PDF Summary: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 Waking the Tiger, Peter A. 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.

In this guide, you’ll learn the four ways in which the body’s immediate response to a traumatic event can continue indefinitely and turn into chronic symptoms. You’ll also learn, step-by-step, how to use the Somatic Experiencing method to process and heal your trauma. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Levine’s advice for trauma survivors with ideas from books like What Happened to You? and The Body Keeps the Score. Furthermore, we’ll consult modern research to determine the degree to which Levine’s understanding of trauma is currently supported by evidence.

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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.

(Shortform note: The condition of struggling to feel, identify, and communicate your emotions is known as alexithymia, and it’s not exclusive to trauma survivors. According to one study, approximately 13% of people exhibit some level of alexithymia, and the condition is more common in men than women (17% versus 10%).)

Levine also asserts that dissociation can cause physical issues like headaches or back pain.

(Shortform note: According to some trauma experts, people with a complex dissociative disorder (such as C-PTSD) almost always suffer from physical symptoms like those Levine describes. However, they warn traumatized people not to assume that every physical symptom is the result of trauma and dissociation. These experts recommend that trauma survivors check with a medical professional to ensure these symptoms aren’t caused by another underlying medical condition.)

Symptom #4: Inaction

Finally, Levine asserts that inaction is a common symptom of trauma. We’ve already discussed how 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.

(Shortform note: Research supports Levine’s assertion that the freeze response is primarily reflexive and physiological, rather than the result of specific fears. One study exposed 404 people to uncomfortable levels of carbon dioxide to study their freeze stress response. The researchers found that 13% of participants felt strongly unable to move, showing that the freeze response can be triggered reflexively—even when people understand that they’re not in true danger.)

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.

(Shortform note: In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk contends that the reason that trauma survivors feel unable to change their lives is because of chronic dissociation. Disconnected from their emotions, they can’t discern what parts of their life make them feel bad—so they struggle to figure out how to make things better.)

How Polyvagal Theory Explains Trauma Symptoms

While Levine asserts that these four symptoms are simply caused by traumatic stress trapped in the body, a neurological framework called polyvagal theory provides a more detailed physiological explanation of where trauma symptoms come from.

According to this theory, when someone perceives danger, their nervous system transitions through three stages: First, it moves from a peaceful state called ventral vagal social engagement to the fight-or-flight state, or sympathetic nervous system activation. Then, if the danger persists and seems inescapable, the nervous system shifts into dorsal vagal shutdown. This third state triggers the freeze response, slows down bodily functions like your heartbeat, and hinders social behaviors like eye contact.

When someone experiences a traumatic event, the part of their nervous system responsible for detecting threats and transitioning through these stages becomes overly sensitive, reacting even to minor or nonexistent threats. Thus, trauma survivors frequently experience sympathetic nervous system activation, which triggers heightened physiological arousal and tightening. Additionally, they frequently experience dorsal vagal shutdown, which triggers dissociation and inaction.

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.

Repetition Compulsion as an Escape From Numbness

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk offers an alternative explanation for why people feel compelled to reenact their traumatic experiences. As we’ve discussed, traumatized people often go through life feeling emotionally numb and disconnected from their lives. According to van der Kolk, reliving the traumatic event provides them with a rush of emotions that’s otherwise absent in their day-to-day lives.

There’s a physiological explanation for the craving of intense emotional stress: Trauma survivors become addicted to the stress-induced endorphins that their brain secretes when they relive their traumatic experience. In their daily lives, they experience withdrawal from these endorphins as pain. Although finding a way to reexperience something traumatic isn’t necessarily pleasant—and it’s potentially dangerous and self-destructive—it helps relieve this pain.

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.

(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 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.

(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.

(Shortform note: The term “felt sense” was coined by psychologist Eugene Gendlin, who used it in his 1966 paper “The Discovery of Felt Meaning.” It’s a key part of “Focusing,” a unique process of self-reflection that Gendlin developed. Like Somatic Experiencing, Focusing involves observing the felt sense, but it’s intended for anyone who wants to gain clarity in their life—not just for trauma survivors.)

Developing Felt Sense Builds Emotional Resilience

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk offers an additional explanation for why deepening the felt sense helps people heal from trauma. As trauma survivors pay closer attention to the moment-to-moment experience of their bodily sensations, it becomes clear that these feelings are constantly changing. This realization takes away some of the power these feelings normally have. Instead of reflexively taking action to avoid or suppress these feelings, trauma survivors see them as temporary sensations that they’re capable of enduring.

For this reason, yoga can be a powerful tool to heal from trauma. By mindfully holding their body in different yoga poses, trauma survivors can strengthen their felt sense and become less easily overwhelmed by powerful sensations.

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.

A Body Scan Meditation for Mindfulness

Whereas Levine recommends developing your felt sense as a tool specifically for processing traumatic energy, other experts recommend cultivating the similar quality of mindfulness for more general improvements to your quality of life. Mindfulness is the consistent awareness and acceptance of the experience of the present moment. This makes it broader than the felt sense, which is the impression you get from a specific occurrence or person. Experts contend that cultivating mindfulness can help alleviate stress and anxiety. Additionally, by helping you peacefully accept and release troubling thoughts, mindfulness can help cure insomnia and other sleep issues.

To cultivate mindfulness, experts recommend a body scan meditation that’s similar, yet not identical to Levine’s felt sense exercise. To perform a body scan meditation, find a comfortable position—either lying down or sitting. Instead of immediately scanning your body (as in Levine’s exercise), focus your attention by observing your breath. This will help you conduct your body scan with slightly more intentional direction than Levine’s open awareness practice.

Next, move your attention through different parts of your body. Observe the sensations you feel in each area, acknowledging any pain or discomfort without judgment. If your thoughts begin to wander, gently redirect your attention back to the body part you were focusing on. Continue until you’ve focused your attention on every single body part individually. Finally, try to maintain awareness of your entire body all at once before slowly returning your attention to your surroundings.

We’ll walk you through another version of this exercise on the next page of this guide.

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 of the traumatic symptoms we discussed earlier 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 (as we’ve discussed), 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.