What Is Somatic Experiencing?

How the Nervous System Stores Childhood Trauma...

(and how Somatic Experiencing Helps You Let it Go)

Trauma isn't just what happened.

It’s how the body responded when it happened and how it kept carrying it long after the moment passed. It's the years you held that particular feeling or experience in your nervous system.

 And if you had childhood trauma, it's probably woven so tightly into your coping. mechanisms, what you think is your personality & how you move in the world.

It shows up as....

• Tightness in your chest when someone raises their voice.

• Feeling like you're foggy in the middle of a conversation.

• Exhaustion after saying “no” or hanging out with certain people

• Being startled or on edge really easily
• People Pleasing & monitoring how people are feeling & if they are happy
• Difficulty trusting others and new experiences or certain situations
• Feeling unsafe, even when you know you are logically
• Being hard on yourself & having a harsh inner critic
• Chronic pain or health issues... especially auto-immune

These aren’t overreactions or overthinking.
They’re signs from your nervous system that it is still carrying unfinished survival energy from the past.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a healing modality designed to gently help your nervous system "finish" processing the experiences it got stuck in from your past. These are the moments where you didn't have the support you needed, you were overwhelmed, unsafe, didn't know how to process what you were going through or had to pretend you were ok to get through it.  

Those experiences are still lingering in your body and build up over time into physical pain & issues, emotional pain and patterns that hold you back or hurt you & the mental loop we get stuck in when we can't seem to "move on."

 It Matters because... Trauma Lives in your Body, Not Just your Mind

Traditional talk therapy helps us understand our experiences.
But trauma doesn’t just sit in memory, it stays in muscle tension, breathing patterns, body posture, and your nervous system. 

When as a child you experience overwhelming events... neglect, emotional volatility, abuse, or even subtle, chronic stress, your system moved into survival modes like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. 

But if there’s no safe way to process and complete those responses, the survival energy stays trapped in the body. 

It doesn’t go away. It simply goes underground — and resurfaces as anxiety, shutdown, reactivity, or chronic fatigue.

 What Is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing, is a trauma healing modality that allows us to support your nervous system in releasing those moments of survival mode that are still stuck in the body. 

Think of an experience you had as a child that was stressful or traumatic. In that moment your body felt a certain way. It may have been frozen in fear, overwhelmed with hurt or ready to fight back. That "activation" is a normal response to that situation for you BUT if you didn't have a chance to fully respond (say you wanted to run away but had to stay still & take it) the activation gets stuck in your system.

Then as the years go on, you feel that old familiar sense of being "trapped" play out. That's because the body never got to complete the action and re-regulate itself.

In Somatic Experiencing, we track your nervous system to find these moments of activation and allow them to complete so your nervous system doesn't stay perpetually stuck in cycles of fight or flight. What this looks like is being guided into your nervous system & me tracking what is showing up in the way you hold your body, the way it moves (sometimes micro-movements) and even subtle things like the way you breathe.

When your body is able process these things safely, you build resiliency in your nervous system, calm your body & mind and can feel the old charge or pattern dissolve. Pain that has been trapped in your body from things like 'bracing for the next attack" will start to release as well. (Shoulder pain I had for 3 years literally disappeared in a couple sessions from old bracing patterns!)

If you want to learn more about how this works, check out Dr Levine's book HERE

 How SE Supports Nervous System Healing

There are 4 principles in Somatic Experiencing:

 We work with your body, not against it.

SE starts with physical sensations, not thoughts. This bottom up approach taps into the body’s 

wisdom, which often bypasses the mind’s defenses and overthinking.

 The goal isn’t to revisit trauma, it’s to restore balance.

Sessions focus on what’s present now, not just what happened then. 

In sessions we work towards small, safe moments of awareness that help shift the nervous system out 

of stuck survival states.

 It supports completion of survival responses.

Trembling, sighing, warming, softening, these are all signs that the body is releasing stress 

that didn’t get to move through at the time of the original trauma.

 It builds resilience and self-trust.

Over time, you often develop more capacity to stay with difficult sensations and emotions.

You become more attuned to what safety actually feels like in the body, which opens the door to 

deeper healing.

 Why This Matters for Childhood Trauma

As children we are especially vulnerable to trauma becoming "stuck" in the system.  Without the power to fight, flee, or ask for help, your body adapts by shutting down or disconnecting and those patterns often carry into adulthood and for a lot of us become the freeze response we never realize is there. This is a process of helping you feel what was too unsafe to feel as a child.

 What a Session Might Look Like

An SE session could involve:

• Noticing areas of tightness or openness in the body

• Tracking the sensations that arise with certain memories or emotions

• Exploring small movements or grounding techniques

• Creating space to feel what was once overwhelming without becoming overwhelmed

Even subtle changes... a deeper breath, a release of tension, a slight shift in posture, can mark where your nervous system has shifted into feeling safer again.

Ready to give it a try? Schedule Your Somatic Session HERE