How SE™ Works
Somatic Experiencing® works through the weaving of physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual layers of the experiences that constitute you.
Trauma creates fragmentation. Through a safe, intentional slowing down, SE™ helps you tune into your body’s rhythms and reactions. Along with the imagination, we can shift the physiologic patterns that have been created in response to particular experiences.
Ever wonder why you want (and know) you should change a behavior, but feel like you can’t?! Something inside drives you to action, despite your intellectual knowing. A cascade of physiologic process creates an internal pattern linked to behavior. Change comes as we offer presence to the “somatic expression”. By effecting change at this layer, we are free to create and tell ourselves a new story. See the map (graphic) for more about this process.
This approach opens up new neural (brain) networks or pathways and creates new physiologic patterns thereby connecting you to your inner resources, fostering resilience, restoring balance, and brings you a deeper understanding of yourself.
An explanation of the map:
Stimulus: anything that rouses activity or energy in someone;
A thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue (from google dictionary)
Sensation: is what happens in response to a stimulus: the hormones, neurotransmitters, chemical reactions; our physiologic processes.
Emotion: is physical sensation or somatic expression
Feeling: is a story that begins to emerge; the beginning of meaning
Reason: how we make sense out of what we notice
Meaning: a story we create that supports or validates our perspective or identity.
Example:
A loud noise (stimulus) evokes a chemical reaction (sensation) in my body that feels like butterflies in my stomach and tension all over (emotion) which I have related to as anxiety (feeling). I fear something bad is going to happen (reason) when I get anxious because it has in the past (meaning).
Transformation can occur when we pause at the level of emotion and accept the somatic expression of the physiologic response to the stimulus as just that; no other meaning tied to it. In that moment, we detach from the current story and allow a new story to emerge; one that's aligned with the TRUTH of who we are.