Somatic Experiencing® Training & Education
A body-based approach to trauma, stress, regulation, and resilience
Somatic Experiencing®, often shortened to SE, is a body-oriented approach to working with trauma, chronic stress, and nervous-system dysregulation.
The approach was developed by Peter A. Levine, PhD, and draws from the understanding that overwhelming experiences affect more than thoughts and memories. They can also influence bodily sensation, posture, movement, breath, attention, emotion, protective responses, relationships, and the autonomic nervous system.
I began the three-year Somatic Experiencing Professional Training in 2016 and earned the Somatic Experiencing Practitioner credential in 2018.
Since 2020, I have continued returning to the curriculum as a Somatic Experiencing Training Assistant across Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced levels.
How Stress May Show Up in the Body
You do not need to know whether the word trauma applies to you. Some people simply notice that their body, emotions, or nervous system continue responding as though something unresolved is still present.
Chronic Tension or Bracing
A sense that the body is holding, tightening, guarding, or preparing for something even when no immediate danger is present.
Anxiety and Vigilance
Persistent alertness, startle responses, scanning, panic, irritability, or difficulty feeling settled.
Shutdown or Numbness
Emotional numbness, low energy, collapse, dissociation, fogginess, or feeling disconnected from the body.
Difficulty Resting
Feeling restless, unsafe, guilty, or activated when slowing down, relaxing, or receiving support.
Boundaries and Protection
Difficulty sensing limits, saying no, accessing protective energy, or feeling that your response is larger than the current situation.
Feeling Stuck in the Past
A sense that the body remains prepared for something that has already passed, even when the mind understands that the present is different.
What Is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing helps us notice how the body and nervous system are responding in the present moment.
During overwhelming experiences, the body may prepare to fight, flee, freeze, brace, collapse, hide, reach for support, or protect vulnerable areas. These responses can occur rapidly and outside conscious choice.
When an experience is too much, happens too quickly, lasts too long, or occurs without enough support, aspects of the response may remain unresolved.
Somatic Experiencing does not assume that every symptom comes from trauma. It offers a framework for exploring whether present difficulties may be connected with unresolved stress, defensive responses, or patterns of nervous-system organization.
Trauma Is More Than the Event
Two people can live through similar events and respond very differently.
The effect of an experience depends on many factors, including age, developmental stage, previous experiences, available support, ability to escape or protect oneself, physical health, attachment, culture, community, and what happened after the event.
Trauma is therefore not defined only by what happened.
It also involves how the experience affected the person and whether the body and nervous system had enough capacity, support, protection, and time to respond.
This understanding helps move away from comparing experiences or asking whether something was “bad enough.”
The more useful question is often: How did your system respond, and what support might help now?
The Nervous System and Regulation
The Autonomic Nervous System
The autonomic nervous system helps regulate functions that occur largely outside conscious control, including heart rate, digestion, breathing patterns, temperature, energy, mobilization, and rest.
When danger is sensed, the system may increase energy for action. When escape or resistance seems impossible, the body may move toward freezing, shutdown, collapse, or dissociation.
These responses are not character flaws. They reflect biological strategies intended to support survival.
Regulation Is Not Constant Calm
Regulation does not mean feeling relaxed at all times.
A healthy nervous system needs access to energy, protection, emotion, movement, attention, and rest.
The goal is not to eliminate activation. The goal is to develop more capacity to move through different states and return to greater organization after stress.
Core Somatic Experiencing Principles
Somatic Experiencing uses careful attention, pacing, and present-moment awareness to support the nervous system’s movement toward greater organization.
Tracking
Tracking means noticing experience as it unfolds through sensation, posture, breath, movement, emotion, imagery, thought, impulse, and attention.
Orienting
Orienting is the natural process of turning attention toward the environment. It can help expand awareness so that difficulty is held within a larger present-day context.
Resources
Resources are experiences that provide some degree of support, steadiness, protection, connection, competence, or relief.
Titration
Titration means approaching difficult material in small and manageable amounts so awareness, curiosity, choice, and connection can remain available.
Pendulation
Pendulation refers to the natural movement between difficulty and greater support, openness, neutrality, or organization.
Protective Responses
The body contains powerful systems for protection, including turning, pushing, pulling, running, bracing, hiding, reaching, freezing, or collapsing.
Working Carefully With Protection and Overwhelm
Boundaries and Containment
Boundaries are more than verbal rules. They also involve a bodily sense of where you begin and end, what feels close enough, what feels too close, whether you can say yes or no, and whether protective energy is available.
Dissociation and Disconnection
Dissociation is often a protective response to experience that was too overwhelming, inescapable, or unsupported.
Somatic therapy does not treat dissociation as resistance or failure. The work may begin by strengthening orientation, support, choice, predictability, and connection.
Working Without Retelling Everything
Somatic Experiencing does not require a person to describe every detail of a traumatic event.
Conversation and narrative can be important, but the work may also focus on present-day bodily responses, protective impulses, resources, boundaries, orientation, and what is available now.
What a Somatic Session May Be Like
Somatic Experiencing can be quiet, conversational, active, relational, movement-oriented, or very subtle.
A session may begin with what is happening in your life now, a recent situation, something from the past, a body sensation, an emotion, a relationship pattern, or a place where you feel stuck. We do not always need to retell every detail of what happened. Sometimes we only need enough contact with an experience to notice how your body and nervous system are responding in the present.
The body often gives us important information about what has been held, interrupted, protected, or needed. When we slow down enough to listen, sensations, impulses, posture, breath, emotion, movement, and orientation can begin to show us part of the roadmap for healing.
My role is to help us slow down, pause, notice what is happening, and track the body’s story without overwhelming your system. We may talk, orient to the room, notice what happens in your body while you speak, track sensation, explore posture or movement, identify resources, or notice impulses for protection, connection, distance, or support.
Rather than moving directly into the most intense material, we work in manageable amounts. We may include both the difficult experience and what helps you stay connected to support. This might include feeling your feet, noticing the chair, looking around the room, sensing a boundary, remembering a resource, tracking something neutral or steady in the body, noticing that the present is different from the past, or connecting with a sense of choice.
In this way, we are not only listening to the story through words. We are also listening to how the body is carrying and organizing the experience now. Including the body, resources, pacing, and present-moment support can allow difficult material to be processed in a different way.
Sometimes the work involves activation, such as anxiety, anger, urgency, trembling, heat, or energy for action. Sometimes it involves shutdown, numbness, collapse, fogginess, or difficulty staying present. We may also notice protective responses that could not happen fully at the time, such as turning away, pushing, reaching, bracing, stepping back, saying no, or asking for help.
A session may include sitting, standing, moving, walking, lying on a padded table, using imagery, practicing boundaries, exploring attachment and relationship, or connecting what emerges in the session with practical choices outside therapy.
You do not have to close your eyes.
You do not have to force deep breathing.
You do not have to remain still.
You do not have to tell every detail of what happened.
You may pause, ask questions, decline an experiment, change position, request more distance, choose not to use touch, or redirect the session.
The work is collaborative and depends on your needs, preferences, goals, history, present circumstances, and capacity. We proceed at a pace your nervous system can actually work with, allowing more room for choice, organization, and integration.
Pacing and Consent
Pacing is central to the way I practice.
There can be pressure in therapy to reach the deepest material quickly, produce an emotional release, or demonstrate visible progress. This pressure can reproduce earlier experiences of having to override limits, perform, comply, or move faster than feels safe.
I am more interested in creating conditions that support sustainable change.
You are welcome to keep your eyes open, change position, move around, ask for more distance, request explanation, decline an exercise, pause the conversation, shift to something more supportive, say that an intervention does not fit, change your mind, or decide not to use touch.
Consent is an ongoing process rather than a one-time agreement.
Experiences This Work May Support
Somatic Experiencing may be relevant when the body and nervous system continue to carry the effects of overwhelming, frightening, painful, or unsupported experiences.
This does not mean every concern is treated in the same way. The work is always shaped by the individual person, present circumstances, health, relationships, culture, resources, and goals.
Accidents, Injury, and Medical Stress
Motor-vehicle accidents, falls, physical injury, surgery, hospitalization, anesthesia, medical procedures, choking, suffocation, near-drowning, burns, poisoning, high fever, serious illness, head injury, birth and early medical stress.
Shock and Overwhelm
Experiences that happened too quickly, were too intense, lasted too long, or occurred without enough support, protection, time, or help afterward.
Relational and Developmental Trauma
Emotional or developmental trauma, neglect, chronic relational stress, shame, chronic overwhelm, repeated misattunement, or experiences of helplessness, lack of protection, or having to adapt around unsafe relationships.
Threat, Violation, and Survival Responses
Physical assault, sexual trauma, inescapable attack, animal attack, boundary violations, or experiences where fight, flight, freezing, bracing, collapse, or protection could not happen fully.
Loss, Grief, and Witnessing
Traumatic loss, grief, survivor guilt, witnessing violence or horror, or carrying the impact of something painful that happened to someone else.
Disaster, War, and Collective Stress
Natural disaster, war, terrorism, forced displacement, community violence, or other events that affect the body, nervous system, relationships, safety, and belonging.
Somatic Experiencing does not require you to prove that something was “bad enough.” A more useful question is often: how did your system respond, and what kind of support might help now?
My Somatic Experiencing Training Record
Beginning and Intermediate Training
Linda Stelte, M.Ed., CCC, SEP
Yellow Springs, Ohio | 2016–2017
Beginning I | February 2016 | 24 hours
Beginning II | June 2016 | 24 hours
Beginning III | November 2016 | 24 hours
Intermediate I | March 2017 | 24 hours
Intermediate II | June 2017 | 24 hours
Intermediate III | November 2017 | 24 hours
Advanced Training
Advanced I
Raja Selvam, PhD
San Diego, California | March 2018 | 36 hours
Advanced II
Berns Galloway, MEd, LCSW, SEP
Chicago, Illinois | October 2018 | 36 hours
Formal Student Training Total
Eight modules
Three-year professional training
216 hours
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner credential earned in 2018.
Returning as a Training Assistant
In 2020, I began returning to the Somatic Experiencing curriculum as a Training Assistant.
I have assisted across Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced cohorts in both in-person and live online settings.
Across these cohorts, I have completed more than two dozen modules and over 600 hours of training assistance, with additional modules scheduled.
As a Training Assistant, I support experiential exercises, dyads and triads, pacing, stabilization, nervous-system tracking, boundaries, and integration of the curriculum.
Ongoing Consultation and Personal Experience
My relationship with Somatic Experiencing has continued beyond formal certification.
I participate in ongoing consultation, professional groups, live demonstrations, advanced learning, and regular personal Somatic Experiencing sessions with experienced teachers and practitioners.
My professional development has included learning with Abi Blakeslee, Linda Stelte, Berns Galloway, Raja Selvam, Russell Jones, Twig Wheeler, Glyndie Nickerson, Alicen Halquist, and other Somatic Experiencing faculty and practitioners.
Continuing to receive the work from the client’s side helps me remain connected to the vulnerability, courage, uncertainty, pacing, trust, and relational sensitivity involved in body-based psychotherapy.
How Somatic Experiencing Integrates With My Work
Attachment Work
Somatic Experiencing provides a detailed framework for understanding survival responses, activation, shutdown, orientation, protection, and nervous-system regulation.
Attachment-focused approaches add particular attention to early relational experience, co-regulation, closeness and distance, trust, receiving support, misattunement and repair, connection and autonomy, and relational safety.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Somatic Experiencing helps us notice what the body and nervous system are doing.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps us explore how language, behavior, avoidance, values, and context influence our direction.
Together, these approaches help connect bodily capacity, psychological flexibility, personal meaning, values, choice, and action.
Scope and Responsible Practice
Somatic Experiencing is a psychotherapeutic and educational approach. It does not replace medical assessment or treatment.
Physical pain, neurological symptoms, head injuries, serious illness, medication concerns, and other medical conditions should be evaluated by qualified medical professionals.
Somatic psychotherapy may address the emotional, relational, behavioral, or traumatic-stress dimensions that coexist with physical concerns.
Responsible practice includes attention to scope, competence, informed consent, consultation, referral, and the limits of any single therapeutic approach.
How This Training Shapes My Practice
Somatic Experiencing has deeply influenced how I listen.
I listen to words, and I also pay attention to changes in breath, movement and stillness, posture, muscle tone, facial expression, orientation, rhythm, impulses, shifts in connection, and signs of activation or settling.
The model has taught me to respect protective responses rather than treating them as obstacles.
It has also taught me that meaningful change does not always need to be dramatic.
Sometimes healing begins through a small shift: feeling the support beneath you, recognizing that you want more distance, discovering strength in your legs, turning toward something supportive, allowing a breath to change on its own, noticing that you can pause, or realizing that the present is different from the past.
Somatic work has also become part of how I live, not only something I practice clinically. It influences how I relate to movement, rest, creativity, nature, relationships, boundaries, stress, and the rhythms of daily life.
For me, embodiment is not a technique used only in a therapy room. It is an ongoing practice of listening more carefully to life as it moves through the body, relationship, environment, and action.
Interested in working together?
The body often responds before the mind has found words.
Somatic Experiencing gives us a way to listen to those responses with patience, curiosity, and respect.
The work supports greater capacity to recognize what is happening, access support, protect yourself, recover after stress, remain connected, and participate more fully in life.