What is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a safe and naturalistic approach and a potent psychobiological method for resolving trauma symptoms and relieving chronic stress and anxiety. This approach helps to release traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD that may have developed from dental procedures. It uses your own natural ability to connect with the underlying health of your nervous system. SE helps restores self-regulation and returns a sense of aliveness, relaxation and wholeness to traumatized individuals who have had these precious gifts taken away.

Somatic Experiencing® is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine, resulting from his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. It is based on the science that human beings have an innate ability to overcome effects of trauma and stress, however, when this ability is thwarted by overwhelming events and states of helplessness (we become “stuck” in the fight, flight, freeze, or collapse responses). This response creates the symptoms of trauma. Dental anxiety and phobia is an example of this trauma response.

Change and healing happens when the body’s own physiology is used in the process of working with these traumatic symptoms. It is important the symptoms are worked within a safe, gentle, contained way or you will be spun back into the vortex of trauma and there will be no change. This is the goal of individual sessions.

The symptoms of trauma are real, but are not always recognized as this. The field of somatic (body) focused trauma work is relatively new and there maybe times when even well-trained health care professional just can’t understand or relieve your suffering. 

If you are seeking help with overwhelming, unexplained, symptoms left over from traumatic or overwhelming traumatic dental experiences, please allow me to introduce a cutting edge approach that provides a gentle path back to wholeness.

How SE Works

Somatic Experiencing® facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. SE does not require the traumatized person to re-tell or re-live the traumatic event. Instead, it offers the opportunity to engage, complete and resolve (in a slow and supported way) the body’s instinctual fight, flight, freeze, and collapse responses. Individuals locked in anxiety or rage then relax into a growing sense of peace and safety. Those who are stuck will gradually find their feelings of hopelessness and numbness transformed into empowerment, triumph, and mastery. SE utilizes corrective bodily experiences that counter those of fear and helplessness. This resets the nervous system, restores inner balance, enhances resilience to stress, and increases people’s vitality, equanimity, and capacity to actively engage in life.