Trauma is not what happened to us, but our nervous system’s response to the event.

Clients often tell me that they have gone to therapists for years but still feel stuck. While we can gain a lot of insight from discussing our problems, extensively talking about our trauma runs the risk of re-traumatizing us. Because traumatic experiences are embedded in the more primitive parts of our brain, we need deeper ways of processing. 

Somatic Experiencing (SE™) is a gentle approach that aims to resolve symptoms of stress that accumulate in our bodies by assessing where we become stuck in physiological states of survival. You might not have an explicit memory of the experiences that shaped you. With SE we learn that the rational part of our brain goes offline while our “reptilian brain” comes online when we feel unsafe. When we are faced with increasing or pervasive levels of stress, we resort to the survival responses of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Because the reptilian brain’s language is sensations, traumatic experiences need to be processed through the the body, also known as the nervous system.

I am a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and use SE with my clients to help them renegotiate their body’s incomplete survival responses to traumatic events and help them reconnect with a deep and intrinsic sense of embodiment. SE provides tools to restore our sense of safety and resilience through our body’s natural ability to release and recover.