{"id":176,"date":"2010-03-14T15:59:31","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T15:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?page_id=176"},"modified":"2015-01-26T13:10:10","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T18:10:10","slug":"somatic-experiencing","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?page_id=176","title":{"rendered":"Somatic Experiencing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somatic Experiencing<\/a> is a method for healing trauma that was developed by Peter Levine, after observing animals in the wild.\u00a0 This is described in his book Waking the Tiger<\/a>.\u00a0 Trauma happens because an organism\u2019s ability to cope with an experience is overwhelmed.\u00a0 Instead of being processed into an ordinary memory, the event seems to be broken into pieces, and if some reminder of the event triggers the organism, it is then literally back in the past.\u00a0 \u201cFlashbacks\u201d are not just an image of the event, they are an actual reliving.\u00a0 Usually the trauma survivor will have some of the information, but not all.\u00a0 She may remember the sight, but not have any feelings about it, or she may be overwhelmed by emotion which seems to come out of nowhere.<\/p>\n

The word \u201ctrauma\u201d is badly misused in our culture.\u00a0 It\u2019s generally seen as being in the event \u2014 people would agree that a tornado or a car accident was traumatic but not more everyday things.\u00a0 Or people will say \u201cI had a traumatic day\u201d when what they had was a very stressful day.\u00a0 Trauma is something that happens in the nervous system of an organism when it meets an event, and its ability to cope with the event is overwhelmed.\u00a0 Two things that contribute to trauma are helplessness (either real or perceived) and the threat of death (either real or perceived).\u00a0 Peter Levine says that an infant can be traumatized by being left alone in a cold room.\u00a0 The infant is truly helpless, and its ability to regulate its body temperature may not be developed enough yet, and if the situation isn\u2019t changed by an outside agency, the infant might well die.<\/p>\n

Peter Levine\u2019s theory is that trauma happens when an organism\u2019s physiology detects a death threat, and responds by gearing up for fighting or fleeing.\u00a0 If the creature can either fight or flee it uses up the energy that has been mobilized, but if it can neither fight nor flee, instinct has a default plan which is freeze.\u00a0 This is what the possum does to avoid being eaten by a predator who thinks it\u2019s dead and is not interested in eating dead meat.\u00a0 The coyote walks away, and the possum comes out of freeze.\u00a0 What happens to all the energy that was stored in the body?\u00a0 The possum shakes it off, before it walks away.\u00a0 The bear that has been chased and shot with a tranquillizing dart will start making running motions as it comes out from under the anesthetic.\u00a0 The body knows what it needs to do to discharge the energy.\u00a0 What happens to a child who is abused by its parents?\u00a0 Neither fighting nor fleeing is possible, and the necessary shaking may be stopped by a parent who says \u201cI didn\u2019t hurt you. Stop that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what trauma happened to me.\u00a0 Fortunately I don\u2019t need to know in order to heal.\u00a0 I deduce from the available evidence that what happened was I was left alone too much when I was an infant. Imagine an infant lying in her crib and she\u2019s hungry.\u00a0 She cries as loudly as she can.\u00a0 Crying represents her entire repertoire of ways to ask for help.\u00a0 She\u2019s so young that she doesn\u2019t yet have \u201cobject constancy\u201d \u2014 for the baby, if mother is out of sight, mother doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 The truth is that this baby is completely helpless.\u00a0 If no one brings her food, she will die.\u00a0 The moment that her reptilian brain stem concludes that she will die, she enters the realm of trauma.\u00a0\u00a0 I can tell you what that baby feels like: she feels terrified, some nameless doom is rolling toward her (she has no cognitive understanding of death) and she feels totally despairing because there\u2019s absolutely nothing she can do to change it.\u00a0 These feelings will continue through her life as recurring episodes of depression and terror.<\/p>\n

I did part of the training to be a Somatic Experiencing Practioner, but when I got very sick for the second weekend in a row, I decided my body was telling me that this was not right for me at this time.\u00a0 But I learned a lot about the process which has been very helpful in my own healing.\u00a0 In the training they taught us that the body doesn\u2019t know the difference between a reality and a thought or an image. (The evidence for this is brain scans while someone is reading the story of their automobile accident.) If you tell the story of your trauma, you may be retraumatizing yourself.<\/p>\n

In Somatic Experiencing, the first step is to get \u201cresourced.\u201d A resource is anything that helps you feel more calm, centered and grounded.\u00a0 Sometimes a resource can be a person or a place, or even an imaginary person or place.\u00a0 What makes something a resource is whether or not it makes you more comfortable.\u00a0 A resource can also be a place in your body that\u2019s more comfortable.\u00a0 For me it\u2019s often feeling my weight in the chair. Once you are fully resourced, you are allowed to look at one piece of your trauma story.\u00a0 Example: “When did you first know the car was going to hit you?\u201d If your heart starts to pound or you get an adrenaline rush, you stop right there and go back to your resource.\u00a0 Using a technique called \u201cpendulating\u201d the practitioner guides you between the trauma and the resource until the trauma loses its charge.\u00a0 The idea is to work with tiny manageable bits of what happened.\u00a0 It’s counterproductive to tackle the whole thing at once, that\u2019s how you got traumatized in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somatic Experiencing is a method for healing trauma that was developed by Peter Levine, after observing animals in the wild.\u00a0 This is described in his book Waking the Tiger.\u00a0 Trauma happens because an organism\u2019s ability to cope with an experience … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-176","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}