What is Somatic Experiencing for trauma? Could it be your path toward healing?
In Waking the Tiger, trauma expert Peter Levine describes his Somatic Experiencing method and explains how it can help release trapped trauma from the body. His groundbreaking approach focuses on completing the body’s natural stress response rather than solely addressing psychological symptoms.
Keep reading to discover a gentle, step-by-step process for healing trauma through body awareness and natural movement patterns.
Somatic Experiencing for Trauma
What is Somatic Experiencing for trauma? 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 emphasizes that, although Somatic Experiencing 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.
(Shortform note: When you take a break from this process, consider talking about what you’re experiencing with loved ones. In What Happened to You?, Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry assert that sharing your thoughts and feelings with a supportive community is invaluable for people trying to process trauma—especially if you lack access to a therapist. Furthermore, like Levine, Winfrey and Perry emphasize that processing trauma is something that happens slowly over time. For this reason, they recommend regularly having small chats about your experience with loved ones rather than trying to process everything during a single deep conversation.)
Next, we’ll provide an overview of how Levine’s Somatic Experiencing 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 Somatic Experiencing 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.
(Shortform note: This view of trauma healing aligns somewhat with Eastern spiritual traditions. In The Way of Zen, Alan Watts explains the Taoist principle of wu-wei: the experience of making decisions naturally and spontaneously. Taoists believe that when you let your mind act freely, without trying to rationally direct it or interfere with it, it acts more intelligently. This is because it’s directed by the Tao, the natural guiding power of the universe. Thus, Taoists would likely agree with Levine that the best way to process trauma is to stop intellectualizing and let your body and subconscious mind direct your experience.)
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.
| Imagery Rehearsal Therapy for Curing Nightmares Other experts also recommend processing trauma by engaging with dream imagery. Research shows that up to 71% of people with PTSD suffer from regular nightmares, and sometimes, these nightmares involve directly reliving the original traumatic incident. Resolving these nightmares can be a vital step in a trauma survivor’s healing journey. The most common therapeutic method for curing nightmares is called imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT). Unlike Levine’s healing process, in which you passively wait for empowering forces to arise, IRT involves actively inventing new empowering images and events you want to appear in your dreams. For example, if a veteran repeatedly dreams of being ambushed in a war zone, unable to save their fellow soldiers, they might invent a new dream in which they’re able to fly everyone to safety in a helicopter. IRT participants make it a habit to mentally rehearse this new version of their dreams during the day, which makes them more likely to experience them when they’re asleep. Additionally, instead of using the felt sense to make traumatic images and sensations feel less powerful, IRT participants weaken these negative forces by discussing them with a therapist. Objectively inspecting their nightmares in a safe environment helps trauma survivors get used to facing them, making it easier for them to gain control when they’re asleep. |
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.
| Alternating Pain and Pleasure to Prevent Addiction Levine contends that trauma survivors must alternate between painful experiences and empowering ones to process and heal from trauma. According to Anna Lembke in Dopamine Nation, a similar alternation between pain and pleasure is necessary to avoid addictions of any kind. Lembke explains that the brain is adaptive and constantly seeks homeostasis, a balanced state between pleasure and pain. If you experience heightened pleasure for long enough, your brain compensates by changing its baseline of what “pleasure” is. Thus, it takes more intense or frequent pleasurable experiences to trigger the same pleasant sensation. Additionally, when you’re not actively seeking and experiencing pleasure, you feel uncomfortable rather than neutral. This can create an addictive cycle by pushing you toward increasingly extreme pleasure-seeking behavior—under the threat of the increasing pain of neutrality. To avoid this addictive cycle, you must reset your brain by intentionally experiencing safe, healthy forms of discomfort—such as taking cold showers or engaging in challenging exercise. This deliberate discomfort pushes your brain’s homeostasis in the opposite direction, making it easier to experience pleasure and feel good when you’re doing nothing. Temporarily abstaining from pleasurable experiences can also reset your brain’s homeostasis and help prevent addictive cycles. By this logic, it’s possible that managing their brain’s pleasure-pain homeostasis (along with grounding in empowering forces) could help trauma survivors process traumatic memories and experiences. If these negative forces feel less painful, it may be easier to face them without being overwhelmed and swept away by 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.
(Shortform note: This stage of Levine’s healing process functions similarly to dance therapy. In dance therapy, a therapist guides their client through movement exercises intended to help them listen to their bodies and instinctively express emotions that would feel too overwhelming or intangible to articulate in another way. Bringing these feelings to the surface can help trauma survivors process them. Experts emphasize that slow, comfortable progress in dance therapy is crucial for trauma survivors—don’t feel pressured to immediately reenact your traumatic incident if your body doesn’t do so naturally.)
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
| Evidence That Somatic Experiencing Works Although some of Levine’s conceptual framework isn’t rigorously supported by scientific evidence, a review of preliminary research suggests that Somatic Experiencing (SE) is effective. Multiple studies have found that trauma survivors who go through SE experience significant reductions in PTSD symptoms compared to control groups—symptoms such as heightened physiological arousal; intrusive flashbacks and anxiety; and avoidant, inactive behavior. (This review doesn’t specifically mention whether SE alleviates dissociation-related symptoms, but it does mention that this approach improves related symptoms like depression.) That said, the research on SE is still in its early stages. While existing studies show promise, researchers emphasize that more rigorous randomized controlled trials with larger sample sizes are needed to firmly establish SE’s efficacy. |
