trauma, somatic experiencing
and brainspotting
“Trauma is a fact of life.
It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
-Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing
Trauma, and PTSD-like symptoms are gaining broader definitions. Initially trauma was reserved for people that had experienced war, severe accidents, rape, and near death experiences. Now we are understand that anything that is experienced as threatening can impact our ability to function day to day and can significantly impact our inter-personal relationships. Trauma includes both a physical threat and/or emotional threats such as emotional neglect, shame, guilt, loss, divorce, growing up with active addiction, etc.
Anyone who has experienced any form of trauma is aware that the body’s responses kick in whenever a trigger is experienced. This can be experienced as a wide variety of symptoms from heightened anxiety to full blown panic attacks to emotional shut down or freeze response. Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing studied the body’s response to trauma. Stuck trauma is not the event that occurred but is caused by the body’s inability to process it. Two people experiencing the same event will have two very different reactions, some one may be traumatized and one may not. It isn’t a matter of will power or thought stopping. It is a matter of each individual’s own body’s response to trauma. The body imprints trauma on the reptilian brain. Fight, flight, and freeze, is stored in the body’s autonomic nervous system. Part of releasing trauma, is working with the body’s response of fight, flight, and freeze, to allow for a gentle release. Therapy is about getting the body unstuck, and then the brain will follow. Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting are holistic modalities used to re-establishing the rhythm of the nervous system.
So what happens in a session when we use SE and Brainspotting? You will learn to ground yourself, pendulate between constricted areas in the body and grounded areas. We will slowly titrate the trauma response leading to discharge versus re-traumatizing and re-activating a cycle of fight, flight, or freeze.
Therapy is not about retelling the story, therapy becomes about helping discharge the physical sensations, and allowing the body to release the trauma. The body becomes unstuck by allowing the body’s completion of it’s own defense response. Stuck thought patterns will naturally and far more easily change as the body is able to trust in it’s own resiliency. Our therapeutic experience will be looking at the sensations that lie underneath the feelings, and uncovering the body’s habitual responses to those feelings. In the end you will learn that we can gain resiliency from difficult life experiences and become stronger not weaker.
Somatic Experiencing developed by Peter Levine and Brainspotting, developed by David Grand, are two techniques developed to help the body get back on track to what it does naturally, which is self -regulate. For more in depth information on either of these modalities please look to the links below.
More about Somatic Experiencing:
https://traumahealing.org/about-us/
“Somatic Experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy,” by Payne, Levine and Crane available online at http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093/full
For information about Brainspotting: