"Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness."

Somatic Experiencing (SE™) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP™) are both innovative, body-oriented psychotherapies designed to address the profound impact of trauma and stress on the mind and body. These therapeutic approaches recognize that trauma is not just stored in the mind but also deeply rooted in the body, influencing our physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. By integrating body awareness techniques with traditional therapeutic methods, SE™ and SP™ offer holistic healing strategies that enable individuals to process and release traumatic stress

Somatic Experiencing (SE™) is a powerful therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine, based on his extensive research into stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics. SE™ is grounded in the understanding that trauma resides in the nervous system rather than in the event itself. This innovative approach focuses on helping individuals renegotiate and discharge the physiological activation associated with trauma, facilitating healing from the inside out.

How SE™ Works

SE™ operates by closely tracking and guiding the client’s bodily sensations, which are often the key to releasing pent-up trauma energy and restoring the body’s natural equilibrium. The process begins with the careful identification of physical sensations that are linked to traumatic memories or experiences. These sensations might include tightness in the chest, a fluttering sensation in the stomach, or tension in the shoulders. By bringing mindful attention to these sensations in a controlled and safe environment, clients can begin to process and integrate their traumatic experiences more effectively.

One of the unique aspects of SE™ is its emphasis on gradual exposure. Rather than delving directly into the traumatic memory, SE™ gently guides clients to experience their physical sensations in small, manageable doses. This method, known as “titration,” allows the nervous system to process the trauma without becoming overwhelmed. Over time, this approach helps to release the stored energy associated with the trauma, leading to a reduction in symptoms such as anxiety, hypervigilance, and dissociation.

Skills Taught in SE™

In addition to the direct therapeutic work, Somatic Experiencing also teaches clients a range of skills that support their ongoing healing and resilience:

1. Grounding Techniques: Grounding helps clients anchor themselves in the present moment, reducing feelings of dissociation or overwhelm. These techniques may involve focusing on the contact between the body and the ground, noticing physical sensations, or engaging with the environment through sight, sound, or touch.
2. Body Awareness: Clients are encouraged to develop a deeper awareness of their bodily sensations, learning to recognize early signs of stress or dysregulation. This awareness forms the foundation for self-regulation and helps clients intervene before their nervous system becomes overwhelmed.
3. Self-Regulation Skills: SE™ teaches clients how to modulate their arousal levels by recognizing and responding to their body’s signals. This might involve using breathing exercises, movement, or other calming techniques to help bring the nervous system back into balance.
4. Pendulation: This skill involves moving between sensations of discomfort and comfort within the body, helping the nervous system to oscillate and gradually release stored trauma. Pendulation allows clients to explore difficult sensations without becoming stuck in them, promoting a more fluid and adaptive response to stress.
5. Resourcing: Clients are guided to identify and connect with internal or external resources that provide a sense of safety and stability. These resources might include memories of supportive people, safe places, or personal strengths. Resourcing helps to build a sense of security that clients can draw upon during challenging moments.
6. Tracking Sensations: Clients learn to track their bodily sensations in a detailed and non-judgmental way. This skill helps them to stay connected with their physical experience, providing valuable information about their emotional state and helping to guide the therapeutic process.
7. Boundaries and Containment: SE™ supports clients in recognizing and setting healthy boundaries, both physically and emotionally. Containment techniques help clients manage intense emotions and sensations, preventing overwhelm and fostering a sense of control.

The Benefits of SE™

Through the gentle and mindful attention to physical sensations, Somatic Experiencing (SE™) helps clients develop a greater capacity for self-regulation and resilience. As clients learn to process and release stored trauma, they often experience a reduction in symptoms such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and post-traumatic stress. SE™ not only helps individuals heal from past trauma but also equips them with the tools to navigate future stressors more effectively, leading to a more balanced and empowered life.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP™) is a body-oriented approach to trauma treatment developed by Dr. Pat Ogden that combines traditional psychotherapy with techniques to increase awareness of bodily sensations. SP integrates cognitive, emotional, and physical dimensions, addressing the physical manifestations of trauma that often remain untouched by standard talk therapy. By emphasizing the body’s role in the healing process, SP enables individuals to process and transform traumatic experiences in a holistic and embodied way.

SP helps facilitate change and healing through three primary mechanisms: Resourcing, Sensorimotor Sequencing (SMS), and Reinstatement of an Active Defense (RAD). Each mechanism focuses on different aspects of body awareness and response, helping clients develop resilience, heal trauma, and create new, adaptive patterns of behavior.

1. Resourcing is foundational in SP and involves building internal and external resources that enhance an individual's ability to cope with stress and manage difficult emotions. In therapy, clients learn to identify and cultivate resources that might include specific body postures, movements, memories, or sensory experiences that evoke feelings of safety, strength, or comfort. These resources help regulate the nervous system, enabling clients to remain within their window of tolerance during sessions. Resourcing also empowers clients to create new associations with past experiences—ones that foster resilience rather than reactivity. The goal of resourcing is to enhance stability and increase one’s ability to face challenging situations while feeling supported from within.

2. Sensorimotor Sequencing (SMS) is a process of helping clients identify, track, and process incomplete physical responses that were originally triggered during a traumatic event. Traumatic experiences often leave the body in a state of incomplete arousal, where fight, flight, or freeze impulses were interrupted or could not be fully acted upon. In SMS, the therapist guides the client to mindfully track and complete these sensorimotor impulses in small, manageable steps, also known as “slivers of memory.” By safely exploring these movements, clients release residual energy stored in the body and gain a renewed sense of agency. This gradual sequencing helps restore the natural flow of the autonomic nervous system, leading to a reduction in the physical manifestations of trauma.

3. Reinstatement of an Active Defense (RAD) involves identifying and completing defensive responses that were thwarted during the original trauma. When an individual is unable to act upon their natural defensive impulses, such as running away or pushing back, the body stores this energy, which can manifest as anxiety, hypervigilance, or tension. RAD focuses on revisiting these thwarted defenses and discovering how the body wants to complete the action—what the client needed to do but couldn't during the traumatic event. By facilitating and completing these defensive movements in therapy, clients often feel a sense of empowerment and mastery over their experience, which helps counteract feelings of helplessness and restores a sense of agency.

By focusing on these three mechanisms, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy provides clients with a unique and holistic approach to trauma recovery. The process starts with resourcing, ensuring clients have a solid foundation of safety and stability. Then, sensorimotor sequencing allows for the gentle release of stored traumatic energy through movement and body awareness. Finally, reinstating active defenses helps individuals experience a sense of completion, mastery, and empowerment over their past experiences. This progression allows clients to integrate their traumatic memories in a way that feels less overwhelming and more manageable, enabling healing to occur at a deep, somatic level.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy addresses not only the cognitive and emotional aspects of trauma but also the physical sensations and impulses that accompany it. This multidimensional approach allows clients to engage with their entire being—mind, body, and emotions—helping them recover from the effects of trauma and move toward a more connected and resilient self.​​

The concept of the "felt sense" was first introduced by Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychotherapist, in the 1960s. Gendlin discovered through research that clients who were able to focus on their vague, bodily sensations—the "felt sense"—during therapy made more progress than those who did not. This idea became the foundation of his Focusing method, which encourages people to tune into these internal, bodily experiences to access deeper emotional truths. The felt sense is now recognized as a key component in many somatic therapies, helping clients become more aware of the connection between their body, emotions, and thoughts. It is particularly important in Somatic Experiencing (SE™) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP™), where it serves as a gateway to healing trauma and understanding deeply rooted emotional patterns.

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The felt sense is a rich and nuanced way of experiencing bodily sensations, often described through various categories of sensation. In terms of intensity, sensations can feel sharp, dull, intense, weak, hard, soft, pressurized, or solid. When focusing on muscle sensations, individuals might describe feelings such as trembling, achy, shuddering, crampy, shivery, twitching, pulsing, fluttery, shaky, throbbing, tense, or spasming. These sensations often provide insight into emotional or physical stress. Skin sensations are equally varied and might include feelings like itchiness, prickliness, tingling, sweatiness, moisture, clamminess, dryness, flushing, or even goosebumps.

When it comes to temperature, sensations can range from frozen, icy, cold, and cool to numb, warm, hot, boiling, or steaming, which often reflect emotional states or body tension. Constriction sensations may manifest as feelings of being stuck, knotted, blocked, tense, contracted, tight, congested, constricted, breathless, compressed, or even suffocating. These are common when the body is responding to stress or anxiety. On a larger scale, whole body sensations might be described as trembling, heavy, thick, vibrating, flaccid, full, puffy, jittery, gurgling, energized, light, calm, fidgety, jumpy, tingling, faint, fuzzy, wobbly, spinning, or buzzing, offering a broader sense of how one feels overall. Finally, expansion sensations bring a sense of openness and movement, and can be felt as expansive, floating, fluid, radiating, waves, moving, flowing, relaxed, glowing, or streaming.

This language of sensation helps individuals connect more deeply to their bodily experiences, aiding them in processing emotions, physical feelings, and psychological states in a more embodied and mindful way.

In Somatic Experiencing (SE™), the felt sense is used to help clients track physical sensations that represent unresolved trauma. The goal is to regulate the nervous system by gently working with these sensations, allowing the body to release stuck energy from incomplete survival responses (like fight, flight, or freeze). The felt sense is seen as a key to unlocking the body’s natural healing processes and moving the client toward physical and emotional balance.

In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP™), the felt sense is integrated with emotions, thoughts, and relational dynamics. It is used to explore how attachment and trauma have influenced both the body and mind. Clients are encouraged to notice how bodily sensations connect to cognitive patterns or emotional responses, allowing them to understand how past experiences continue to shape their present reactions. In SP, the felt sense acts as a bridge between the body and the mind, offering insight into how physical sensations mirror emotional and relational patterns.

Both approaches utilize the felt sense as a powerful tool for healing, though SE™ focuses more on physical regulation and resolving trauma stored in the nervous system, while SP™ emphasizes understanding how physical sensations relate to emotions, thoughts, and relational patterns.​​

Somatic Experiencing (SE™) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP™) are both body-oriented therapeutic approaches that emphasize the integration of bodily sensations with emotional processing to heal trauma and stress-related disorders. Both methods recognize the profound connection between the mind and body, utilizing mindfulness and somatic awareness to help clients attune to their physical experiences. SE™ focuses specifically on releasing physical tension and stored energy from trauma, aiming to restore the body’s natural self-regulation abilities. In contrast, SP™ combines traditional talk therapy with body-centered techniques to address trauma, attachment, and developmental issues, providing a more comprehensive framework that includes cognitive and emotional aspects of psychotherapy.

Despite these differences, SE™ and SP™ complement each other well, offering a synergistic approach that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of each client for a more holistic and effective healing process. By integrating somatic techniques with traditional psychotherapeutic approaches, both SE™ and SP™ honor the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. Whether used as standalone treatments or in conjunction with other therapeutic modalities, SE™ and SP™ hold great promise for promoting healing, growth, and transformation in individuals dealing with trauma and related issues.

My Training and Credentials:

I have completed a comprehensive three-year training program in Somatic Experiencing (SE™), earning my certificate as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP™). Additionally, I have advanced my education in SE™ through Master classes with esteemed SE™ faculty, including Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing®, and Dr. Kathy Kain, a renowned expert in somatic therapy techniques.

I have also completed the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma Themes course through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (SPI). As a dedicated student at SPI, I am committed to deepening my knowledge and skills in this transformative therapy. Through comprehensive coursework, experiential training, and ongoing supervision, I have gained valuable insights and practical techniques that allow me to effectively integrate Sensorimotor Psychotherapy into my clinical practice.

Suggested SE™Readings: 

• Kain, K, & Terrell, S. (2018). Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma - An Integrative Somatic Approach. Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic Books.
• Levine, P (1997). Waking the tiger: healing trauma : the innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences. Berkeley, CA., North Atlantic Books.
• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY, Penguin Books.

Suggested SP™Readings: 

• Ogden, P. (2021). The pocket guide to sensorimotor psychotherapy in context .(Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). W.W. Norton & Company.

Suggested SE™ Videos: 

• Peter Levine: What is Pendulation in Somatic Experiencing®
• Peter Levine: How to Overcome Toxic Shame
• Kathy Kain: Objecting Without Contracting or Let It Be So  (The exercise starts at the one hour mark and lasts about 12 minutes)

To learn more about SE™ or to find a Somatic Experiencing Practitioners (SEP) in your area, please visit TraumaHealing.org. For more information  about Sensorimotor Psychotherapy™ (SP™) or to locate Sensorimotor Psychotherapists near you, visit the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (SPI). ​​