Somatic Therapy and Counselling online via Zoom

 

What is Somatic Experiencing (SE) Therapy?

 

Somatic therapy is an approach to healing that works with the body — not just the mind. Where traditional talk therapy focuses primarily on thoughts, beliefs and conscious understanding, somatic therapy recognises that our experiences, and especially our traumas, are held not only in the mind but in the nervous system, the muscles, and the deeper layers of our physiology.

 

The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning body. Somatic healing begins from the understanding that the body holds its own intelligence — and that by learning to listen to it, track it, and gently work with it, we can resolve patterns of stress, anxiety, trauma and disconnection that talk-based approaches often can't reach.

 

Technically, our unconscious patterns, behavior and holding of bracing patterns are activated at the level of the autonomic nervous system, governed by the Reptilian and Mammalian parts of the brain. Talk therapy focuses on the Neo-frontal Cortex rather than on these more ‘primitive’ parts of the brain. That is why even a great understanding of our psychology, patterns and behaviour doesn’t shift these. In contrast, Somatic therapy works directly with these other brain parts, and with the nervous system (including the Vagus Nerve specifically), which is why it works so well.

 

Very importantly, somatic therapy - SE specifically - is actually truly trauma informed.

Many therapies nowadays say they are ‘trauma-informed’ but they are not really. If sessions with a therapist are re-traumatising, they are not trauma-informed.

 

SE doesn't require you to relive difficult memories or analyse your way to insight. Somatic Experiencing Practitioners are highly and specifically trained in a unique approach that helps people process trauma exactly by not having to re-live it.

 

Some examples of how SE is distinct from other so-called trauma-informed modalities. One of the ways SE is not re-traumatising is that we work with what is happening in your body right now — sensations, impulses, breath, posture — as a doorway into deeper healing. Most people are surprised by how much shifts, and how quickly, once the body is included in the conversation. We use ‘titration’ so the therapy is not overwhelming to your system or conscious mind.

 

Unlike various trauma-release exercises or modalities that stimulate a traumatic response or release, SE works in a sophisticated way so that the release comes organically - and deeply - from the nervous system being able to release when it;s properly supported and ready.

 

Many clients come to SE, not only from psychology that hasn't worked but from other supposedly ‘trauma-informed’ therapies that, unfortunately are re-traumatising.

 

As an SE therapist, I follow Peter Levine’s system of ‘energy wells’ allowing the nervous system to experience just the right amount of stimulation and discharge. In SE we say we ;’go slow to go fast’ and ‘go shallow to go deep’. In these ways the healing process can be integrated, another reason SE works better than other approaches.

 

SE practitioners are uniquely, and deeply, trained and experienced to work with you to know how much to prompt a healing response and when to hold back: in how to help manage the discharge of traumatic holding in a manageable way, so it’s enough but not too much. Often clients believe that from the point of the conscious mind ‘I’m ready to deal with my trauma’, but may not really be ready. We help to determine whether the body and nervous system are actually ready, and what is needed to really develop that readiness. This is one of the reasons so many people trust SE and find it so effective.

 

Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Trauma Resolution

"Trauma" includes a wide range of experience: accidents, attacks, physical, emotional, psychological or sexual abuses, medical trauma, and more. It also includes developmental or attachment (early childhood) trauma, including the long-ranging impacts of neglect — of not getting our attunement and higher-order needs met.

'Accumulated stress', which many people experience, and which may not involve an actual 'trauma' as such, can also be successfully managed using a somatic experiencing approach, as can anxiety, depression, and feeling flat or hopeless.

A good therapist can be a godsend, and a lifeline: someone who is your ally over the short, medium and/or long term.

Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing and author of the book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, notes that trauma is fundamental to what interferes with our ability to be fully present, in the moment. It also interferes with finding or having healthy, sustainable relationships, and with trusting in life and the process of living. Good trauma therapy can fundamentally help shift how you feel in the world, and how you feel in your own skin.

The good news is that as our trauma heals, we start to feel better and better — even better than we could have ever imagined feeling.

Healing trauma helps us to feel more alive, more fully present, able to choose and have nurturing, loving, satisfying connections with others — and, most importantly, with ourselves.

Primary or secondary trauma can also affect people who have witnessed trauma or even its aftermath. It may also affect those who work with clients who have experienced trauma, or anyone who hasn't had access to effective trauma resolution and therapeutic support.

By utilising the tools and understanding of somatic experiencing, I can help you significantly resolve trauma — even complex trauma such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Complex PTSD (CPTSD).

How does Somatic Experiencing (SE) work?

Levine, initially trained as an animal behaviourist, recognised that animals in the wild recover from trauma and attack without the symptoms of stress and trauma experienced by people or domestic animals. In brief, because animals don't experience the shame often accompanying the release of trauma, their physical system is able to release the charge of the incomplete action effectively and permanently. In contrast, humans are conditioned not to discharge internalised feelings of shame, pain or hurt — and so these get stored in our nervous system.

In trauma, rather than completing the incomplete action — executing a defensive response such as orienting to danger, then fighting or fleeing — our bodies often 'learn' to fawn or freeze, which then becomes our unconscious habitual default response to any sense of danger or discomfort. And so the cycle becomes entrenched in our nervous system, beneath the level of our consciousness.

Somatic experiencing therapy provides a structured method to safely and slowly release the stored, unconscious patterns of response to trauma. It also helps re-educate the body to again feel capable of resisting — or escaping — the sense of threat associated with original traumas, and to separate from the layers of post-traumatic stress that develop without an effective trauma resolution process.

 

Just as the body learns to contract and freeze in response to original traumas — and the layers of stress that accumulate without our conscious awareness — the instinctual intelligence of the body can repair those programmed responses.

Once the trauma response patterns in the nervous system are identified and resolved, the body can quite quickly relearn new ways of being in the world. The old unconscious patterns are replaced with new patterns of response to threat and fear — so the body, quite literally, relaxes into new ways of being.

We now understand so much more about how old neural pathways in the brain can reform. Old pathways associated with fear responses are literally — and gently — rewired through corrective experiences in therapy, and the brain begins to experience life in new, un-traumatised ways.

As the nervous system continues to relax, your experience of life on a day-to-day level continues to improve. This is what Peter Levine means when he says: "Trauma there, trauma where?" With therapy, the awful feelings and experiences of living with being traumatised start to disappear — both at the deepest unconscious and the conscious levels.

What is Somatic Experiencing (SE)? How does it help heal trauma and C/PTSD? 

 

New scientific evidence shows that the effects of trauma can be resolved. People who have suffered trauma can learn to permanently develop a greater sense of safety and resilience, in which the debilitating associations of trauma are actually resolved.

Resolving trauma in the present heals past trauma held in our nervous system.

As the patterning of the original trauma acts like a domino effect, so does the healing. As the presenting trauma is resolved, past traumas are resolved, meaning you are likely to end up feeling much better overall: better than you've ever felt before. Not just after a session, but ongoing and, eventually, permanently.

And as trauma is often inter-generational, healing our own wounds reverberates on many levels.

An example that helps illustrate how trauma works: someone high-functioning in many respects suddenly has an impact injury — a car accident or significant physical event — or faces a major life stressor such as losing a job, a relationship, or a home, and feels as though they're having a 'nervous breakdown'. What's happening is that the recent trauma has triggered a deeply held body memory of past trauma. The nervous system, which over time has developed ways of managing a history of smaller traumas, is pushed into overload.
Somatic experiencing tends to the current, presenting trauma — whether recent or long-held — in a way that allows the whole nervous system to be effectively repaired, and past experiences of trauma and their associated distress to be resolved.

 

What does a Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapist do? 

Somatic Experiencing works at the level of the nervous system – including the mammalian / limbic and ‘reptilian brain’ - redefining your entire experiences of living in the world through gentle, patient and focused attention by a trained therapist.

There is an important physiological stratum in which we can’t think or rationalize our way out of a traumatic experience. We need to be able to experience a corrective sense of repair at the level of the nervous system itself (which is a subconscious level).

What an SE therapist does is to help, literally, repair the body’s experience of not being able to fight or flee, or of being caught in ‘freeze’, (as a way of avoiding feeling the immediate impact of traumatic experience/s).

Somatic Experiencing re-patterns the body’s experience, so you start to feel, literally – including on a deep physical level - as if the trauma had been able to be averted. That is, we work to complete the response that wasn’t able to be completed at the time - usually an incomplete fight or flight response. With SE, additionally, we also discharge the charge held in the nervous system.

At the same time, from a psychological point of view, we can work together to make meaning, and to achieve a measure of psychological peace, from integrating trauma and its aftermath, so that it becomes manageable, even if it is difficult to imagine that a miracle like that can happen.

The result is that with SE, you can come to feel a level of wellbeing that may have been unimaginable previously. And it helps you build the skills and capability to continue to heal and grow, as your nervous system becomes more and more resilient, flexible and stronger.

We can work successfully with all types of trauma, from situational (accidents, violence and abuse), to PTSD and CPTSD, to developmental or attachment trauma. In this way even long-term wounding can be repaired using the tools of SE, supported by the psychotherapeutic relationship.

I can highly recommend a wonderful talk by Peter Levine (the Founder of Somatic Experiencing) and the Spiritual Teacher Thomas Hubl on Healing Trauma from a Science & Nonduality Conference from a few years back. It's well worth listening to it, as it covers many of the key questions people ask about both healing trauma and spirituality (eg. what is trauma, how long does it take to heal, what's the connection between personal and ancestral trauma, how does it affect relationships etc.) Here's the YouTube link: Healing Trauma & Spiritual Growth.

 

Why SE works — and why other therapies often don't go far enough

Many people who have experienced traumatic events and complex trauma may have tried other forms of support such as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), general psychology, or talk-based counselling. You may even have found some temporary or medium-term relief, but noticed that the underlying feelings didn't fundamentally shift.

It can be deeply distressing when therapy doesn't reach the underlying feelings at the level of the nervous system. Cognitive understanding of our patterns and responses is helpful - but only up to a point. Without therapy that actually resolves the issues and gives you tools to continue deepening your healing, it's easy to feel hopeless, and to believe you are stuck with these feelings for life.

With effective somatic therapy, this is not the case. Effective help is available — and the process of therapy itself can, and should, be a nourishing and supportive experience.

Somatic psychotherapy is unique in that it addresses the underlying causes of suffering from trauma by working with the neurophysiology and neurobiology that created the symptoms in the first place. Unlike most other psychological modalities, we work together, directly, with the nervous system, including the autonomic nervous system. We also teach you how to do this for yourself.

SE is not re-traumatising.

 

Many people (quite reasonably) worry about having therapy because they don’t want to have to re-live or revisit traumatic experiences. Indeed, many talk-based therapies and psychology therapies can be re-traumatising.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the SE approach is that it does not re-traumatise. With SE you do not re-live trauma or terrible memories. We work with the way trauma is held in the body (the nervous system), and 'titrate' the treatment. You learn how to resolve the experiences - importantly - without having to re-experience them.

The “gift” of trauma.

Peter Levive speaks (somewhat controversially) of ‘the gift of trauma’ by which he means that people that have experienced adversity often have greater bandwidth that someone who has not. That is, our ability to feel states of expansion, sensitivity and joy are as great as our ability to feel stress, shock and contraction.

Once we resolve our trauma, we can therefore feel more range and joy than someone who has not had to deal with trauma. It is often said that ‘learned resilience’or ‘learned secure attachment’ is as or more substantial than having this in the first place, as it’s a conscious process that fully integrates in our experience (cognition) and in our nervous system.

In working with a good therapist, our healing journey becomes a rich and rewarding experience. We may even find a depth in ourselves, and in our appreciation of life, that others never experience.

The nervous system is much more resilient than you ever imagined possible. By working with a Somatic Experiencing (SE) practitioner you are ironing out ‘kinks’ you may not even (consciously) know were there.

This is why somatic practitioners sometimes speak of “the gift of trauma”, because trauma may be the catalyst for a level of healing that may otherwise never been sought out, or even dreamed of.

This is true for very major traumatic experiences, for serious conditions like PTSD, and CPTSD and for a lifetime of smaller traumas that may not seem significant in isolation but take a huge toll on daily experience — until they are effectively addressed and healed.

 

Somatic healing with Gina Bloom: on Zoom

 

Working with clients across Australia and globally counselling on Zoom, I am a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), trained directly through Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETI). 

 

My work integrates somatic healing with transpersonal psychotherapy, offering a depth of support that goes beyond symptom relief — towards lasting change at the level of the nervous system, the mind, and the whole person.

If you're ready to explore what somatic therapy can do for you, the best first step is to book a session. To make an appointment please contact me directly on 0404 093 865 or send an email enquiry.