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Welcome to Wellness Innovations, where healing begins and hope is restored. Our dedicated team is here to support you on your journey to emotional well-being and personal growth.
What we do.
WHAT IS SOMATIC EXPERIENCING®?
Overview
Somatic Experiencing (SE™) aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and become more resilient. It is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied in multiple professions and professional settings—psychotherapy, medicine, coaching, teaching, and physical therapy—for healing trauma and other stress disorders. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine.
The Approach
The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It 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. SE provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others.
The Science
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, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.
We specialize training for first responders
Firefighters
Police
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Team Training
How it works.
The Somatic Experiencing approach facilitates 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. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions.
Dr. Levine was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system when he realized that animals are constantly under threat of death, yet show no symptoms of trauma. What he discovered was that trauma has to do with the third survival response to perceived life threat, which is freeze. When fight and flight are not options, we freeze and immobilize, like “playing dead.” This makes us less of a target. However, this reaction is time-sensitive, in other words, it needs to run its course, and the massive energy that was prepared for fight or flight gets discharged, through shakes and trembling. If the immobility phase doesn’t complete, then that charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective, it is still under threat. The Somatic Experiencing method works to release this stored energy and turn off this threat alarm that causes severe dysregulation and dissociation. SE helps people understand this body response to trauma and work through a “body first” approach to healing.
When fight and flight are not options, we freeze and immobilize, like “playing dead.”
What is the Polyvagal Theory?
The Polyvagal Theory is a theory proposed by Stephen Porges that describes how the mammalian autonomic nervous system evolved to keep us safe and alive. As mammals evolved from reptiles, our autonomic nervous system developed to automatically communicate with other mammals and engage different self-defense systems when needed.
When our self-defense systems are repeatedly or chronically engaged or we aren’t able to communicate with others effectively, our bodily systems can become stuck in certain maladaptive states. Porges’ theory emphasizes the importance of how our physiological state—the way the systems of our body are functioning—is involved in behavioral problems and psychiatric disorders.
In this post, I’ll explain the basics of the vagus nerve and Polyvagal Theory. In next month’s post, I’ll discuss how Polyvagal Theory can be used in clinical settings to help people overcome the lasting effects of trauma.
The Polyvagal Theory of Trauma
“Trauma is a pervasive fact of modern life,” Peter Levine wrote in his 1997 book Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma. “Most of us have been traumatized, not just soldiers or victims of abuse or attack. Both the sources and consequences of trauma are wide-ranging and often hidden from our awareness.”
For Levine, the key to healing trauma “is in our physiology.” In Waking The Tiger, Levine writes that “traumatic symptoms are not caused by the ‘triggering’ event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.”
In a nutshell, this is the “Polyvagal Theory,” a collection of evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological constructs about the vagus nerve’s role in emotion regulation, social connection, and fear response, introduced in 1994 by American psychologist and neuroscientist Stephen Porges.
Polyvagal Theory takes its name from the vagus, a cranial nerve that forms the primary component of the parasympathetic nervous system. The traditional view of the autonomic nervous system presents a two-part system: the sympathetic nervous system, which is primarily activating (“fight or flight”), and the parasympathetic nervous system, which supports health, growth, and restoration (“rest and digest”). Polyvagal Theory identifies a third type of nervous system response: the “social engagement system,” a hybrid state of activation and calming that plays a role in our ability to engage socially—or not.
The three branches represent different evolutionary stages. “Dr. Porges identified a hierarchy of response built into our autonomous nervous system and anchored in the evolutionary development of our species,” wrote Deb Dana, LCSW, in The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. “The origin of the dorsal pathway of the parasympathetic branch and its immobilization response lies with our ancient vertebrate ancestors and is the oldest pathway. The sympathetic branch and its pattern of mobilization, was next to develop. The most recent addition, the ventral vagal pathway of the parasympathetic branch brings patterns of social engagement that are unique to mammals. When we are firmly grounded in our ventral vagal pathway, we feel safe and connected, calm and social.”
Polyvagal Theory postulates that trauma can send us backward and down that evolutionary pathway.
“A sense (neuroception) of danger can trigger us out of this state and backwards on the evolutionary timeline into the sympathetic branch,” wrote Dana. “Here we are mobilized to respond and take action. Taking action can help us return to the safe and social state. It is when we feel as though we are trapped and can’t escape the danger that the dorsal vagal pathway pulls us all the way back to our evolutionary beginnings. In this state, we are immobilized. We shut down to survive. From here, it is a long way back to feeling safe and social and a painful path to follow.”
Because trauma plays out in the nervous system, this is the place in the human body that holds the key to healing trauma. “The nervous system holds the recipe for the end of suffering,” explained Taruno Steffensen, a practitioner in addiction and trauma recovery in a recent webinar. “We just need to help the person to get out of their own way and let the nervous system finish and do what it was designed to do. This holds true no matter what the trauma.” Steffensen recently joined a New Paradigm Recovery group session as a facilitator and lent insight and counsel.
In Waking The Tiger, Levine described a breakthrough he had with a patient called Nancy, who suffered from immobilizing panic attacks. During a therapy session, Levine inadvertently provoked Nancy’s nervous system into overcoming her paralysis by telling her to envision escaping from a large tiger. This allowed her to regain motion and remember a previously hidden traumatic childhood experience. Without being aware of it, Nancy’s autonomous nervous system had replayed the childhood trauma over and over again—with devastating consequences.
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