Understanding Somatic Embodied Stress
Unwinding & Releasing Stress Patterns, Anxiety, Unresolved Trauma, And PTSD To Living A More Grounded Life.
Do you find yourself frozen/stuck or in repetitive unproductive patterns?
Be a creative partner in your life versus living as a reactive participant.
Developing the tools and insight that unwind physiological survival patterns that do not serve us.
Somatic Experiencing is a non-evasive and gentle approach to unwinding the nervous system.
Utilizing a Mindful Somatic Approach to discharge overwhelming stress patterns and PTSD. We not only release distressing physical patterns, we also unwind the emotional and psychological habits we've clung to that keep us stuck in old looping patterns.
Embodied healing opens us to allow in self-kindness and compassion practices that unlock our heart and mind to new ways of processing and thinking.
Release:
Depression – Tension – Panic – Grief – Anxiety – Muscle Fatigue
Abandonment & Betrayal – Childhood Trauma – ADD – PTSD
IBS – And/or other reoccurring chronic health symptoms.
Memory, Trauma & Healing by Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. Founder of Somatic Experiencing.
“Trauma is fundamentally a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when our full neuromuscular and metabolic machinery prepares us to fight or flee, muscles throughout the entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high-energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions and discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations, this energy becomes fixated into specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. Afferent feedback to the brain stem generated from these incomplete neuromuscular/ autonomic responses maintains a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word. They have become fixated in an aroused state. It is difficult (if not impossible) to function normally under these circumstances.”
~CHANGE CAN HAPPEN NATURALLY!~
How does SE/Somatic Experiencing® differ from other therapeutic modalities?
SE employs awareness of body sensation to help people “renegotiate” and heal rather than re-live or re-enact trauma.
SE’s guidance of the bodily “felt sense,” allows the highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.
SE “titrates” experience, rather than evoking catharsis – which can overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the organism.
SE helps eliminate pitfalls of re-traumatization and the spurious generation of “false memories”.
Somatic Experiencing gives you the tools that allow your body to slowly and safely discharge uncompleted survival energies.
If a human cannot fight or flee…we can go into a freeze response.
If a wild animal goes into a freeze response and survives an attack…afterwards it will begin shaking.
For an animal living in nature on survival instinct of fight and flight, this shaking out after a survival event is normal and what’s needed.
Healthy nervous system moving with life's ups and downs.
Over and Under Activated Nervous System
Traumatic experiences can produce feelings of anxiety, depression, despair, hopelessness, reoccurring anger, self-blame, guilt, and shame, as well as sexual dysfunction, compulsive or aggressive behaviors, sleep disorders, and concentration problems.
Long-held stress and repetitive trauma responses are specific defensive bodily reactions that people initially mobilize in order to protect themselves. This reaction can live on as a belief that it protects them from feeling the totality of their horror, helplessness, or pain.
Traditionally, therapies have attempted to change perceptions of the world by means of reason and insight, with conditioning and behavior modification, and with drugs and medications. However, perceptions can remain fundamentally unchanged until the internal physical experience of the body changes. Even after physical injury, accidents, rape or assault, emotional or physical abuse, illness, surgery, pre & perinatal trauma, abandonment, and death of a loved one people can learn to have new bodily experiences and then come to heal and accept what has happened and create new lives and new communities.
If we are unable to move out long held stress anxieties or trauma, the cognitive brain will create a story in order to make sense of the incident. These experiences then become trapped within the nervous system and muscle tissue of the body. This is where many symptoms, syndromes, and maladies begin to take place.
As an experiential body, we experience both “little traumas” and “Big Traumas” in our life.
Our brain may not differentiate between these two and we become stuck. If the nervous system becomes stuck on high (over-coupled), we remain highly activated. The nervous system will seek out ways to re-create highly activated energy or drama. The individual may not feel safe if not in physical motion or the mind is unable to stay highly activated. We can develop false “belief systems” about ourselves and others from the need for this high activation.
If we are stuck on low with no energy (under-coupled), any type of activation can feel overwhelming. Again our “belief systems” are formed from this lack of energy. Our mind has an “unhealthy desire of needing” to make sense of our experience, even if it stays trapped in a vortex of pain and suffering.
Then we have the issue of being stuck on both…High energies wear us down with the body becoming overdosed on cortisol and adrenaline. With shut-down, there is no energy left. A yo-yo effect on our nervous system.
“… re-living trauma often occurs in the form of physical sensations that precipitate emotions of terror and helplessness. Learning how to manage and release these physical sensations from trauma-based emotions is an essential aspect of the effective treatment of PTSD.” ~ Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Noted Trauma Authority and Author.
