I integrate Somatic Experiencing™ into my Family Therapy practice and yoga teaching to support deeper healing and connection. Somatic Experiencing™ is also available as a stand-alone approach for resolving trauma. Sessions are offered both in-person and online. For more information or to enquire about availability, please feel free to contact me using the enquiry form below.

Somatic Experiencing ™ is a body-mind approach aimed at resolving ‘symptoms of stress, shock and trauma that accumulate in our bodies’ (Levine, 1997, 2010).

Peter Levine (1997, 2010) founded Somatic Experiencing. According to Levine trauma occurs when we are unable, for whatever reason, to complete a survival response. Trauma results when we cannot socially engage to create safety (our first port of call), we cannot flee (the second option), and we cannot fight (a last resort for most nervous systems). The stress in the body in this context is extreme and becomes bound in the body – frozen. Behind the freeze is a huge amount of what Levine calls ‘survival energy’ or ‘sympathetic activation;’ when this is too much for the nervous system we may disassociate or shut down in a dorsal vagal collapse. This unresolved stress is thought to be the foundation upon which numerous mental and physical health diagnoses are built (Mate, 2011).Levine and others suggest that months and years later we can tap in to thwarted survival responses through the felt sense and release the muscular (and relational) patterns of bracing that arose through our will to survive.

This resolution is achieved through resourcing – connecting with a felt sense of safety, titration - taking a small piece of trauma/stress and pendulation - moving between a felt sense of the stress and the felt sense of safety. In this process the body may release or discharge stress. This can be felt when moving back to a relaxed state or when a movement impulse in enacted (which sometimes is indicative of the fight/flight response which was thwarted in the original trauma). A different sense of the self is made, space is made for a different story where one has more agency, more wholeness and increased choices going forwards.