What is Somatic Experiencing?

A Bottom-Up Approach to Trauma Healing

Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a body-based form of therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice. It was developed to help people heal from trauma, shock, and chronic stress. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which usually works from the “top down” by starting with thoughts and trying to influence the body and nervous system, SE works “bottom up,” beginning with the body in order to influence our thoughts and mental health.

Where SE is Practiced

SE is used in many professional settings, including psychotherapy, bodywork, medicine, coaching, and physical therapy. Sessions vary depending on the practitioner’s scope of practice. Some SE work is done through dialogue alone, while others may incorporate touch as part of the process.

The Meaning of “Somatic Experiencing”

“Somatic” means related to the body and “Experiencing” means paying attention to what is happening in the present moment. In SE, this means bringing awareness to the body’s experience in the present moment. In a way, SE is a kind of a mindfulness process where we're training our attention to stay in the here and now and to become aware of what's happening in our body’s experience as well as our thoughts, emotions, and mental images that might come through. By gently welcoming all of these layers of experience, SE helps create a more coherent and integrated healing process—one that honors both the mind and body. SE can support the transformation of traumatic impacts and often opens the door to post-traumatic growth, allowing people to move toward a fuller, more grounded sense of themselves.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Healing Approaches

There are many approaches to healing that use a top-down inhibitory strategy, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While these cognitively based or behavioral interventions can be very helpful, from the perspective of SE, long-term resolution of trauma also requires the integration of bottom-up processing.

One reason that somatic approaches are helpful for healing trauma is because trauma doesn’t live in the thinking part of the brain, the neocortex, where our decision-making and reasoning happen. It’s held in the deeper, more primitive parts of the brain, especially the brainstem.

The brainstem is at the core of how we experience life. It provides the foundation for all of our thinking, feeling, and behavior. If the brainstem, or the way it communicates with the rest of the body, becomes disorganized, it can limit how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. As Bessel van der Kolk, one of the leading voices in trauma research, has bluntly said: “If you’re using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to treat trauma, you’re working with the wrong part of the brain.” We can't just think our way out of trauma.

The Autonomic Nervous System and Trauma

In SE and other somatic therapies, we work with the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which travels throughout the body and contacts all of our organs and glands. When our ANS is regulated—meaning the brainstem is sending out appropriate signals to the body and receiving coherent feedback about our bodily state from the body through afferent pathways—our system naturally provides the optimal level of arousal to help us thrive in whatever environment we’re currently in. A regulated nervous system is flexible, able to adjust moment by moment in ways that match the current situation. It can upregulate to give us energy when we want to exercise or play, downregulate during a calm interaction with someone we care about, and settle into even lower levels of arousal when we’re preparing for sleep or meditation.

When our nervous system becomes dysregulated through trauma or chronic stress, it loses the ability to respond to each moment with flexibility and coherence. The brainstem and autonomic nervous system can become disorganized, leaving us unable to access the optimal level of arousal for what’s happening in the present. Sometimes this shows up as being stuck on “ON,” with high-energy symptoms such as anxiety, panic, frustration, anger, or rage. Other times, it looks like being stuck on “OFF,” with low-energy symptoms like depression, chronic fatigue, or autoimmune issues. For many people, the experience is a back-and-forth between these two extremes—moving from stuck on “ON” to stuck on “OFF” and back again.

Types of Trauma SE Can Address

Somatic Experiencing can be helpful for a wide range of experiences, including:

  • Shock trauma: car accidents, injuries, falls, natural disasters, assaults

  • Developmental trauma: early childhood neglect, misattunement, or abuse; trauma occurring in utero or during/after birth

  • Medical trauma: surgical procedures, difficult births, chronic illness

  • Intergenerational and cultural trauma: the ongoing impact of oppression, racism, war, or displacement

  • Chronic stress: living in unpredictable or unsafe environments, even without a single “big” event

How SE works

Stabilization


In SE, we use specific interventions to support a bottom-up shift toward greater regulation and resilience. One of the first ways we do this is by inviting people to connect with their environment through the five senses, a process referred to as exploratory orienting. Many people come to therapy expecting the first step to be building more insight, but in SE, one of the most helpful first steps is actually developing more outsight. By orienting ourselves to the environment, we bring balance back to our awareness (balance between attention inward and attention outward). Using our visual, auditory, and tactile senses, we begin to notice what is actually around us—and for our nervous system, that simple act of orienting to the present moment can be deeply stabilizing.

Completing Protective Responses

One of Peter Levine’s most powerful insights came from observing animals in the wild while doing research at Berkeley in the late 1960s and 70s. He noticed that even though wild animals regularly face life-threatening situations, they almost never become traumatized. This led him to ask: Why do animals in the wild, though routinely threatened, rarely become traumatized—while humans so often do?

What he found was that after a chase or near-death encounter, a wild animal will often shake, tremble, or go through visible waves of discharge. These involuntary processes allow the survival energy that built up in the body to move through, so the nervous system can reset and return to balance. When fight or flight isn’t possible, animals may go into a freeze or collapse response. But once the danger has passed, they naturally come out of that state by trembling or releasing energy, which completes the threat response cycle and prevents trauma from being stored in their system.

Humans, on the other hand, often don’t allow these natural responses. From a young age, many of us are told to “calm down,” “stop crying,” or “hold it together.” We become scared of the sensations and survival energy moving through our body so we shut it down. Over time, this creates what SE calls incomplete protective responses.  Instead of the body finishing a protective response—like running away, fighting back, getting support, or releasing through tears—the survival energy gets stuck in our body. This can leave the nervous system chronically dysregulated, with the body still carrying the imprint of past events as if they never ended.

In SE, the practitioner gently guides the client to track their sensations, which can bring access to implicit memories—sometimes called ‘body memories.’ The practitioner may guide the client to complete incomplete protective responses that arise from implicit memory. Once the body is able to finish what was left incomplete, the nervous system can settle and return to its natural rhythm of regulation. At that point, both body and psyche can finally leave the event in the past where it belongs.

Pendulation

Peter Levine, the founder of SE, coined the term pendulation, which is now used widely in somatic and other healing approaches. Pendulation refers to the natural movement of our attention back and forth between what he called the trauma vortex and the counter vortex.

These two poles can be thought of simply as “things I don’t like” and “things I do like.” The trauma vortex includes our experiences of challenge, places in the body where there is tension or pain, and our negative thoughts. The counter vortex includes experiences of pleasure, comfort, and ease as well as places in the body that feel easier to be with and more positive thoughts and memories.

In trauma healing, it’s essential to be able to move between these two poles. In SE, one of the first steps is helping people strengthen their counter vortex. We do this by building the capacity to notice and stay with healthy, non-addictive forms of pleasure—experiences that feel good and bring a sense of wholeness or ease. We start by building up the counter vortex instead of diving straight into the trauma vortex by cataloging everything that feels bad and what isn't working.

When we bring attention to the pleasant aspects of our experience, it creates a sense of ease and flow in our body that helps the nervous system regulate. From there, we can begin to work through traumatic experiences gradually, one small piece at a time. This approach allows clients to heal from trauma in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the nervous system in the process.

Titration

A key principle in SE is titration. Titration means working with trauma in very small pieces rather than all at once. Instead of diving into the full intensity of a memory or sensation, or retelling the whole story, the practitioner helps the client touch into a small part of it. The practitioner will guide the client to experience a manageable dose of activation and then allow time and space for the nervous system to settle before continuing onto the next piece. By approaching trauma in small doses, the nervous system has the chance to process and integrate the experience without becoming overwhelmed or retraumatized. Titration also helps keep the client within their “window of tolerance,” ultimately allowing the work to be integrated in a way that is sustainable.



SIBAM

In SE, we track the body’s experience through five channels that Peter Levine describes using the acronym SIBAM:

S – Sensation: raw physical sensations in the body (tightness, tingling, warmth, etc.)

I – Image: mental images, pictures, or flashes that arise spontaneously

B – Behavior: observable actions, impulses, or body movements

A – Affect: emotions and feelings (fear, anger, sadness, joy, etc.)

M – Meaning: the personal narrative, beliefs, or story we give to the experience

This means we’re paying attention to sensations, emotions, thoughts, and mental images that arise, while the practitioner also observes the client’s posture, gestures, impulses to move, and quality of their voice.

The Self-Regulating Capacity of the Body

At its core, SE is about collaborating with the nervous system’s innate self-regulatory capacity. Trauma healing isn’t just about a practitioner offering interventions and techniques to the client, though sometimes that is part of the process. The central focus of SE is creating the conditions that allow the body to do what it’s naturally designed to do: complete and integrate overwhelming experiences; move through activation, and return to settling.

Peter Levine emphasizes that within every human organism lies an intrinsic ability to heal. SE helps us reclaim that capacity for self-healing, reconnect with the body, and restore regulation. SE can feel like a return to being fully human, allowing us to reconnect with our animal biology and shake off the accumulated influences of culture and conditioning so the body can do what it was naturally designed to do.

For many people, SE can help reduce symptoms of PTSD and chronic stress. Even when symptoms remain, it often changes how we relate to them—making symptoms feel less overwhelming and easier to live with. Beyond symptom relief, many notice shifts such as feeling more connected to themselves, to others, to nature, and to their environment. SE can also support the restoration of healthy aggression and healthy boundaries, a greater ability to feel “safe enough” more often, the capacity to experience moments of rest and relaxation, and more resilience in meeting the ups and downs of life.


How to Find a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner

If you’re interested in trying SE, there are a few ways to find a qualified practitioner:

The SE Directory: The official Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Directory lists practitioners worldwide. Keep in mind this directory only includes members who maintain a paid membership, so not all SE practitioners are included here.

Google search in your area: You can often find SE practitioners by searching for “Somatic Experiencing” in your area. Look for someone who has the credential SEP (“Somatic Experiencing Practitioner”). This means they’ve completed the full three-year professional training and met all requirements for certification.

Co-Regulating Touch Directory: If you’re specifically interested in touch-based somatic work, you can also search the Co-Regulating Touch Directory, which lists somatic practitioners who have studied with Kathy Kain or Stephen Terrell, authors of Nurturing Resilience, in their respective touch-based modalities.

About the Author

Audrey Burke, LMBT NC #22197, SEP, CYT-200

Audrey Burke, owner of Restorative Presence, is a licensed massage and bodywork therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner based in Durham, NC. She specializes in trauma-informed somatic work, including Somatic Experiencing® and Transforming Touch®, with a focus on supporting people healing from developmental trauma, shock trauma, and chronic nervous system dysregulation.

Disclaimer: This blog is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical or psychological advice.