Somatic Experiencing™ is a body-oriented approach that helps people living with the consequences of chronic stress or trauma to regain their innate vitality and ability to cope with life’s challenges. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, racial discrimination, oppression, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the harmful stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.

Being a body-oriented approach, Somatic Experiencing™ does not require one to re-live a traumatic event. Instead, it aims to facilitate, in a slow and supported way, 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.