Somatic Experiencing (SE) offers a hopeful, naturalistic perspective on trauma. It views the human organism as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal, as well as the intellectual spirit to harness innate healing abilities. The focus of the training will primarily be to broaden your knowledge and understanding of the debilitating effects of trauma.

The 6 day fundamnetal part 1 workshop teaches the essential somatic building blocks to help release the long-term and acute effects of traumatic stress in order to create comprehensive, permanent, positive change from the body level up. During days 1-2, topics include the physiology of threat, healthy autonomic response, the dynamics of self-regulation, the roles of the triune brain and the polyvagal nervous system in both activating and deactivating reactions to trauma. Participants will view and discuss several video demonstrations of the work of Peter Levine during both workshops. In the first two days, there will also be live demonstrations to illustrate various SE skills such as: • How to work with sensation, the language of the reptilian brain; •How to Identify, normalize, and stabilize traumatic reactions;•Specific ways to titrate and integrate trauma activation in the body;• The TRIPODS and ROSE models of tracking.

In addition, attendees will learn more about the following:  Tracking sensations, managing trauma-related activation, facilitating somatic integration through work with pendulum rhythms, and ways of helping with the titration or deactivation of various trauma responses.

Days 3-4 focus on additional Somatic Experiencing building blocks, with special emphasis on understanding and facilitating resources of empowerment, mastery, and expansion of choice and resiliency. Participants will learn specific ways to facilitate movement through time for problems that have been “frozen” due to various types of trauma; methods of containing and managing flooding and overactivation; and how to restore gentle cycles of sympathetic and parasympathetic interplay using various types of language patterns. 

Attendees will also have the opportunity to refine the following: • Identifying resources, • Effective use of invitational and body-based language, • Recognition of patterns of constriction, activation, discharge, and integration, • Coupling and dissociative dynamics.

Days 5-6 of the Somatic Experiencing Training will focus on understanding and working with basic survival responses, including orienting, fight, flight, and freeze responses, that are linked with the primitive reptilian brain and the limbic circuits. When these reactions are interrupted or blocked at different points in the threat response cycle, this creates subtle differences in physiology, which in turn, require different types of interventions. We will examine the threat response cycle in depth and participants will learn the most common disturbances in each stage. 

Participants will learn, inter alia: • How to discharge, release, and complete blocked threat response behaviours;• How to restore healthy fight, flight, and freeze responses;• How to uncouple or unlink toxic emotions such as rage, shame, and powerlessness;• How to re-establish a sense of timing, pace and space;• How to understand the role of the dorsal vagal system in the inescapable shock or freeze response.