Life Coaching
Emotional Integration
Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing Therapy
1.5 hours, $150
Sessions done in person or online
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Somatic experiencing therapy is a type of alternative therapy geared towards helping people find healing from Trauma.
Created by Peter Levine,PhD. this therapy works on the principle that trauma gets trapped in the body, leading to some of the symptoms people with PTSD or people who have experienced trauma might experience. Through this method, practitioners work on releasing this stress from the body.
Many people who have experienced trauma, especially those who have experienced physical trauma such as domestic violence or sexual assault, can dissociate or disconnect from their bodies.
Somatic experiencing helps them have an increased sense of awareness of their internal experience (interoceptive, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic sensations).
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Be prepared for your practitioner to ask you about your trauma history. Remember, this is your therapy, so you can only answer as much as you feel comfortable with. A good practitioner should recognize and respect that and work with you to feel safe as you disclose more.
What Does a Session Look Like?
First, the practitioner or therapist will do a pre-interview to learn about your trauma and overall health history and answer any questions about your expectations. They will then ask questions centered around assessing how your body is responding to your trauma and stress.
The therapeutic process will involve facilitating states of stress triggered by the trauma and sensations of safety and calm. This process of going back and forth between these states is called pendulation, and it focuses on recognizing these sensations. Trauma can interfere with our ability to recognize our internal state, and this technique helps us reconnect with ourselves and what’s going on in our bodies.
This is practiced in the safety of your therapy so that you become familiar with these sensations and once learned you will hopefully be able to down-regulate on your own. Because of how our bodies hold and express trauma primitively, your therapist may see small movements that indicate your body moving into flight mode. You will learn to safely ride these somatic experiences out as you begin to heal.
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Somatic experiencing practitioners use a framework known as SIBAM (Sensation, Imagery, Behavior, Affect, and Meaning) to help clients incorporate their bodies in processing trauma.
Typically, most therapy uses our cognitive skills to access our memories or traumas via “top down” methods. However, somatic experiencing uses a “bottom up” approach, which starts with bodily sensations before returning to our thoughts.
Sensation: You may not be used to sitting with the sensations that are constantly coursing through your body, or you may not have previously realized how they were linked with your emotions. You will begin with simply noting what you are feeling in your body.
Imagery: This part of the framework uses guided imagery (where the practitioner leads you through imagining a scene while you listen) or interactive guided imagery. The latter is an ongoing conversation between you and the practitioner where you share what’s coming up as you are being led through this exercise.
Behavior: While much of this therapy consists of you reporting your internal experiences, the behavior part of Levine's model involves the therapist observing your behavioral responses, such as your body language or posture.
Affect: This is how you display your emotions to the outside world, such as through your word choices, tone, and speed.
Meaning: Finally, this part of the model looks at how you perceive the therapy and what your experiences mean to you.
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Somatic experiencing therapy may be helpful with aspects of:
Trauma
Anxiety
Grief
Substance use disorders
PTSD
Chronic Pain
The trauma that is held within the body may lead to emotional dysregulation. It is believed that somatic experiencing therapy works by releasing the trauma that becomes “trapped” in the body. One aspect of this dysregulation is known as the “freeze” response; our body’s primitive defense against danger. This response would activate if someone were being chased by a tiger.
Unlike the "fight or flight” response that takes place in response to an acute threat, which causes the sympathetic nervous system to increase heart rate, breathing, and focus, the "freeze" response can cause the opposite.
The freeze response in the human body is akin to an animal “playing dead.”
It is said that the body doesn’t know how to distinguish physical trauma from mental trauma. If the danger is life-threatening, like that tiger, you may be able to physically shake off that fear once the tiger is no longer around. With emotional trauma, however, the brain can get stuck believing that you are still in a state of danger.
The freeze response may manifest in both cognitive and physical symptoms such as:
Cognitive Symptoms
Confusion
Detachment
Difficulty concentrating
Physical Symptoms
Difficulty moving
Slowed breath
Lower heart rate
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While not much research has been published on somatic experiencing, one study, a randomized controlled trial, showed that 44% of the participants lost the diagnosis of PTSD.
One study looked at the efficacy of somatic experiencing interventions following a 2004 tsunami in India. While there was no control group, 90% of the 150 participants in one study reported either no symptoms or a reduction in symptoms at an eight-month follow-up interval following a single 75-minute session.
Another non-controlled intervention study followed 53 participants who received one to two sessions of treatment a month after a tsunami and were evaluated three to five days post-treatment and a year later. After the first session, 67% of participants reported a full or partial reduction in symptoms. When evaluated a year later, 90% of these people had sustained improvement in that time period.
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While somatic experiencing therapy does not involve a complete retelling and processing of your past trauma like some other trauma therapies might, you will be asked to bring up some of these painful memories. Doing so may result in you feeling “activated” or feeling a high level of energetic arousal in your body. This may also be known as feeling triggered
This may feel uncomfortable, but that is the point. Before reaching this stage, your therapist will work with you on "resourcing," or finding tools that will help you self-sooth when you are feeling emotionally overloaded so that you can handle working with these memories when they come up in therapy.
Healing the Emotional Body through Self-Realization
1.5 hours, $150
Sessions done in person or online
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This is a formula for allowing our essential nature of Love, peace, and happiness to be revealed and accessed through the non-dual teaching of the “Direct Path”. Through this process deep rooted misaligned belief systems, painful emotions, and trauma patterns are encouraged to surface into the light of pure awareness to be embraced, dissolved, and therefore healed. We use exploration processes of feeling into the sensations produced by emotions in the body and offer them into the light of awareness. This courageous process empowers you with tools to stay with your emotions and sensations and guide them into the light of your radiant center that cannot be moved, changed, influenced, or harmed by your experience. This process does not focus on the story surrounding your trauma, but the sensations of the nervous system produced by your trauma.
It faces these painful emotions and subsequent somatic sensations with complete focus, absolute gentleness, and complete respect. You will find freedom to stay with these sensations and emotions in loving presence instead of trying to resist them, cover them up, distract yourself from them, or numb yourself to them. Resistance is the source of suffering and non-resistance, or complete acceptance, is the source of peace. Most of us have been taught to live our lives using coping mechanisms to resist these painful feelings. Often times these neurological patterns of trauma were laid down in our nervous system when we were soft, open and receptive children or even infants and we have spent our entire life in a subconscious feedback loop of reactivity as our nervous system desperately tries to resolve these cycles and align itself with peace and regulation.
The way out of suffering is as counter intuitive as facing a wild animal and standing your ground instead of running away. You must turn around and face, embrace, and stand with yourself in the light of your own true nature and allow this pain that is trapped in the body-mind to be permeated through and through by turning your awareness toward your pain in complete surrender. This process takes time, courage, practice and commitment. But it is the surest and most direct way to experience true emotional freedom.
Our essential nature is Love, Peace, Happiness, Fulfillment, Beauty, and Truth. When we are able to relax our focus from our current experience and instead become focused on what is aware of this experience, our inherent peace is cleared from the obstructions of experience and stands revealed to us.
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Most people believe and feel that they're essential self, that is pure awareness, is identified with the content of experience, which are thoughts feelings and sensations. Consequently we believe and feel that are being shares the qualities and limitations of our thoughts feelings and sensations. It is this mixture of ourself, pure awareness, and the content of our experience with a mind and the body that makes us believe and feel that I, awareness, am temporary, finite, limited, and separate. So the person that most people believe and feel themselves to be (We will call this the "separate self") is a mixture of their essential self plus their thoughts feelings and sensations.
So the first step that we must take is to disentangle ourself from the contents of experience. We do this by separating ourself from everything that is not essential to us. And this happens by simply realizing that it is not I, the body-mind that is aware of the world, it is I, awareness that is aware of this body-mind and the world. The body and the mind, this mixture of thoughts images feeling sensations and perceptions, is not itself aware, It is something that we, standing as awareness, are aware of. The body-mind is an object of experience, It is not the subject of experience. The body-mind is known, it does not do the knowing. Knowing belongs to awareness alone.
The separate self is created by two essential feelings/thoughts.
a sense of lack or feeling incomplete
a fear of death, or a feeling of separation. a fear that it shares the same limitations and instabilities of the body-mind.That is, that ourself is finite, temporary, limited, separate.
When You fear being incomplete You have your own coping mechanisms to relieve the pain of the feeling of emptiness, or not having enough or being enough.
When you fear death or separation, you have your own coping mechanisms to ease this pain of feeling separate, alone, isolated, limited, insignificant, a lack of belonging, and the subsequent feeling of powerlessness that you can be overpowered, engulfed by something bigger than you.
These coping mechanisms turn into deep subconscious habits, tendencies, addictions, desires, compulsions, and impulses to either move towards something that feels like relief, or to move away from where you believe the pain originates.
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We will identify what your unique addictions are to relieve these two mechanisms of the separate self.
And then work directly with these behavioral patterns, habits, and conditioning in order to bring the light of awareness, or the truth of your being to light in the midst of these impulses and compulsions.
It's important to note that The residue of past trauma can either be completely cleared from your body mind energy field, or it may remain. The point is thst Even if the scars and the emotional handicaps remain,The power that it has over you dissolves. You can think about it like someone who is able to adapt their life and thrive after an injury that has left them with a permanent limp.
Our goal in the sessions is to feel into and get to know our true nature introducing the inherent love, fulfillment, peace, and happiness into the emotional pain and subsequent behaviors and reactivity that have been placed by the body-mind in order to protect itself. The reactivity will be diminished.
We then replace the reactivity with healthy behavioral patterns and choices that reflect the new understanding of your true nature that are driven by love, understanding, and expressions of fulfillment instead of trying to fulfill a sense of lack and satisfy feelings of separation.
The next step is to visualize a life that contains all that you need in order to support yourself, and create structure that honors your particular unique needs around the residue of the things that have happened to you that have created the emotional, mental, and physical injuries.
You will emerge with tools to guide you into peace and fulfillment, and a life plan with actionable steps that creates a foundation of stability, security, structure, community, support, self care routines, and ways of meeting your needs that are mutually supportive to yourself and to all those with whom you share your being.