We all have the Autonomic Nervous System. Unlike other animals we are not always able to engage with an appropriate threat response.  Road traffic accidents are classic examples of situations in which we are unable to fulfil threat responses. As humans we have an extended period of juvenility in which we may be too vulnerabie to fight or run away in certain situations, especially when involving a caregiver. Threats may not be so explicit, for example the lack of presence of a parent may signal to a child that they are not safe and therefore mobilise their nervous system. An unfulfilled threat response, or in some cases an accumulation of them, can cause maladaptive patterns within our nervous system, which Peter Levine defines as trauma. An individual may have a propensity to get stuck a sympathetic state, emotional symptoms of which can be anger or anxiety. Conversely a person may experience a tendency to inhabit a parasympathetic state, in which numbness or disassociation can be a pattern.

The aim of Somatic Experiencing is to bring more fluidity to our nervous system allowing us to move from one state to another and allow the discharge and integration of unexpressed responses. We do this through a technique called pendulation, guiding the client through an exploration of their nervous system through patterns of sympathetic activation and back to regulation, paying particular attention to what arises in their body. As we are addressing patterns within the nervous system we don’t necessarily need to explore big traumatic events as the echoes of those events are present within our nervous system in our day-to-day interactions.

The beauty and potency of this work is that we are working with our primal survival system on which all our cognitive and emotional narratives are built on. The understanding that our behaviours are driven by our system’s will to survive, can help to build self-compassion and start to dissolve our stories of shame and fault.