“The very structure of trauma, including hyperarousal, dissociation, constriction and helplessness, is based on the evolution of predator/prey survival behaviours.
The symptoms of trauma are the result of a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time.
By enabling this frozen response to thaw, move ahead in time and then complete, trauma can be healed.”
Peter Levine

Somatic Experiencing (SE) offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. A shortterm, naturalistic approach to the resolution and healing of trauma developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine, SE is based upon the observation that wild prey animals, though threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized. The most primitive portions of the brain are activated when a person perceives threat. At the same time, certain higher areas in the cortex associated with language, observations and planning are shut down. Animals in the wild utilize innate mechanisms to regulate and discharge the high levels of energy arousal associated with survival behaviours. “Modelling” the animals' build-in “immunity” to trauma enables people to return to equilibrium in the aftermath of fear, rage, helplessness, loss and other extreme experiences.

Although humans are born with virtually the same regulatory mechanisms as animals, the function of these innate systems is often overridden or inhibited. Our reluctance to surrender to the instinctual prevents the complete discharge of survival energies. This undischarged energy remains “stuck” in the body and the nervous system. In bringing together the highest cerebral functions of refined awareness with the primitive animal instincts, we are able to develop our own natural ability to rebound after extreme events. Transforming trauma in this way allows us to become more fully human.

How does Somatic Experiencing® differ from other therapeutic modalities?

• SE helps to develop the organismic capacity for self-regulation.
• SE employs awareness of body sensation to help people “renegotiate” and heal rather than relive or re-enact trauma.
• SE's guidance of the bodily “felt-sense”, allows the highly aroused survival energies to be safely experienced and
  gradually discharged.
• SE “titrates” experience, rather than evoking catharsis - which can overwhelm the regulatory mechanisms of the organism.
• SE helps eliminate pitfalls of re-traumatization and the spurious generation of “false memories”.

Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner Training Outline

The complete training program consists of three levels - Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced - with 2 modules, each 6 days in length.
The training is conducted in English with German translation.

Beginning:

• Understand the physiological basis of trauma.
• The function of the nervous system.
• Identify signals and signs in the body and the nervous system
• Teaching of basic SE-techniques
• SE-Exercises for grounding, boundaries and containment
• Practice establishing defensive orienting responses
• To work with sensation, impression, behaviour, affect, meaning
• To work with fight, flight and freeze
• Resource
• Symptoms
• Attain skills to avoid pitfalls of re-traumatization and false memory
• Somatic first aid

Intermediate:

• Short repetition of the themes from the first year and integration
• Examine the different categories and causes of traumatic shock and approaches to treating each case:
• Global high intensity trauma (early traumata, fever, drowning, fetal distress, traumatic birth…).
• Inescapable attack (rape, physical abuse, mugging, incest…)
• Physical injury (Operations, anaesthesia, burns, poisoning…)
• High impact accidents, head injury
• Emotional trauma i.e. severe neglect and abandonment, severe loss, ongoing abuse
• Natural disaster (earthquakes, fires, floods, social dislocation…)
• Horror i.e. seeing an accident, watching someone else be abused, raped, killed or tortured
• what is the difference between shock-trauma and developmental-trauma

Advanced:

• Short repetition of the themes from the first two years and Integration
• Neurophysiology
• The work with syndromes (chronic. fatigue, fibromyalgie, asthma, migraine).
• Vertical techniques
• SE-bodywork: theory and practice
• The art of therapy

The advanced training will be lead by Raja Selvam, Ph.D.

Each module can be booked separately.

Prerequisites for participation:

Prerequisite to participate in the training is a 2-day introductory seminar in Somatic Experiencing.
We are offering an SE Intro seminar February 4th – February 5th, 2011 or March 31st - April 1st, 2011
at UTA Academy, Cologne with Elisabeth Schneider-Kaiser (Seniorassistant of SE). The Indtroductory Seminars
are in German.

Participants also need to have completed either a training in psychotherapy resp. bodywork or be part of one of the following professional guilds: medical practitioners, dentists, physiotherapists, social workers, alternative practitioners, ergo therapists, logaoedics, educators.