What Is Somatic Experiencing? Understanding the Body’s Role in Healing Trauma
Quick Answer: What Is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-centered therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine that helps people heal from trauma by working with physical sensations not just thoughts and words. Rather than reliving painful memories through talk alone, SE gently guides the nervous system through the survival responses that got “stuck” during a traumatic experience. Research shows it can meaningfully reduce PTSD symptoms, depression, and chronic stress. SE may be a particularly good fit for people who have tried talk therapy and found it limiting, those with physical symptoms tied to trauma, and anyone who struggles to put their experiences into words. At Sandoval Therapy, we draw on somatic and trauma-informed approaches to help you move toward lasting healing at a pace that feels safe for you.
When the Body Remembers What the Mind Can’t Let Go
Most of us understand trauma as something that lives in the mind an unwanted memory, a thought we can’t shake, or a story we carry with us. But trauma does not stay neatly in the realm of thought. It also lives in the body.
When something overwhelming happens a car accident, an assault, childhood neglect, a sudden loss, or a long period of chronic stress the nervous system mobilizes to protect us. We fight, flee, or freeze. And when those experiences are too much to fully process in the moment, the body can get stuck in that survival response long after the danger has passed. The result can look like anxiety that doesn’t make sense, numbness, chronic tension, unexplained physical pain, or a persistent feeling that something is just not right.
Somatic Experiencing is a therapy designed to address exactly that. It meets the trauma where it lives in the body and offers a path toward release and resolution. At Sandoval Therapy, this is one of the approaches we draw on when working with clients in Pasadena and the greater Los Angeles area who are ready to explore healing beyond what words alone can offer.
What Is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-centered approach to trauma therapy developed by Dr. Peter Levine in the 1970s. The word somatic simply means “of or relating to the body,” and SE takes that connection seriously. Rather than relying solely on conversation and cognitive reflection, SE integrates awareness of physical sensation as a central part of the healing process.
According to Psychology Today, somatic therapy rests on the understanding that mind and body are intimately connected that our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations all influence one another. When talk therapy has reached its limits, the body becomes a largely untapped resource for deeper healing.
Dr. Levine’s foundational insight came from observing animals in the wild: despite regularly facing life-threatening situations, they rarely show the lasting effects of trauma that humans do because they naturally “complete” their survival responses.
Animals shake off the experience, trembling, running once the danger is gone. In humans, those natural discharge processes are often interrupted. Social norms, the nature of traumatic events, and the sheer overwhelm of certain experiences can leave the nervous system holding an incomplete response. SE works to help the body finish what it could not at the time.
How Does Somatic Experiencing Work?
SE guides a person’s attention toward interoception the ability to sense and interpret signals from inside the body as well as awareness of physical position and movement. Research co-authored by Dr. Levine and published in Frontiers in Psychology describes SE as working by helping the body complete thwarted, biologically-based self-protective responses while discharging excess activation from the nervous system.
Two principles are central to how SE unfolds in practice:
Titration
Titration refers to the careful, gradual pacing of the work. Rather than asking a client to dive into the most painful parts of a traumatic experience, the therapist guides them toward difficult material in very small doses enough to begin processing, not so much as to become overwhelmed. Think of it as turning a dial slowly rather than flipping a switch.
Pendulation
Pendulation describes the back-and-forth movement between states of activation and states of calm. A therapist might help a client touch briefly on a distressing sensation, then guide them back to a resource a memory, image, or physical sensation associated with safety and ease before returning to the harder material. Over time, this builds the nervous system’s capacity to move through difficulty without becoming flooded or shut down.
In a session, this might look like a therapist gently inviting you to notice what is happening in your body as you speak a tightening in your throat, a heaviness in your chest, a sense of warmth or tingling and simply being curious about those sensations without judgment or pressure to fix them. The talking may continue, but the body’s responses become part of the therapeutic conversation.
At Sandoval Therapy, we apply these principles from the very first session. When a client comes to us carrying the weight of a difficult experience, we do not move straight toward the hardest material. We begin by helping you identify what safety and ease feel like in your own body building that felt foundation first, so that when we do approach more difficult territory, your nervous system has somewhere steady to return to.
Who Can Benefit from Somatic Experiencing?
SE was developed primarily with trauma and PTSD in mind, but its application has grown considerably over the decades. It may be a meaningful fit for a wide range of people who commonly benefit, including:
Single-Event Trauma Survivors
Accidents, assaults, or natural disasters
Complex or Childhood Trauma
Long-standing, layered experiences
Anxiety & Chronic Stress
Including emotional numbing
Physical Complaints
Chronic pain, fatigue, or tension
Talk Therapy Plateaus
Those who feel they’ve hit a wall
Difficulty Verbalizing
No need to narrate trauma in detail
Importantly, SE does not require a person to narrate their trauma in detail or to find the right words for what happened to them. For people who struggle to verbalize distressing experiences, this is a significant and often welcome difference from traditional approaches.
A 2025 Finding on Accessibility
A 2025 study published through the National Institutes of Health found that people who had previously faced barriers to mental health care including negative past therapy experiences and limited access showed particular openness to somatic approaches. The study also found that both patients and clinical staff considered somatic therapy acceptable and appropriate for addressing PTSD. This points to SE’s potential value for people who have felt dismissed, misunderstood, or simply stuck in other therapeutic settings.
At Sandoval Therapy, we regularly work with adults across Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, Glendale, Alhambra, and the broader Los Angeles area who carry exactly these kinds of experiences. Many of our clients come to us after years of managing symptoms that never fully resolved chronic tension, emotional distance, or patterns in relationships that keep repeating not knowing that those patterns often have roots in the body. Somatic Experiencing gives us a way to work at that level alongside you.
What Does the Research Say?
The evidence supporting SE has grown steadily over the last decade, and the findings are promising. Here’s an honest look at what the evidence shows and where the gaps remain.
What the Studies Found
-
•
A Comprehensive Scoping Review: A review published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology examined 83 articles and systematically analyzed 16 studies that met rigorous scientific criteria, finding preliminary evidence for positive effects of SE on PTSD-related symptoms, as well as early evidence for its positive impact on broader measures of emotional and physical well-being across both trauma survivors and individuals without a trauma history.
-
•
Resource Orientation as a Key Factor: The review also identified resource orientation helping clients connect with internal and external sources of calm before approaching difficult material as one of SE’s key therapeutic factors, reflecting the careful, supportive pacing that defines the approach.
-
•
Encouraging, Not Conclusive: SE is a relatively young field of formal study, and researchers acknowledge that more large-scale, independently funded trials are still needed. The current evidence is encouraging, not conclusive.
-
•
Meaningful Symptom Reductions: What exists including the first published randomized controlled trial of SE points to real and meaningful reductions in trauma symptoms and depression for those who engage in SE treatment. For many clients, particularly those who have not found sufficient relief through other methods, that is a meaningful finding.
Sources: Kuhfuß et al. (2021), Eur. J. Psychotraumatology · Payne, Levine & Crane-Godreau (2015) · Harwood-Gross et al. (2025)
What to Expect in a Session
A Somatic Experiencing session feels quite different from what many people picture when they think of therapy. When clients come to Sandoval Therapy for somatic work, one of the first things we tell them is this: you will not be asked to relive your trauma story in graphic detail or to repeatedly revisit the most painful moments of your past.
A Pace Your Nervous System Can Tolerate
We work alongside you at a pace your nervous system can tolerate, inviting you to bring gentle awareness to sensations in your body as you speak noticing when something shifts, tightens, softens, or releases and to sit with that with curiosity rather than urgency.
Identifying Your Resources
Early in our work together, we help you identify your resources: the people, places, images, or physical sensations that feel grounding and settling. These become anchors we return to throughout our sessions.
Moving Between Activation and Calm
From there, we move carefully between moments of activation and moments of calm helping your nervous system gradually build the capacity to move through what it has been holding. Our clients often describe SE sessions as surprisingly gentle. The work can be deeply felt, but it is never forced. We follow your body’s signals, not a predetermined script.
What Are the Top 3 Somatic Exercises?
While SE is best practiced with a trained therapist, there are somatic exercises that draw on its principles and can be used to support nervous system regulation between sessions. Here are three of the most foundational:
Orienting
Orienting is one of the most distinctly SE-informed exercises, and one of the most immediately calming. It involves slowly and deliberately looking around the space you are in noticing colors, shapes, textures, and light as if seeing the room for the first time. The nervous system uses this kind of conscious, unhurried environmental scan to register that the present moment is safe. Even thirty seconds of this practice can shift the nervous system out of a threat response.
Grounding
Grounding anchors awareness in the body’s contact with the physical world. You might press your feet firmly into the floor and notice the sensation of being supported, feel the weight of your body against a chair, or hold something with texture in your hands. In SE, grounding is often used as a resource a way to establish a felt sense of safety before approaching more difficult material.
Tracking & Pendulation
Tracking means bringing gentle attention to whatever sensations are present in your body right now warmth, tightness, tingling, heaviness without trying to change them. Pendulation takes this further by moving attention back and forth between a sensation that feels uncomfortable or activated and one that feels neutral or pleasant. Over time, this rhythmic movement teaches the nervous system that activation is not permanent, and that calm is always accessible.
These exercises are supportive tools, not substitutes for therapeutic work. At Sandoval Therapy, we introduce practices like these as part of a broader therapeutic relationship giving clients something concrete to work with between sessions, while we do the deeper, guided work together.
How Sandoval Therapy Can Help
At Sandoval Therapy, various techniques are used to help you work through what you are carrying. With a personalized approach, you will receive care tailored to your needs working toward understanding, growth, and lasting change.
We help adults and couples explore patterns rooted in trauma, stress, relationships, identity, and emotional disconnection, using compassionate, trauma-informed therapy approaches. Whether your work calls for individualized psychodynamic exploration, CBT-based skill-building, a systemic lens on your relationships, or a deeper understanding of how your attachment history shapes your present we offer a range of approaches to meet you where you are.
Serving Pasadena and Greater Los Angeles
Both in-person and telehealth services are available. We are based in Pasadena, CA, and proudly serve clients throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including Arcadia, Monrovia, Glendale, Alhambra, and surrounding communities.
If you are wondering whether therapy is right for you, we warmly invite you to reach out. You do not need to have everything figured out that is exactly what we are here for.
Frequently Asked Questions About Somatic Experiencing
Answers to the questions people most commonly ask when researching Somatic Experiencing therapy.
Who is Somatic Experiencing useful for?
Somatic Experiencing is most often used with people who are navigating the effects of trauma but the range of who it can help is broader than many people realize. It is commonly used with survivors of single-event traumas such as accidents, assaults, and natural disasters; people with complex or childhood trauma; individuals experiencing chronic anxiety, emotional numbing, or persistent stress that does not resolve through talk therapy alone; and people whose trauma has expressed itself as physical symptoms, such as chronic pain, tension headaches, fatigue, or digestive issues.
SE is also a strong option for those who struggle to verbalize what they went through. Because the work centers on body sensation rather than storytelling, it does not require a person to narrate their trauma clearly or find the “right” words. This makes it accessible for people who feel speechless about their experiences, or whose nervous systems become overwhelmed when they try to speak about what happened.
If you have been in therapy before and felt like something important was not being reached, SE may offer a different angle of entry into healing. At Sandoval Therapy, we often work with clients who describe exactly that feeling and for many of them, shifting to a body-centered approach has made all the difference.
What is the difference between Somatic Experiencing and EMDR?
Both Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) are trauma-focused therapies that engage the nervous system but they do so through different pathways.
EMDR, developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, asks a client to hold a specific traumatic memory in mind while following a form of bilateral stimulation typically side-to-side eye movements, but sometimes tapping or sound. The process works by helping the brain reprocess the stored memory so that it loses its emotional charge. EMDR is more structured and protocol-driven, targeting specific memories and moving through a defined sequence of phases.
SE, by contrast, does not focus directly on specific memories. Instead, it follows what the body is doing right now the sensations, impulses, and physiological responses present in the current moment and works to complete the interrupted survival responses that trauma left behind. It tends to be more exploratory and naturalistic in its flow, guided by the client’s body rather than a fixed protocol.
Both approaches can be effective for trauma and PTSD. Some people find the clear structure of EMDR helpful; others find SE’s slower, sensation-led pace more tolerable, particularly when trauma feels too activated to approach directly through memory recall. At Sandoval Therapy, we are glad to talk through these options with you and help you understand which direction might best serve your particular history and goals or whether an integrated approach drawing on both might be the right fit.
What are the top 3 somatic exercises?
While SE is best practiced with a trained therapist, three of the most foundational somatic exercises are Orienting (slowly and deliberately looking around your space, noticing colors, shapes, and textures, to signal to the nervous system that the present moment is safe), Grounding (anchoring awareness in the body’s contact with the physical world, such as pressing your feet into the floor or feeling the weight of your body against a chair), and Tracking and Pendulation (gently noticing sensations in the body and moving attention back and forth between activated and neutral or pleasant sensations).
These exercises are supportive tools, not substitutes for therapeutic work. At Sandoval Therapy, we introduce practices like these as part of a broader therapeutic relationship giving clients something concrete to work with between sessions, while we do the deeper, guided work together.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical advice, a clinical diagnosis, or a substitute for professional mental health treatment. The information presented reflects current research and general therapeutic approaches, but every person’s experience is unique. If you are experiencing distress, mental health symptoms, or believe you may be affected by generational or historical trauma, please consult with a licensed therapist or mental health professional. If you are in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or reach your local emergency services.