Somatic Experiencing: Healing Trauma Through the Body

The Insight That Changed Everything

In 1969, a young biophysicist and psychologist named Peter Levine was working with a client named Nancy. She suffered from severe anxiety, migraines, chronic pain, and agoraphobia. During a relaxation exercise, Nancy suddenly froze in terror, her legs locked rigid, her eyes wide. Levine, acting on instinct he could not yet explain, told her to imagine being chased by a tiger. Her legs began to tremble violently. Then they began to run — involuntary running movements on the therapy couch. Waves of shaking passed through her body. When it was over, Nancy’s symptoms began to resolve.

This session became the seed of Somatic Experiencing (SE), a body-oriented therapeutic approach that has since been validated by clinical research, applied in disaster zones worldwide, and fundamentally altered how we understand trauma. Levine published his foundational text, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma in 1997, followed by In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness in 2010.

The core insight: trauma is not in the event. It is in the nervous system.

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and founder of the Trauma Center, spent decades documenting what happens to the brain and body during and after traumatic experience. His 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma became one of the most important works in modern psychology.

Van der Kolk’s neuroimaging studies revealed that during traumatic recall, the brain’s language centers (particularly Broca’s area) go offline while the amygdala and insula — centers for threat detection and body sensation — become hyperactive. Traumatic memories are not stored as coherent stories. They are stored as fragments: a smell, a sound, a texture, a body sensation, an emotional charge without context. This is why talking about trauma does not necessarily heal it. The trauma lives in regions of the brain that do not understand words.

Van der Kolk’s research confirmed what Levine had discovered clinically: the body is not merely a container for psychological experience. It is the primary site where trauma is stored, maintained, and — crucially — where it can be resolved.

How Animals Shake It Off

Levine’s great contribution was observing what happens in nature. A gazelle chased by a cheetah enters full sympathetic activation — massive adrenaline, maximal heart rate, explosive muscular effort. If the gazelle escapes, something remarkable happens: it finds a safe spot and begins to tremble, shake, and make involuntary running movements. Its breathing shifts. Its body goes through visible waves of discharge. After several minutes, the gazelle stands, shakes once more, and returns to grazing. No PTSD. No hypervigilance. No nightmares.

This discharge process completes the survival response cycle. The enormous mobilization of energy — the fight-flight charge — is discharged through the body. The nervous system resets. The event is processed as “survived” rather than “still happening.”

Humans have the same biological discharge mechanism. Watch a child after a scare — the trembling, the crying, the shaking. But we have been socialized to suppress these responses. “Stop crying.” “Calm down.” “Be strong.” The prefrontal cortex overrides the body’s natural discharge process. The survival energy gets trapped. The nervous system never resets. The body continues to run the survival program, day after day, year after year, decades after the threat has passed.

Core Principles of Somatic Experiencing

The Felt Sense

Before Levine, philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago had identified something he called the felt sense — a holistic, bodily awareness of a situation or experience that is more than emotion, more than thought, more than sensation. It is the body’s knowing. Gendlin published Focusing in 1978, demonstrating that clients who made therapeutic progress were those who could access this felt sense — this vague, murky, hard-to-articulate body awareness — rather than those who merely analyzed their problems intellectually.

SE uses the felt sense as its primary therapeutic tool. The practitioner guides the client’s attention to internal body sensations — not emotions, not thoughts, not stories, but raw sensory experience. “What do you notice in your body right now?” “Where do you feel that?” “What is the quality of that sensation — does it have a shape, a temperature, a color, a movement?”

Pendulation

Pendulation is the natural rhythm between contraction and expansion, tension and release, activation and settling. In a healthy nervous system, this rhythm flows freely. In a traumatized nervous system, it gets stuck — either in chronic contraction (sympathetic dominance) or chronic collapse (dorsal vagal dominance).

SE works with pendulation by guiding the client’s attention back and forth between areas of distress (activation) and areas of resource (calm, neutral, or pleasant sensation). The practitioner might say: “You notice tightness in your chest. Now let your attention move to your feet on the floor. What do you notice there? Good. Now gently bring your attention back to the chest. Has anything changed?”

This oscillation teaches the nervous system that it can move between states — that activation does not have to become overwhelm, that it can come and go. Each cycle of pendulation discharges a small amount of the trapped survival energy and widens the window of tolerance.

Titration

If pendulation is the rhythm, titration is the dosing. The word comes from chemistry — the careful, drop-by-drop addition of a reagent. In SE, titration means approaching traumatic material in small, manageable doses rather than flooding the system with the full intensity of the trauma.

This is perhaps the most significant departure from cathartic approaches (primal scream, rebirthing, some forms of breathwork) that encourage full emotional discharge. Levine observed that re-traumatization is a real risk when the nervous system is flooded with more activation than it can process. The SE approach is slow, gentle, and titrated. A single session might process only one small fragment of a traumatic experience — a body sensation, a movement impulse, a fleeting image — and spend the remaining time helping the nervous system integrate that fragment.

Discharge

When trapped survival energy is contacted through the felt sense, pendulated through activation and resource, and titrated at a manageable dose, the body begins to discharge. Discharge can take many forms: trembling, shaking, heat, sweating, spontaneous deep breaths, yawning, stomach gurgling, emotional release (tears, laughter), involuntary movements (running, pushing, pulling), and changes in skin color (flushing or pallor as blood flow shifts).

These are not symptoms to be managed. They are signs of the nervous system completing its interrupted survival response. The practitioner’s role is to track these discharge signals, support their completion, and help the client stay present with the process rather than overriding it with cognitive control.

Trauma Vortex vs. Healing Vortex

Levine uses the metaphor of two vortexes. The trauma vortex is the pull of the traumatic experience — the constellation of sensations, emotions, images, and beliefs that organize around the unresolved event. Like a whirlpool, it pulls the person in, narrowing consciousness, amplifying threat, and re-activating the survival response. Flashbacks, panic attacks, dissociative episodes, and trauma reenactments are all expressions of the trauma vortex.

The healing vortex is the counter-force — the body’s innate drive toward health, regulation, and wholeness. It includes every resource the person has: areas of the body that feel calm, memories of safety, relationships that provide co-regulation, skills, strengths, and the fundamental biological orientation toward equilibrium. The healing vortex is always present, even when the trauma vortex seems overwhelming.

SE works by strengthening the healing vortex before approaching the trauma vortex. Resources are established first. The felt sense of safety, calm, and groundedness is anchored in the body. Only then does the practitioner gently direct attention toward the edges of the trauma vortex — not into its center, but toward its periphery, where the charge is manageable.

Completion of Thwarted Survival Responses

One of SE’s most powerful concepts is the completion of thwarted survival responses. In many traumatic events, the person’s body initiated a survival action — running, fighting, pushing away, turning the head, ducking — that was interrupted, overpowered, or suppressed. This incomplete action remains frozen in the body as a pattern of muscular tension, a postural distortion, or a movement impulse that never found expression.

A woman who was held down during an assault may carry chronic tension in her arms and shoulders — the pushing-away response that was never completed. A man who could not run from a car accident may have chronic tension in his legs and lower back — the running response that was thwarted. A child who could not scream during abuse may have chronic throat tension and difficulty speaking.

In SE, the practitioner tracks these incomplete responses and creates conditions for their completion. The client is guided to slow down the impulse, feel it fully, and allow the body to complete the movement. The arms push. The legs run. The voice sounds. The survival circuit completes. The nervous system receives the signal: the threat response worked. You survived. It is over.

This completion often produces dramatic shifts in chronic pain, postural holding, and emotional state. The body literally reorganizes around the new information that the event is finished.

SE vs. Talk Therapy

Traditional talk therapy — particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — works primarily with the prefrontal cortex, the newest part of the brain. It is excellent for restructuring thought patterns and developing coping strategies. But trauma, as van der Kolk demonstrated, is stored in subcortical structures — the brainstem, the limbic system, the body itself — that are largely inaccessible through verbal processing.

SE does not dismiss cognitive processing. It integrates it. But it begins where the trauma lives: in the body. The therapeutic sequence typically moves from body sensation to emotion to meaning, rather than from meaning to emotion to body — the reverse of talk therapy’s usual trajectory.

A meta-analysis by Payne, Levine, and Crane-Godreau published in Frontiers in Psychology (2015) reviewed the neurobiological evidence supporting SE and concluded that body-oriented approaches are uniquely suited to resolving trauma because they directly access the subcortical circuits where trauma is encoded.

A Practical SE Session Framework

A typical SE session (60-90 minutes) follows a general arc:

1. Orientation and Resourcing (10-15 min): The client is invited to orient to the room, notice the support of the chair, feel their feet on the floor. The practitioner helps establish or revisit resources — internal (a memory of safety, an image of strength) or external (the feeling of the chair, the sight of a tree outside the window).

2. Tracking the Felt Sense (15-20 min): The practitioner invites the client to notice internal sensations. “What are you aware of in your body right now?” Sensations are described in sensory terms: tight, warm, buzzing, heavy, open, constricted. No interpretation. No story.

3. Approaching the Edge (15-20 min): With resources established, the practitioner gently orients attention toward an area of activation. This might be a body sensation associated with the trauma, a fragment of memory, or a current stressor that carries the charge of the past. Titration ensures the dose is manageable.

4. Pendulation and Discharge (15-20 min): The practitioner guides attention between activation and resource. As the nervous system oscillates, discharge signs emerge: trembling, breath shifts, heat, emotional release. The practitioner tracks and supports.

5. Integration and Settling (10-15 min): The session closes with time for the nervous system to settle. The client is guided to notice changes in body sensation, to take in any sense of relief, spaciousness, or calm. The practitioner may ask: “How does your body feel now compared to the beginning of the session?”

This framework is not rigid. SE is an art as much as a science, and experienced practitioners follow the client’s process rather than imposing a protocol.

The Living Body as Healer

What Somatic Experiencing reveals is that the body is not a passive repository of damage. It is an intelligent, self-organizing system with an innate capacity for healing. The same nervous system that trapped the trauma has the biological machinery to release it. The trembling is not pathology — it is medicine. The tears are not weakness — they are discharge. The involuntary movements are not random — they are the body completing what it started.

The Jaguar of Villoldo’s Medicine Wheel stalks through the body’s frozen landscapes, not with force but with presence. She does not fight the trauma. She tracks it, approaches it with the precision of a hunter, and creates the conditions for its transformation. SE is Jaguar medicine expressed in clinical form — the art of moving through the darkness of the body’s stored survival responses and emerging into the light of full aliveness.

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What survival response is your body still trying to complete?