Somatic Experiencing & its role in healing trauma

Most of us know what it’s like to feel stressed, overwhelmed, or to push past our limits. For some, it’s an anxiety that won’t go no matter how many regulation tools we use. For others, it’s a heavy numbness, a sense of being cut off from life, or it might show up as chronic pain, digestive issues, sleepless nights, or the looping thought: “Why can’t I just move on?”

Often many of us blame ourselves for what we experience. We think there’s something wrong with our minds, our personalities, or our willpower, but what if nothing is wrong with you? What if your body and your nervous system are doing exactly what they were designed to do: to protect you, but that protection sometimes creates the energy of survival that got stuck. What if your nervous system needs a safe way to let it complete the process it began and create more space inside?

This is the foundation of Somatic Experiencing® (SE): a method to support the body complete what it couldn’t finish back then, so you can return to balance, safety, and presence.

Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, SE is a body-based approach to resolving trauma and stress. It starts from the premise that trauma isn’t always experienced in the event itself, rather, it’s how your nervous system responds now to past events.

“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” - Dr Peter Levine

When something overwhelming happens, such a car accident, surgery, loss, or perhaps the culmination of years of neglect or abuse, your nervous system does exactly what it’s designed to do: it mobilises energy to help you survive. Your heart races, your breath quickens, your muscles tense - the body prepares to fight, run, or, if there’s no escape, to freeze.

In the natural world, animals complete these survival responses. After escaping danger, a gazelle trembles to discharge the stored energy, and then returns to grazing as if nothing happened. Humans, however, often interrupt this cycle because of our high brain (pre-frontal cortex where reasoning lives). We suppress tears, override impulses, or we are told to “hold it together.” The survival energy that was mobilised has nowhere to go now, so instead of releasing, it gets stuck in the nervous system. This is trauma: not the event itself, but the body’s incomplete response to it.

The nervous system doesn’t keep time.

An important aspect to know about the nervous system is that it doesn’t work on clocks! It doesn’t automatically know the danger has passed. Your mind might say: “That was years ago, I should be fine now” but your body may still be bracing, contracting, or shutting down as if it were happening in this moment. This is why trauma symptoms often feel confusing or out of proportion: because you are receiving signs of survival energy still stored in the system, waiting for a chance to finish.

This is where Somatic Experiencing comes in as it works directly with the body and the nervous system to gently complete these unfinished survival responses. Instead of diving headfirst into painful memories, SE uses slow, safe, body-based awareness to help the system release stress without overwhelm.

At its core, SE teaches the body how to:

Release stored survival energy through natural, involuntary discharges like trembling, sighing, or changes in temperature.
Regain flexibility in the nervous system by moving between activation and calm, rather than being stuck in one or the other.
Build capacity to stay present with sensations instead of disconnecting or shutting down.
Develop inner resources that create safety when touching into difficult material.
Reframe symptoms as signals as being intelligent survival patterns.
Restore trust in the body as an ally rather than an enemy.

To make this safer and more effective, SE uses the following pillars:

1. Titration - less is more.

Trauma is overwhelming. Healing can’t happen if we flood the system. SE works in tiny doses, touching into difficult sensations little by little. It’s like letting the steam out of a pressure cooker slowly, instead of blowing the lid off.

2. Pendulation - contraction and expansion.

Trauma makes us feel stuck; either stuck in “on” (anxious, restless, hyper-alert) or stuck on “off” (numb, collapsed, disconnected). SE gently guides the nervous system back into rhythm, moving between contraction and expansion, stress and ease. With time, the body relearns: I don’t have to stay stuck; I can move.

3. Resourcing - finding anchors of safety.

In SE we don’t dive straight into pain and trauma, we build safety first. Resources are sensations, images, memories, or relationships that feel steady. Feeling the support of a chair, remembering a safe place, noticing the warmth of the sun. We take time to anchor these in the body by noticing what happens in the present moment when we recall these resources so we can return to them when touching something harder.

4. Completion - finishing the response.

As safety grows, the body may spontaneously do what it couldn’t before: shake, cry, push, say no or exhale deeply. This is how the body completes what it couldn’t express at the time: survival energy finally leaving the system, but we don’t chase completion. We follow and track the body and trust that it will do what it needs to do.

Somatic Experiencing meets patters of survival with patience and respect. It doesn’t rush, it doesn’t force, it creates the space for the body to remember how to complete and settle gently, at its own pace.

Why coming into the body can feel hard.

One of the paradoxes of trauma healing is that the very thing we long for such as feeling more alive and embodied can also feel unsafe. When we reconnect with the body, we don’t just feel pleasant sensations, we also get closer to what was never processed: fear, grief, or the longing to be held.

Because trauma isn’t just about danger, it’s often about the absence of safety, the absence of being held through challenging experiences, and that’s why healing in isolation can be so hard.

Why relationships matter

This is where slowness and compassion are so important. In slowness, the body can show us where care and pacing are needed. With support, we can learn to stay a little longer each time, building inner holding and increasing the ability to be with ourselves gently, instead of pushing or judging. Often this inner holding emerges from relationships where our nervous systems can co-regulate. When one person is grounded, it helps the other settle, when both are activated, anxiety can escalate into conflict.

The work, then, is not just individual but relational - learning to pause, to name what’s happening in our bodies, to repair after rupture. This is how safety and connection are rebuilt in ourselves, and between us.

What healing feels like?

People often say after sessions:

· “I didn’t realise how much I was holding until I let it go.”

· “I feel like I can breathe again.”

· “It’s like my body is softer, safer, more mine.”

Somatic Experiencing doesn’t erase the past, what it does is change your relationship to it. The memory may still exist, but the charge, the panic, the tension that once accompanied it begins to soften. You start to experience yourself not as a bundle of symptoms to fix, but as a living, responsive body that can adapt, recover, and grow. There is more aliveness, flow and movement towards life that comes from within rather than forced.

An invitation

The more we practice listening to our muscles, our heartbeat, our breath, our gut, the more fluent we become in the language of the body, and as we trust those signals, we begin to live with more vitality, presence, and ease.

Somatic Experiencing is about giving your nervous system what it didn’t get back then: safety, time, and space to complete - step by step, breath by breath, contraction, then expansion, until what was once overwhelming, becomes something your body knows how to move through, and until what once felt like survival becomes the ground for living fully, here, and now.

Life isn’t about avoiding challenges, but it’s about learning how to meet them with more resilience, where stress no longer floods the system in the same way and there’s more room for choice, connection, and ease.

Sounds great right? This is part of what we teach on our program. We welcome your inquiry.

Written for Seven Directions® Breathwork by Teodora Pile:

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Somatic Experiencing® (SE): Healing Trauma by Listening to the Body