Somatic Experiencing® is a cutting edge trauma therapy pioneered by psychologist and biological physicist, Dr. Peter Levine. It draws on mindfulness and somatic psychotherapy and body work traditions.
SOMATIC EXPERIENCING® PROCESSING
SE processing is gentle and respectful, often playful and creative, it supports you to become curious about your somatic sensations and to stay with challenging feelings, experiences and ideas without being overwhelmed. SE does this using, amongst other things, pendulation and titration and through identifying resources.
Titration exposes a person to small amounts of trauma-related distress at a time in order to build up tolerance and avoid becoming overwhelmed by traumatic memories. In therapy, people pay close attention to the sensations they experience when revisiting a traumatic event and gradually become less affected by them.
Pendulation, also called “looping,” involves switching between resourcing and titration, allowing a person to move between a state of arousal triggered by a traumatic event and a state of calm. This helps the body to regain homeostasis—a state in which the body’s systems are regulated and working in balance.
Resourcing helps a person experiencing the effects of trauma to create resources for feeling safe and secure while working to resolve the trauma. These might include memories of good times or loved ones or thinking about a valued object or activity. One goal of therapy is to help people discover and build a supply of resources for support.
information quoted from www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychotherapy-for-your-body-role-of-somatic-psychology-today-0605174
Utilising dialogue, alongside non-verbal approaches such as movement, sound, visualisation and sometimes touch, SE unlocks vitality and brings back a sense of agency, choice, power and capacity, things that are often compromised through experiences of trauma. Ultimately SE supports a return to healthy nervous system functioning and a greater sense of safety and aliveness.
SOMATIC TOUCH PRACTICE
Somatic Experiencing® can include therapeutic touch and table work; SE touch practice is a gentle yet effective approach to resolving trauma that is undertaken at a pace that is appropriate for you.
SE touch and table work can support deeper processing and healing than non-touch methods. Some of the deepest shock experiences held in our bodies occur when we are so young that our brains aren’t yet sufficiently developed to process these experiences cognitively and touch can work directly, viscerally with these non-narrative memories and experiences. That’s why touch practice can be so effective with early developmental and attachment issues as well as relational issues.
But even as adults our cognitive functioning tends to go offline during traumatic experiences, so memories are encoded as feelings or sensations rather than narratives – SE and somatic touch are very effective working in these areas.
Sophie practices an SE touch table work modality developed by Kathy Kain.