Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: December 2025

What is Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body oriented therapeutic approach developed by Peter Levine that helps resolve trauma by completing the biological defensive responses that became interrupted during overwhelming events. Rather than focusing on traumatic memories, SE works with the body’s instinctive survival energy to restore natural regulation.

Finishing What Your Body Started

A gazelle escapes a lion, then trembles violently before calmly returning to graze. This image, central to Peter Levine’s development of Somatic Experiencing, illustrates something profound: animals routinely discharge survival energy after threat, while humans often do not. We interrupt the shaking. We hold ourselves together. We override the body’s completion impulses with social expectations and cognitive control.

This interruption has consequences. The mobilized energy, prepared for fighting or fleeing, remains bound in your nervous system. Months or years later, that unfinished business emerges as hypervigilance, chronic tension, anxiety that seems disproportionate, or numbness that disconnects you from life.

Somatic Experiencing offers your nervous system the opportunity to complete what was interrupted. Through careful attention to bodily sensations and the natural rhythm of activation and settling, SE helps discharge bound energy without overwhelming you. The approach trusts your body’s innate healing capacity, providing conditions for it to do what it already knows how to do.

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On This Page:

Peter Levine’s Revolutionary Approach
The SE Process: Tracking, Titration, and Discharge
What Somatic Experiencing Helps
Experiencing an SE Session
SE Among Body Based Approaches
Finding SE Practitioners
Frequently Asked Questions

Peter Levine’s Revolutionary Approach

Peter Levine spent decades studying stress physiology, ethology (animal behavior), and indigenous healing practices before synthesizing Somatic Experiencing in the 1970s. His insight emerged from a simple observation: why do wild animals, constantly exposed to life threatening situations, rarely develop traumatic symptoms, while humans so often do?

The Biology of Incomplete Responses

When threat appears, your autonomic nervous system mobilizes enormous energy for survival. Heart rate accelerates. Blood flows to large muscles. Stress hormones surge. This preparation happens automatically, beneath conscious control, orchestrated by ancient brain structures shared with all mammals.

If you successfully fight or flee, this energy discharges through the action itself. Your system returns to baseline. The event becomes a memory rather than a persistent activation pattern.

But often, successful action is impossible. You cannot fight a car accident. You cannot flee surgery. You cannot run from a childhood home. In these moments, the mobilized energy has nowhere to go. Your system may shift into freeze, a last ditch survival response, while the fight or flight energy remains bound beneath the immobility.

Levine’s contribution was recognizing that this bound energy does not simply dissipate over time. It persists, creating symptoms we label as trauma, anxiety, or stress disorders. More importantly, he discovered that carefully guiding attention to bodily sensations could allow this energy to complete its original trajectory, restoring regulation without requiring clients to relive traumatic events.

Instinct, Not Story

Traditional trauma therapies often emphasize processing the narrative of what happened. SE takes a different path. While your story matters, SE focuses primarily on what happened in your body during and after overwhelming events. The approach works at the instinctual level, beneath language and cognition, where survival responses originate.

This distinction matters practically. You do not need to recount traumatic details for healing to occur. In fact, detailed narrative can sometimes interfere by reactivating the nervous system faster than it can integrate. SE therapists track your bodily experience moment to moment, following the thread of sensation rather than the thread of story.

The SE Process: Tracking, Titration, and Discharge

Somatic Experiencing uses specific techniques to work safely with traumatic activation. Understanding these core elements helps you know what to expect.

Tracking Bodily Sensations

The foundation of SE involves developing fine grained awareness of internal sensations. Your therapist guides you to notice: Where do you feel that in your body? What is the quality of that sensation? Does it have movement, temperature, texture? Is it expanding or contracting?

This tracking is not analysis. You are not trying to understand why you feel a certain way or connect sensations to memories. You simply observe, with curiosity, what is present in your body right now. This observational stance itself begins shifting your relationship to activation.

Through tracking, you often discover that sensations are not static. They move, pulse, spread, dissolve. This direct experience of flux contradicts the implicit belief that difficult feelings are permanent or dangerous. Your nervous system learns through experience that activation passes.

Titration: Working at the Edge

Unlike approaches that encourage diving into traumatic material, SE works in small, manageable doses. Titration, borrowed from chemistry, means adding one drop at a time. In SE, you approach activated material just enough to engage your system without flooding it.

Your therapist might invite you to touch briefly into a difficult memory or sensation, then guide you back to neutral territory. This rhythm of approach and retreat, called pendulation, allows processing to happen gradually. Each small piece of activation that successfully discharges builds your capacity for the next.

Titration protects against retraumatization. When you flood your nervous system with more activation than it can process, you strengthen traumatic patterns rather than resolving them. SE’s careful pacing ensures you move through difficult territory without becoming overwhelmed.

The Discharge Process

As bound survival energy begins releasing, you may notice various physical responses. Trembling, shaking, heat, tingling, spontaneous movements, deep breaths, tears, or laughter can all indicate discharge. These responses are not symptoms to manage but signs of your body completing what was interrupted.

Your therapist supports you in allowing these movements rather than suppressing them. The social conditioning to hold still, appear composed, and control your body often inhibits natural discharge. SE sessions provide permission and safety for your body to do what it needs.

Discharge is not always dramatic. Sometimes energy releases through subtle shifts: a softening in your shoulders, a spontaneous deep breath, a sense of expansion in your chest. Learning to recognize these quieter signals develops your capacity for ongoing self regulation.

Restoring Orienting and Defensive Responses

Trauma often disrupts your instinctive ability to orient to your environment and respond protectively. You may have lost the sense that you can look around, assess danger, and take action. SE helps restore these capacities.

Your therapist might guide you to slowly look around the room, noticing what your eyes want to rest on. Or they might support the emergence of protective movements, a pushing away gesture, a pulling back, a reaching for support. These are not prescribed exercises but organic impulses arising from your body’s wisdom as activation releases.

As orienting and defensive responses restore, you often experience renewed agency. The helplessness inherent in traumatic experience gives way to felt sense that you can respond, protect yourself, and influence your environment.

What Somatic Experiencing Helps

SE addresses a range of concerns united by underlying nervous system dysregulation. While the approach is best known for trauma, its applications extend wherever bound survival energy creates symptoms.

Shock Trauma

Single incident trauma from accidents, injuries, assaults, natural disasters, or medical procedures often responds particularly well to SE. These events mobilize intense survival energy in a compressed timeframe. When that energy cannot discharge through action, it remains frozen in your system.

SE provides the conditions for completing interrupted responses. The car accident that left you unable to brake finds completion through your arms and legs finally moving as they wanted to. The surgery where you lay immobilized allows the escape impulses to finally express.

Many people with shock trauma report significant relief in relatively few sessions. The bound energy, once released, does not return. Your system recognizes the threat has passed.

Developmental and Complex Trauma

Ongoing adversity in childhood creates different patterns than single incidents. When threat is chronic, your nervous system adapts, developing baseline states of hypervigilance, dissociation, or shutdown. These adaptations, once protective, become obstacles in adult life.

SE for complex trauma requires more time and works with broader systemic patterns rather than discrete events. Your therapist helps gradually build capacity for regulation, working with layers of adaptation accumulated over years. The goal is not processing specific memories but restoring your nervous system’s flexibility and range.

Progress may feel slower than with shock trauma, but the SE framework still applies. Titration remains essential, as overwhelming a system shaped by chronic threat replicates early conditions. Small, successful experiences of activation and settling gradually reshape your baseline.

The effectiveness of Somatic Experiencing for trauma has been validated in rigorous clinical research. A randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that participants who completed 15 sessions of SE showed significant reductions in both PTSD symptoms and depression compared to a waitlist control group. The improvements were substantial, with large effect sizes maintained at follow up, suggesting that SE creates lasting changes in how the nervous system processes traumatic stress.

Chronic Stress and Burnout

You need not have experienced discrete trauma for your nervous system to be dysregulated. Chronic stress, the kind pervasive in demanding careers and high pressure environments, accumulates activation without adequate recovery. Eventually your system loses the capacity to fully return to rest.

SE helps restore the parasympathetic regulation that chronic stress erodes. Through tracking sensations, pendulating between activation and calm, and allowing discharge, you rebuild your system’s capacity to settle. The perpetual low grade alertness that has become your norm begins releasing.

Many clients discover that stress symptoms they attributed to circumstances were actually nervous system patterns. When the pattern shifts, the same external demands feel more manageable.

Anxiety Without Clear Origin

Anxiety often puzzles those who experience it. Your life circumstances may not warrant the persistent worry, hypervigilance, or physical tension you carry. Logical analysis provides no relief because the anxiety does not originate in logic.

SE addresses anxiety as a nervous system phenomenon rather than a thought problem. The racing heart, tight chest, and restless agitation are not just symptoms accompanying anxious thoughts but the primary experience driving them. Working directly with these physical manifestations often resolves anxiety more completely than cognitive approaches.

Through SE, you often discover that current anxiety connects to earlier experiences where mobilization could not complete. The energy bound then still generates activation now, without clear present cause. Releasing that historical charge calms your current experience.

Physical Symptoms and Chronic Pain

The connection between trauma and physical health is increasingly recognized. Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions, and other physical complaints often have nervous system components. When your system remains in defensive states, inflammation increases, healing slows, and pain perception amplifies.

SE does not replace medical treatment but addresses the nervous system contribution to physical symptoms. Clients frequently report reduced pain, improved energy, and better overall health as their systems return to greater regulation. The body held in constant bracing finally relaxes.

Research published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology provides clinical evidence for this connection between trauma and physical symptoms. In a randomized controlled trial of patients with chronic low back pain and coexisting PTSD, participants who received Somatic Experiencing showed significant reductions in both PTSD symptoms and fear of movement compared to those receiving standard physical rehabilitation alone. Notably, these improvements persisted at the 12 month follow up, suggesting that SE creates lasting changes in how the nervous system responds to both pain and trauma.

Dissociation and Numbness

Dissociation, the sense of being disconnected from your body, emotions, or surroundings, represents a specific survival response. When neither fight nor flight was possible, your system separated you from unbearable experience. This protection, once adaptive, becomes a limitation when it persists.

SE approaches dissociation carefully, recognizing it as the nervous system’s attempt to manage overwhelming activation. Rather than pushing through numbness, your therapist helps you titrate toward embodiment. Slowly, in small doses, you rebuild tolerance for being present. The dissociative withdrawal becomes less necessary as your system learns that presence is safe now.

Experiencing an SE Session

The Session Environment

SE sessions typically occur in a calm, private space conducive to internal attention. If meeting in person, you usually sit facing your therapist at a comfortable distance. The room may have soft lighting and minimal distractions. Telehealth sessions work similarly, with you ideally in a private, comfortable space.

Unlike therapies that encourage lying down or closing eyes for extended periods, SE often keeps you upright and oriented to the room. This positioning supports the orienting responses central to trauma resolution. You remain engaged with your environment, not retreating into internal space.

How Sessions Unfold

Sessions generally begin with checking in about your current state. Rather than launching into content from past sessions, you and your therapist assess how you are arriving today. What sensations do you notice? How is your energy level? This grounding in present experience sets the foundation.

From there, sessions follow what arises organically. Your therapist may invite you to notice a particular sensation and describe it. They may ask what happens as you stay with that sensation. At times they might guide you to touch briefly into more activated material, always tracking whether you remain within capacity.

There is no fixed protocol or predetermined sequence. SE follows your body’s process rather than imposing structure. Some sessions involve significant emotional intensity and discharge. Others feel quieter, building resources and capacity. Your therapist attunes to what serves your healing at each moment.

Verbal and Nonverbal Dimensions

While SE emphasizes bodily experience over narrative, talking still occurs. You describe sensations, share observations, and sometimes provide context from your history. The difference is that language serves to deepen somatic awareness rather than analyze or explain.

Your therapist also tracks your nonverbal communication closely. Shifts in breathing, subtle movements, changes in facial color or expression, alterations in posture all provide information about your nervous system state. This tracking allows intervention before overwhelm and recognition of discharge when it occurs.

Between Session Integration

SE works not just in sessions but in the ongoing life between them. As your nervous system begins shifting, you may notice changes in sleep, energy, mood, or physical sensations. Some days you might feel unusually tired as your system integrates releases. Other times you may experience new vitality as bound energy becomes available for living.

Your therapist may suggest simple practices for between sessions: noticing your feet on the ground, allowing deep breaths, orienting to your environment when you feel activated. These are not assignments to complete perfectly but invitations to extend the work into daily life.

SE Among Body Based Approaches

Several somatic therapies share attention to the body and nervous system. Understanding how SE relates to these approaches helps clarify its distinct contribution.

SE and General Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy is a broad category encompassing many approaches that work with the body. SE is one specific modality within this umbrella. While general somatic work might draw from various techniques, SE follows Peter Levine’s particular framework with its emphasis on completing survival responses, titration, and discharge.

Some therapists practice SE specifically. Others integrate SE concepts with other approaches. When seeking SE treatment, look for practitioners who have completed formal SE training rather than those who simply describe their work as somatic.

SE and Brainspotting

Both SE and Brainspotting work with subcortical brain processes rather than relying primarily on verbal processing. Both can produce rapid shifts in trauma symptoms. The modalities differ in technique: Brainspotting uses fixed eye positions to access activated material, while SE tracks sensation and supports natural discharge without specific eye position protocols.

Some practitioners train in both and use them complementarily. Brainspotting might efficiently access material, while SE principles guide the pacing and completion of processing. The approaches share enough theoretical ground to integrate well.

SE and EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) also targets trauma at subcortical levels using bilateral stimulation. EMDR follows a more structured protocol than SE and typically involves more direct engagement with traumatic memories. SE’s emphasis on titration and completion of defensive responses differs from EMDR’s processing model.

For some people, one approach resonates more than the other. Those who appreciate structure may prefer EMDR. Those who want to work more slowly and somatically may gravitate toward SE. Both have strong research support for trauma treatment.

Finding SE Practitioners

Training and Certification

Somatic Experiencing International oversees training and certification for SE practitioners. The full training program spans three years and includes didactic learning, practicum, and case consultation. Practitioners may be licensed mental health professionals who add SE to their skill set, or bodyworkers and other professionals who specialize in SE.

When seeking an SE therapist, ask about their training level. Some therapists have completed the full three year program, while others are in earlier stages or have taken introductory courses. The depth of training affects their skill with the modality.

Telehealth Accessibility

SE works effectively via video, making it accessible throughout California regardless of your location. The emphasis on tracking sensation and supporting discharge translates well to remote format. Your therapist observes your nonverbal cues through video and guides your internal attention with their voice.

Telehealth offers particular benefits for trauma work. Processing difficult material in your own space can feel safer than an unfamiliar office. You have control over your environment and can care for yourself immediately after sessions without needing to commute.

Combining Approaches

Many therapists integrate SE with other modalities rather than practicing it exclusively. This integration can be beneficial, offering flexibility to use whatever approach serves you in a given moment. A therapist might draw on SE for trauma processing while using other approaches for relationship issues or life challenges.

Ask potential therapists how they incorporate SE into their practice. Some use it as their primary framework. Others bring it in selectively when clients present with trauma or nervous system dysregulation. Both approaches can work well depending on your needs.

Frequently Asked Questions About Somatic Experiencing

Q: What does the shaking or trembling actually feel like, and is it controllable?

A: Discharge manifests differently for each person and each session. You might experience fine trembling in your limbs, waves of heat moving through your body, spontaneous movements in your hands or feet, deep yawning, or the urge to stretch. These sensations typically feel natural rather than forced, like your body releasing tension you did not know you were holding.

The experience is somewhat controllable. You can suppress trembling if you want to, just as you might suppress a yawn. However, the point of SE is allowing these natural processes rather than controlling them. Your therapist creates conditions where letting go feels safe. Most clients describe discharge as relieving rather than distressing, like finally exhaling after holding your breath.

Some people worry they will shake uncontrollably or embarrass themselves. In practice, discharge during sessions is usually subtle, visible primarily to trained eyes. Your therapist helps modulate intensity so you never experience more than you can manage. Between sessions, if discharge arises, you remain able to function normally while allowing the process to continue.

Q: How does SE differ from talk therapy if I still talk during sessions?

A: The role of language differs fundamentally. In talk therapy, conversation is the primary vehicle for change. You discuss problems, gain insight, and work through difficulties verbally. The assumption is that understanding leads to healing.

In SE, language serves sensation rather than the reverse. You talk to describe what you notice in your body, to communicate with your therapist, and sometimes to provide context. But the words themselves are not doing the healing. The shifts happen in your nervous system, beneath language, through the body’s own processes.

This distinction has practical implications. You do not need to find the right words or articulate your experience perfectly for SE to work. Many clients find relief from the pressure to explain themselves. Your body does not need accurate narration to release bound energy. It simply needs the right conditions, which SE provides.

Q: Will SE bring up memories or feelings I have been avoiding?

A: SE can access material that has been outside your awareness, but it does so at a pace you can tolerate. The titration principle means you never encounter more than your system can process. Your therapist tracks your state constantly and slows down if you approach overwhelm.

That said, as activation releases, associated memories, images, or emotions may surface. This is part of the healing process. The difference from retraumatization is that material emerges in manageable pieces, accompanied by discharge and settling, rather than flooding you all at once.

If there is specific material you are not ready to address, communicate this to your therapist. SE respects your defenses as adaptive and does not force confrontation with content before you are ready. The approach trusts that your system knows what it can handle and supports its natural pacing.

Q: How do I know if my therapist is properly trained in SE versus just familiar with the concepts?

A: Somatic Experiencing training follows a specific structure through Somatic Experiencing International. The full program involves three years of training modules plus supervised practice hours. Practitioners at different stages have different titles: SE Practitioner (SEP) indicates completion of the full program.

Ask potential therapists directly about their SE training. Where did they train? How far in the program have they progressed? Do they receive ongoing SE consultation? Trained practitioners are generally happy to discuss their credentials.

Therapists who describe their work as somatic or body based without specific SE training may offer valuable services but are not practicing Somatic Experiencing per se. If SE specifically appeals to you based on Levine’s framework, seek practitioners with formal training in the modality.

Q: Can SE work for issues beyond trauma, like general anxiety or life dissatisfaction?

A: Yes. While SE developed in the context of trauma treatment, its understanding of nervous system regulation applies broadly. Anxiety, depression, burnout, and chronic stress all involve dysregulation that SE can address. You need not have experienced discrete traumatic events to benefit.

SE views many common struggles as expressions of bound activation, stress patterns, or diminished capacity for regulation. Working with these patterns at the nervous system level often resolves symptoms that seemed unrelated to trauma. Clients frequently discover that what they labeled personality traits or character flaws were actually nervous system adaptations.

That said, SE may not address every concern. Issues primarily rooted in relationship patterns, meaning making, or life circumstances may benefit from other therapeutic approaches. SE works best when nervous system dysregulation is a significant component of your difficulties.

Q: How many sessions does SE typically take?

A: This varies enormously based on your concerns, history, and how your system responds. Single incident shock trauma sometimes resolves in a handful of sessions. Complex developmental trauma typically requires longer engagement, often a year or more of regular work.

Rather than predicting a specific number, SE therapists assess progress as you go. Early sessions establish safety and build capacity. Later sessions may move into deeper processing. Your therapist can offer perspective on your trajectory after working together for a period.

Many people find that SE creates noticeable shifts relatively quickly, even when longer work is appropriate. You may experience improved sleep, reduced anxiety, or increased energy within the first months while continuing to address deeper layers. Progress is often nonlinear, with periods of rapid change and periods of integration.