What happens in your body when you experience trauma? Why do some seemingly minor events leave lasting emotional and physical scars while others don’t?
In Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine challenges traditional views about psychological healing. He presents a groundbreaking approach that focuses on the body’s natural ability to process and release trauma. His method, called Somatic Experiencing, offers hope for anyone carrying the weight of past experiences.
Read on to explore Levine’s revolutionary insights into healing trauma through the wisdom of our own bodies.
Overview of Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine
Most of us think of “trauma” as psychological scars that require psychological intervention to heal. But what if the key to healing trauma doesn’t lie in your mind, but in your body? In his 1997 book Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine argues that trauma isn’t just a psychological disorder but a deep-rooted physiological one. Based on this understanding, Levine has developed a therapeutic approach called “Somatic Experiencing,” which he believes has the potential to reverse trauma symptoms and transform the lives of trauma survivors.
Levine is a psychologist and trauma expert who has been active in the field for nearly 50 years. He’s the founder of the Ergos Institute, which teaches trauma survivors ways to heal themselves, and Somatic Experiencing International, which trains practitioners to guide trauma survivors through the healing process. He taught at schools including the University of California, Berkeley and Mills College, and he served as a stress consultant for NASA during the early days of the space shuttle program.
The type of trauma Levine primarily addresses is shock trauma: symptoms that appear after one or more specific threatening, overwhelming events. He contrasts this with developmental trauma, which results from ongoing abuse or neglect during childhood. Developmental trauma shapes an individual’s psychological development over time, leading to deeper psychological issues.
Levine states that the healing methods he outlines in Waking the Tiger are most effective at treating shock trauma, and people may be able to use them to facilitate their own healing. In contrast, he urges people with developmental trauma to always seek professional therapy, as their issues typically require more intensive guidance to resolve.
We’ll begin this overview by further explaining how trauma works: What is it? What causes it? Next, we’ll detail some of the most common symptoms of trauma. Finally, we’ll walk through Levine’s original therapeutic process and explore what you can do to heal your trauma.
How Trauma Works
Let’s clearly define what trauma is. Then, we’ll use biology to explain how people get traumatized.
Defining Trauma
According to Levine, trauma is a chronic disorder that someone develops after experiencing a deeply distressing event. He emphasizes that trauma isn’t just a psychological disorder: It’s a condition that affects a person’s entire being—body and mind. Trauma can cause many wide-ranging symptoms, including flashbacks, anxiety, depression, physical ailments, and behavioral issues.
Levine contends that trauma is far more common than most people realize—he asserts that everyone has been traumatized to some degree. One reason for this is that major traumatic events are common. War, natural disasters, and physical and sexual abuse are frequent occurrences around the world, and they often cause major trauma.
Another reason trauma symptoms are so common is that seemingly minor threats can cause major trauma if they happen to someone who’s particularly vulnerable. People who are less capable of protecting themselves, have weaker physical health, or believe themselves to be helpless are easily traumatized. For instance, a child may be traumatized by the minor scare of getting lost at a shopping mall if they’re very young, malnourished, or feel helpless because they were raised by abusive parents.
How People Become Traumatized
Levine argues that trauma isn’t the result of irreversible damage to any part of a person’s body or mind. Rather, a person suffers from chronic trauma symptoms because their body hasn’t completed its physiological stress response to the original traumatic event.
Levine explains that, when threatened, animals (and humans) generate a burst of stress energy and instinctively choose from three possible responses: fight, flight, or freeze. The freeze response—the most relevant to human trauma—serves as a last-ditch survival mechanism, allowing prey animals to play dead and potentially escape when a predator’s guard is down. It also induces a dissociative state where pain is not experienced, sparing the animal from needless suffering as it’s being eaten. This frozen yet high-stress state is temporary—animals naturally unload excess stress energy after a threatening event, often shaking or trembling to get it out of their system.
Humans Interfere With Their “Freeze” Response
According to Levine, humans (like animals) enter a “freeze” state in response to highly stressful events. However, unlike animals, humans resist and suppress their natural stress recovery response. The process of exiting the freeze response and releasing trapped energy typically involves intense physical sensations, including trembling, shaking, and sweating. These sensations are often frightening or uncomfortable, so people attempt to suppress them. Humans’ highly developed neocortex allows them to do so, shutting down the stress recovery response (which occurs in more primitive parts of the brain) before it reaches its natural conclusion.
Levine explains that, when humans suppress their stress response, a vicious cycle begins: They become frozen in this trauma-response state, leaving them trapped in a state of constant stress. The persistent feelings of anxiety and fear that accompany this state further drive them to suppress their stress response. Over time, this stress energy continues to build, manifesting as trauma symptoms.
Common Trauma Symptoms
Now that we’ve established what trauma is and what causes it, let’s take a closer look at its most common symptoms.
According to Levine, trauma symptoms are extensions of the body’s immediate stress response to a traumatic event. Since people suppress the recovery response that would relieve their stress, the bodies of traumatized people essentially act as if they’re continuously experiencing a threatening situation. This causes many problems throughout their lives.
Levine identifies four primary symptoms of trauma, each of which is a chronic form of the original stress response:
- nervous system hyperactivity
- tightening (physiological and perceptual)
- dissociation
- inaction
We’ll explore these four symptoms in detail. We’ll also discuss repetition compulsion, a common symptom in which a traumatized person feels unconsciously driven to destructive behaviors as a misguided attempt to process their trauma.
Symptom #1: Heightened Physiological Arousal
Levine asserts that traumatized people suffer from heightened physiological arousal. When in danger, the body stimulates the nervous system, increasing alertness and strengthening its ability to identify specific immediate threats. However, when this stress energy becomes trapped, this heightened arousal becomes chronic. Consequently, traumatized people continue searching for threats at times when none exist. As a result, they’re often plagued with irrational fears and persistent feelings of anxiety.
Symptom #2: Physiological and Perceptual Tightening
According to Levine, another common symptom of trauma is tightening—a traumatized person’s physical and mental processes become more restrictive. Physiologically, their bodies readily tighten up to deal with an immediate threat: Their muscles tense and their blood vessels constrain, reserving blood for strenuous muscle activity.
Levine explains that mentally, traumatized people suffer from a tightened focus. In the presence of immediate danger, this perceptual tightening helps people filter out unimportant details and focus solely on the threat. However, when this narrow focus becomes chronic, it can leave trauma survivors involuntarily fixated on anxiety-provoking threats and traumatic flashbacks.
Symptom #3: Dissociation
During a traumatic event, a person’s nervous system triggers dissociation, making them mentally disengage from their body. Levine states that in chronic form, dissociation is a lifelong unconscious habit: Trauma survivors’ self-awareness will frequently diminish or disappear completely, especially as a response to intense situations or traumatic memories.
Levine explains that another common form of dissociation is denial: Traumatized people are often disconnected from the intense feelings brought on by the traumatic event, so they act as if it didn’t affect them. In severe cases, trauma survivors firmly deny that the traumatic event ever occurred.
Levine contends that physically, chronic dissociation manifests as reduced sensation or total numbness in various parts of the body. This numbness causes some traumatized people to struggle to discern what emotions they’re feeling.
Levine also asserts that dissociation can cause physical issues like headaches or back pain.
Symptom #4: Inaction
Finally, Levine asserts that inaction is a common symptom of trauma. People tend to freeze in threatening situations. When this freeze reaction becomes chronic, trauma survivors frequently find themselves unable to move, especially in stressful situations. The powerlessness experienced in these moments isn’t just anxiety—it’s a physiological state where action is impossible.
According to Levine, the chronic form of the freeze response also causes long-term inaction: Trauma survivors often feel unable to improve their lives or escape stressful life circumstances (even when escape is possible). Thus, they’re more likely to live unhappy and consistently stressful lives.
Repetition Compulsion: Failed Attempts to Process Trauma
In addition to describing the four primary symptoms of trauma, Levine details another symptom that occurs when the body’s natural psychological healing process goes awry: repetition compulsion, or a trauma survivor’s unconscious drive to repeatedly act out the incident that originally traumatized them.
This compulsion comes from an instinctual drive to process the traumatic event. Unfortunately, if someone lacks the awareness necessary to allow their body to finish processing their trauma, this drive can cause them to play out the traumatic event in the real world rather than internally.
Repetition compulsion can lead to dangerous or self-destructive behaviors. For example, someone who experienced emotional abuse in childhood might repeatedly seek out romantic partners who are critical and demeaning, unconsciously recreating their childhood dynamic. Or, a person who experienced food scarcity in their early years could develop an eating disorder as an adult: They might alternate between periods of binging food and intentionally starving, reenacting the cycle of feast and famine from their past.
Levine explains that this kind of repetition offers a way for the body to release some of its pent-up traumatic energy. For this reason, it can make a person feel better—but only temporarily. Ultimately, unless they fully complete their body’s natural trauma recovery process, they’ll unconsciously chase the relief of repetition and reenact the traumatic event for the rest of their life.
How to Heal Your Trauma
We’ve gained a clear picture of the symptoms we’re trying to alleviate, but how is it possible to do so? Let’s explore Levine’s original healing method: Somatic Experiencing.
Levine emphasizes that although this method sometimes yields sudden breakthroughs, healing trauma is generally a gradual process that takes time. Don’t push yourself too hard. If any part of this process makes you feel unsettled, take a break and try again later. If the process triggers extremely intense emotions, stop and seek professional help.
Next, we’ll provide an overview of how Levine’s healing method works, then we’ll walk through it step-by-step. Finally, we’ll detail the psychological rebirth trauma survivors can expect to experience after this kind of healing.
How Levine’s Healing Process Works
According to Levine, you can heal your trauma by allowing your controlling, rational mind to step aside so the body and primitive parts of the brain can heal. This way, you can complete the body’s original stress response and unload all the pent-up stress energy that you’ve carried since the traumatic incident.
During this process, you may arrive at intellectual insights about you and your trauma, but they’re largely incidental. What matters is that your body processes the trauma on a physiological level.
We’ve organized Levine’s explanation of Somatic Experiencing into three steps:
- Step #1: Develop your felt sense
- Step #2: Unlock empowering internal forces
- Step #3: Alternate between empowering and trauma-related internal experiences
Step #1: Develop Your Felt Sense
Levine warns that when you allow your traumatic memories and energy to come to the surface, you risk getting swept up in overwhelming emotions or intense flashbacks to the traumatic event. It can be counterproductive if you reexperience the traumatic incident without activating your body’s natural healing response.
According to Levine, the primary tool you’ll use to avoid this pitfall when processing your trauma is your felt sense. This is your awareness of the physical sensations you feel throughout your body when thinking about a specific occurrence or person. By focusing on your felt sense, you can channel and engage with traumatic memories in a less overwhelming form. Your physical sensations act as a grounding focal point you can use to calm down when your experience gets intense.
How to Train Your Felt Sense
Levine explains that many people—especially trauma survivors—lack a felt sense at any given moment. If you intentionally build this awareness, you can more easily access your felt sense when you need it, strengthening your ability to process trauma. Levine offers an exercise to help you do this.
First, get into a comfortable position, and try to maintain awareness of all the physical sensations you’re feeling. Notice the points of contact between your body and whatever surface is supporting you, and recognize how this pressure feels. Next, pay attention to the sensation of your clothes on various parts of your skin. Gradually, shift your focus inside your body: Are there any sensations there?
Stay with these sensations for a few minutes and watch how they change. Sensations might intensify, diminish, transform, or vanish. Simply notice this activity without judgment or interpretation.
Step #2: Unlock Empowering Internal Forces
Levine contends that, once you’ve developed your felt sense, you can use it to start gradually processing your trauma. If you wait and pay attention to your felt sense, powerful images and sensations related to your trauma will naturally arise. The flow of sensations may involve real memories from your past or dreamlike images that never really happened.
Some of these sensations may be unpleasant. However, Levine asserts that, if you observe your felt sense for long enough, positive images, sensations, and ideas that make you feel excited and capable will rise into your awareness. Sometimes, even images and ideas that were originally traumatic will turn into empowering positive forces. These empowering images, sensations, and ideas are tools you’ll use to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed as you unload increasing amounts of traumatic energy. For example, someone who was trapped in a burning building as a child might discover that focusing on the sensation of being carried to safety by a firefighter makes them feel safe and invincible.
Levine advises that, when you’re looking to unlock empowering internal forces, try your best to accept whatever your unconscious mind is showing you. Don’t try to control what you feel or decipher what your images or sensations mean—empowering internal forces will naturally reveal themselves. This is a process of passive receiving, not active searching.
Step #3: Alternate Between Empowering and Painful Internal Experiences
According to Levine, after you’ve developed your felt sense and gathered empowering internal forces, you can make significant progress processing your trauma and unloading your trapped stress.
As you give into the flow of your felt sense and observe it without resistance, your mind will naturally alternate between painful experiences and empowering, healing experiences. This alternation is the core of the body’s instinctive healing process. For instance, someone who was trapped in a burning building might experience this sequence of images and sensations:
- A flashback to the overwhelming, suffocating smoke
- A comforting memory of being rescued by a firefighter
- A flashback to the intense pain of recovering from burns in a hospital bed
- A comforting dreamlike image of lying snuggled in their childhood bed
Whenever you feel afraid or overwhelmed, ground yourself in your felt sense of the positive images, sensations, and ideas you identified in Step #2. Levine explains that these positive internal forces will help you reexperience traumatic images and sensations without getting caught up in the negative emotions and flashbacks that have accompanied them in the past. Thus, you can face them and process them.
Let Your Body Move
Free movement is an important part of this step in the healing process. According to Levine, people will often move different parts of their body, seemingly at random, as a means of unloading their traumatic energy. You may even find yourself drawn to move in a way that reenacts the original traumatic incident, or a way you wish you could’ve moved during the incident. This is all part of the healing process: Allow yourself to move in whatever ways your instincts tell you to.
Rebirth After Trauma
Eventually, processing your trauma using your felt sense, positive internal forces, and free movement will leave you feeling completely reborn. Levine contends that each traumatic symptom will disappear and be replaced by their opposites. You’ll feel:
- relaxed and optimistic rather than alert and paranoid
- open and flexible rather than tightly fixated on fears and anxieties
- fully engaged with life rather than dissociated
- confident and capable rather than helpless and inactive
