Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma and other stress-related disorders. SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight, or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It offers practical skills appropriate to various healing and helping professions, including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, educators, and more.

During this unique program, Peter A Levine, Ph.D., the developer of Somatic Experiencing, will demonstrate how SE addresses trauma through a combination of theoretical explanation and body-oriented experiential exercises. Participants in this program will learn the underpinnings of trauma and explore how nervous system regulation and awareness of bodily sensations can bring clients out of a trauma state and into a more embodied and regulated sense of authentic self.

Learning objectives

• Differentiate between top-down and bottom-up processing and discuss how they can work together.
• Classify the trauma response as a set of defensive bodily reactions mobilized to protect us.
• Describe how shame, defeat, and humiliation, associated with the original traumatic event, replay themselves repeatedly in the body.
• Define how trauma-based perceptions remain fundamentally unchanged until the internal experience of the body changes.
• Demonstrate body-oriented experiential exercises that explore how best to work with anger, grief, and shame in order to build a greater capacity for resilience.