What is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach to working with stress and trauma. It’s an amazing tool for helping us reconnect to ourselves, be able to feel our feelings, experience greater joy, pleasure and aliveness, develop our resilience and experience a deep sense of wellbeing.

Somatic Experiencing works with each person’s innate capacity to move towards healing when their body is given the right conditions to do so.

In an SE session, I work with an approach that includes co-regulation and somatic practices that builds connection with your body and support you to develop a more embodied state. This enables you to begin to experience more safety and for your mind-body to recognise that overwhelming and traumatic situations are in the past. These experiences can then be metabolised and integrated rather than be experienced as ongoing.

Over-time past experiences are no longer present in the body as high levels of activation that manifest as dysregulation and mental and physical health symptoms.

 It also means that you become more able to deal with challenging and uncomfortable situations that you encounter in life, to respond to them rather than react, experience a greater feeling of safety, give space to your emotions without feeling overwhelmed by them and more easily feel and set boundaries.

While there is talking in an SE session, we’ll continuously come back into the body to explore what’s happening there in terms of your felt-sense, image and associations. This enables us to work with experiences that may be beyond conscious memory and language, prevents retraumatisation by working at a ‘titrated’ pace and develops your relationship with your own body and felt-sense to support you to become more embodied.

 By creating space for the body to be listened to and heard, SE is often effective at resolving psychological and physical trauma symptoms, including chronic-pain and chronic health issues as well as anxiety and overwhelm.

If you’d like to know more about Trauma and Somatic Experiencing go to: What is Trauma

If you’d like to know more about what might happen in a Somatic Experiencing session then you might want to read: What Happens in a Somatic Experiencing Session.