In somatic therapy, the body is the starting point to achieve healing. This form of therapy cultivates an awareness of bodily sensations, and teaches people to feel safe in their bodies while exploring thoughts, emotions, and memories.
—Maureen Salamon, Harvard Women's Health Watch
What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Do you have unresolved chronic pain? Do you feel like talk therapy alone has not been fully effective? Somatic Experiencing® (SE) aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies and nervous systems. Trauma, from an SE lens, is focused on how it shows up in the nervous system and how that dysregulation impacts life. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and become more resilient. It is a body-oriented therapeutic model based on a multidisciplinary intersection of bodywork and talk therapy.
Read more about about Somatic Experiencing®
How does Somatic Experiencing® differ from talk therapies?
Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can impair, sometimes seriously, a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, epigenetics, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. Typical talk therapies engage only the mind, not the body, encouraging people to become aware of disturbing thoughts and behavior patterns and work to change them. But in Somatic Experiencing therapy, the body is the starting point to achieve healing. This form of therapy cultivates an awareness of bodily sensations and teaches people to feel safe in their bodies while exploring thoughts, emotions, and memories.