Somatic Experiencing™
Nothing is wrong with you.
Your body knows how to heal -- wellbeing and joy are your birthright.
To schedule a free consultation, call or text (507) 403-0937 or email [email protected]
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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves... - Mary Oliver, excerpt from "Wild Geese" |
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Somatic Experiencing™ (SE) is a powerful, body-based therapy for healing from the effects of trauma. Unlike traditional talk therapies, SE works at the level of your nervous system to allow you to release the stored physical energy of traumatic experience and let go of learned patterns of defensive reaction and reactivity that no longer serve you.
Ways SE can be helpful to you:
Jenifer specializes in:
In SE, we honor the fact that the defensive patterns you developed did serve you at one time – that's why you developed them. You are not bad or wrong or damaged for having developed them or for not knowing how to change them. Your system did what it evolved to do to protect you.
But sometimes your protective mechanisms get stuck in "ON" mode, like an alarm always going off, detecting threat where it doesn't exist. Because the protective system is automatic and doesn't require you to notice what's happening consciously, those protective responses can color the way you move through the world. When this happens, relationships, work, social time, and/or any other aspect of life can feel harder than it should.
Defense mechanisms sometimes simply outlive their usefulness. But you can, with gratitude for the way they helped you when you most needed them, let them go. This letting go will allow space to develop new ways of being at home in your body, leading to a greater sense of well-being, satisfaction, contentment and your innate capacity to access joy.
SE helps us slow down so we can work through trauma by releasing the ways it has been stored energetically, behaviorally, and in the negative stories we tell about our lives. SE works where traditional talk therapy often falls short because it goes beyond talking about problems to helping people heal trauma where it lives and makes itself felt: in the body.
What is trauma?
Trauma involves something that happened to you that was too much, too fast or too soon and which you weren’t able to process. That's it. It can happen anytime, anywhere and nearly everyone has experienced some form of trauma.
Trauma is not the event itself but how your body reacted to and stored the experience. At the physical level, which is where you experience it, trauma is an embodied pattern of nervous system reaction. To heal from it, we need to work holistically at the bodily level with all the ways traumatic patterns manifest. This means we attend to sensations in your body, like that pit-in-the-stomach feeling; your emotions, including feeling nothing at all; behaviors you engage in to manage your feelings; images, sense impressions and memories; and the stories you tell and the meanings you make about your life.
One-time traumas
Sometimes trauma can be easy to pinpoint – it’s our sweaty hands and racing heart when we get behind the wheel after an accident or pass by the hospital where we had surgery. This is classic PTSD with a cause that can be pinpointed. This doesn’t mean it’s less impactful; it just means we can identify when things changed and focus on healing from a singular experience.
Childhood and developmental trauma
Sometimes it’s hard to know where trauma began and the effects can impact an entire life. Abuse, neglect, loss and other hard experiences in childhood can lead to all sorts of struggles with relationships, especially with romantic and sexual partners. But any area of life can be affected from your work to your capacity to enjoy social activities. Sometimes people develop addictive behaviors to cope with persistent feelings of sadness, depression, low energy, anxiety or low self-esteem. Here's what I want you to know: Childhood trauma can be healed. Recovery takes time, but your body knows how to heal and healing is your birthright.
Ways SE can be helpful to you:
- You’re ready to work through challenging or traumatic experiences from any time in your life
- You struggle to make things happen or you feel “stuck”
- You’re aware that you engage in patterns of response in your relationships or work or other areas of your life that don't serve you and even hurt you
- You want support with challenging emotions, memories, dreams, images or your story-telling mind
- You want support with or to more fully explore feelings, memories, images, etc., that arise in your practice here in the Baseline classroom or at home
Jenifer specializes in:
- Attachment
- Childhood and developmental traumas
- Relationships challenges
- Feeling stuck
- Life transitions
- Grief and loss
- Non-traditional families
- Race-based traumatic stress (RBTS) and structural and systemic racism
- LGBTQIA+
- Trauma stemming from navigating jails, prisons and the criminal justice system
- Purpose and spirituality
- Writer’s and other creative blocks
In SE, we honor the fact that the defensive patterns you developed did serve you at one time – that's why you developed them. You are not bad or wrong or damaged for having developed them or for not knowing how to change them. Your system did what it evolved to do to protect you.
But sometimes your protective mechanisms get stuck in "ON" mode, like an alarm always going off, detecting threat where it doesn't exist. Because the protective system is automatic and doesn't require you to notice what's happening consciously, those protective responses can color the way you move through the world. When this happens, relationships, work, social time, and/or any other aspect of life can feel harder than it should.
Defense mechanisms sometimes simply outlive their usefulness. But you can, with gratitude for the way they helped you when you most needed them, let them go. This letting go will allow space to develop new ways of being at home in your body, leading to a greater sense of well-being, satisfaction, contentment and your innate capacity to access joy.
SE helps us slow down so we can work through trauma by releasing the ways it has been stored energetically, behaviorally, and in the negative stories we tell about our lives. SE works where traditional talk therapy often falls short because it goes beyond talking about problems to helping people heal trauma where it lives and makes itself felt: in the body.
What is trauma?
Trauma involves something that happened to you that was too much, too fast or too soon and which you weren’t able to process. That's it. It can happen anytime, anywhere and nearly everyone has experienced some form of trauma.
Trauma is not the event itself but how your body reacted to and stored the experience. At the physical level, which is where you experience it, trauma is an embodied pattern of nervous system reaction. To heal from it, we need to work holistically at the bodily level with all the ways traumatic patterns manifest. This means we attend to sensations in your body, like that pit-in-the-stomach feeling; your emotions, including feeling nothing at all; behaviors you engage in to manage your feelings; images, sense impressions and memories; and the stories you tell and the meanings you make about your life.
One-time traumas
Sometimes trauma can be easy to pinpoint – it’s our sweaty hands and racing heart when we get behind the wheel after an accident or pass by the hospital where we had surgery. This is classic PTSD with a cause that can be pinpointed. This doesn’t mean it’s less impactful; it just means we can identify when things changed and focus on healing from a singular experience.
Childhood and developmental trauma
Sometimes it’s hard to know where trauma began and the effects can impact an entire life. Abuse, neglect, loss and other hard experiences in childhood can lead to all sorts of struggles with relationships, especially with romantic and sexual partners. But any area of life can be affected from your work to your capacity to enjoy social activities. Sometimes people develop addictive behaviors to cope with persistent feelings of sadness, depression, low energy, anxiety or low self-esteem. Here's what I want you to know: Childhood trauma can be healed. Recovery takes time, but your body knows how to heal and healing is your birthright.