The Somatic Experiencing approach facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms.

Dr. Levine was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system when he realized that animals are constantly under threat of death, yet show no symptoms of trauma.
What he discovered was that trauma has to do with the third survival response to perceived life threat, which is freeze. When fight and flight are not options, we freeze and immobilize, like “playing dead.”

This natural response is often what saves the life of a prey animal … or a human because it makes us less likely to be a target. However, this reaction is time-sensitive, in other words, it needs to run its course, and the massive energy that was prepared for fight or flight gets discharged, through shakes and trembling. If the immobility phase doesn’t complete, then that charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective, it is still under threat.

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The Somatic Experiencing method works to release this stored energy and turn off this threat alarm that causes severe dysregulation and dissociation.

SE helps people understand the  body’s natural response to traumatic situations and work through them in a “body first” approach to healing.

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