Somatic work is a gentle method of working towards healing, focusing on connecting the emotional with the physical. Often, especially in defining moments in life.

Trauma is an embodied event, meaning that it is held in your body because you were pushed beyond your normal coping ability and so you adapted to survive.

Examples of trauma can be: accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma and early developmental experiences, or the debilitating experience of continuous fear and conflict.  

“When terrible events happen, the instinctive response is to escape or fight back. When neither of these are possible - because you are too small, too young, too frightened, trapped, overpowered, or alone - the human system shuts down and freezes at the height of the experience. This ensure survival.

When this self-protective response cannot complete, the body may remain stuck in that "freeze" state. Unexplained psychological and physical conditions may arise and affect relationships and the capacity to deal with the normal ups and downs of daily life.

When the system remains in this “freeze”, we are surviving by "playing dead" and shutting down in order to conserve the energy that we need to survive. 

Whilst this is happening, people continue with ostensibly ordinary lives – raising families, going to work, caring for relatives, and participating in community activities. Yet, they are living with the residue of the traumatic event or what Peter Levine calls "functional freeze". Of course, people lives and relationships are affected in many ways during this time, often in highly distressing ways.

The nervous system holds the story of this unfinished situation through patterns of experience (implicit memory) and not through the verbal story of explicit memory or recall.

The Somatic Experiencing™ approach supports the safe completion of these self-protective responses to re-establish the rhythmic movement of ease and resilience.” - I.S.E