What is Trauma Healing?
What is trauma healing?
Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is a body-oriented approach to healing trauma and other stress disorders. I work with people who have had car accidents, falls, injuries or have experienced physical or sexual abuse. Trauma can disconnect us from our bodies and make us feel like we can never really relax.
Many people I see have been in psychotherapy yet sense that there is still a “missing piece” in the body that needs to be addressed to restore a sense of wholeness.
Whether trauma is physical or emotional, at its core is the body’s attempt to manage the intense survival energy of fight, flight and freeze.
Containing this pent-up energy can result in chronic tension and patterns such as migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue as well as behavioral problems such as anxiety, panic attacks and depression.
The goal is to help the body out of the arousal system of fight or flight so that the body doesn’t continue to react as if a threat still exists.
Equilibrium is restored to the nervous system by allowing the body to complete instinctual survival responses and discharge this intense survival energy, while reconnecting with your own strength and resiliency.
What is a session like?
While knowledge of the nervous system enhances any bodywork session, trauma sessions are distinct and separate from Structural Integration sessions and may or may not involve touch.
It is not necessary to relive an event to heal trauma. Somatic Experiencing addresses how the body continues to play out a habitual response to a past event. This approach uses your own body awareness to track the responses of your autonomic nervous system. You learn to you become mindful of your body sensations, images, behaviors, emotions and thoughts.
This heightened state of body awareness allows you to become aware of how your nervous system, muscles, body and mind become tense to prepare for defensive action.
By gently guiding you into the realm of body sensations through this process, you regain the ability to regulate the activity of your own nervous system and recover your sense of safety.
For more info on Somatic Experiencing: www.traumahealing.com