Click here for more information in a handout about Somatic Experiencing®.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented complimentary method of therapy for de-activating stress and trauma. The practitioner uses safety, language, timing, perhaps touch, as needed in assisting the client to transcend the post-traumatic stress reactions. The practitioner does this by assisting the client to focus upon their own body (somatic) sensations - actual and perceived - their mental imaging, their behaviors, their emotional processes, and their personal meanings.
SE assists the client, through consciously focusing, i.e., tracking their behaviors and feelings - somatically, emotionally, and mentally. The aim is to restore the client's innate vital energies and re-negotiate dynamics of organismic generation, regulation, and elimination of distress through autonomic processes.
While in a safe and professionally supportive environment, the client consciously focuses on the elements of the traumatic event which allows for insights into and discharge of past and presenttraumatic stress. This release process is a movement of the body and the mind from fixation in and on the past, to flow.
SE interventions are accomplished through rigorously trained and certified practitioners who themselves undergo years of trauma healing for their own past traumas. They are taught that the client’s healing powers need to be addressed in a safe and supportive space. Even though an SE session could look like talk therapy, the practitioner is tracking the traumatic stress and strain through the client's autonomic nervous system as expressed by the client. The practitioner senses the verbal and non-verbal cues exhibited by the client in their expressed communications. The practitioner assists the client to complete unfinished incidents of defensive responses, neglect, stress, threat, and traumatic shock reactions, and to re-establish exploratory orienting and organismic vitality.
What is happening in a Somatic Experiencing session?
The aim of SE is to locate and provide innate and systemic resources (bio-psycho-social) that were missing at the time of a traumatic incident, or perhaps a neglectful occurrence, and thereby discharge the client's post traumatic shock energies and reactions, as well as the effects of social neglect.
Somatic Experiencing renegotiates the sympathetic nervous system’s fundamental autonomic reactions to a past overwhelming event by providing a platform where innate felt resources, when experienced in the session, can support a significant discharge of traumatic stress. The Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) has been fueling the symptoms and symptomatic patterns of a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The PTS is the result of the organism not adequately discharging the enormous amount and intensity of life force that has not been discharged in the person's attempt to meet and overcome the traumatic event. This non-discharged energy has remained in the biology of the person and has a need for compensation, which itself causes the symptoms and patterns of dysfunction. Also, it is to be noted that such attempts for compensation exacerbate states of unresolved threat and traumatic events of overwhelm during earlier developmental states, creating a constellation of undifferentiated trauma. The SE healing process works to recalibrate the sympathetic nervous system through the ventral vagal system’s mediating capacity to digest these somatic body memories and balance one’s life force energies within the nervous system and the organs of the body.
For example, SE can assist a colic infant of a caesarian birth and her resourced mother by completing the primary innate birth reflex in the child. This can occur through a re-enactment to negotiate a truncated emergent birthing process. Prior to this treatment, the mother is educated as to her role and is coached by the SE Practitioner during the procedure to communicate with her child, including verbal and non-verbal coherent communication, soothing sounds and words, touch, physical positioning, eye contact, and heartfelt encouragement.
While the child is lying on a clean blanketed floor on her back, comfortably supported and flanked with soft supporting cushions, the mother sits on the floor above her child's head and gently cups the child’s cranium with both her hands, while opposite to the mother at the child's feet, the SE Practitioner applies gentle pressure to the heels of the child to stimulate the unspent, innate birth reflexes, Because these impulsive energies are unexpressed, the reflexive urge to push off against this pressure will be stimulated and will initiate a sequence of active motor locomotion initiated by the infant’s innate intelligence to push its heels against the uterine walls and so extend her body to push through the birth canal. This process continues until the instinctual birth reflex has been fully activated and expressed.
It is important to know that post traumatic stress, if left unattended, will continue to exist in the body creating compensatory symptoms until discharged autonomically.
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