The training is accredited by the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (SETI) in Colorado, USA and can only be conducted by accredited international SE trainers.

Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a naturalistic approach to the understanding and healing of trauma, developed by Peter A Levine over the past 40 years and taught throughout the world. SE® is a clinical methodology based upon an appreciation of why animals in the wild are not traumatized by routine threats to their lives. Animals in the wild utilize innate mechanisms to regulate and discharge the high levels of energy arousal associated with defensive survival behaviours. These mechanisms provide animals with a built-in ‘immunity’’ to trauma that enables them to return to normal in the aftermath of highly ‘charged’’ life-threatening experiences. Humans, on the other hand, are readily overwhelmed and traumatized. Fortunately, the very same instincts (and related survival based brain systems) that are involved in the formation of trauma symptoms can be enlisted in the transformation and healing of trauma.

Therapeutically, this ‘instinct to heal and self-regulate’ is engaged through the awareness of body sensations that contradict those of paralysis and helplessness, and which restore resilience, equilibrium and wholeness. Because human responses to potential threat vary so greatly, it is difficult to identify or classify sources of trauma. Most people associate trauma with events like war, violence, extremes of physical, emotional or sexual abuse, crippling accidents, or natural disasters. However, many ”ordinary” or seemingly benign events can also be traumatic. For example, so-called minor automobile “whiplash” accidents frequently lead to bewildering and debilitating physical, emotional, and psychological symptoms. Common invasive medical procedures and surgeries (particularly those performed on frightened children who are restrained while being anaesthetized), can be profoundly traumatizing. Somatic Experiencing® utilizes basic tools (and “building blocks”) but also works differentially with various sources of trauma. These diverse categories include:

  • Medical: hospitalizations, surgeries, invasive medical procedures, anaesthesia, burns, poisoning, foetal distress and traumatic birth.
  • Accidents: falls, high impact accidents (including auto accidents), head injury, electrocution.
  • Suffocation: drowning, strangulation.
  • Attack: rape, war, bombings, physical abuse, mugging, molestation, physical injury, stabbing, gunshot wounds, animal attacks.
  • Natural and man-made disasters: earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, floods, terrorism, dislocation from the natural world and community.
  • Horror: Seeing an accident (especially with blood, gore and dismemberment), watching someone else being abused, raped, killed or tortured, killing or hurting someone.
  • Developmental: neglect, abandonment, loss and ongoing abuse.
  • Torture, repeated rape and systematic abuse

SE is a short-term naturalistic psychotherapeutic approach to the resolution and healing of trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine and is supported by research. It is based upon the observation that wild prey animals, though threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized.

  • 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 may employ touch in support of the renegotiation process.
  • SE ‘titrates’ experience (breaks down into small, incremental steps), rather than evoking catharsis – which can overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the organism.

SE can result in a number of benefits to you, such as relief of traumatic stress symptoms, increased resilience, and resourcefulness. Like any other treatment it may also have unintended negative side effects, such as sleep disturbances, frightening memories, or unfamiliar and uncomfortable body sensations. Such reactions are not uncommon and can be attended to in the course of our work together.