Somatic Experiencing (SE)

The body as the site of healing

Most therapeutic approaches work primarily with memory, meaning, and cognition, with the story of what happened and the beliefs it generated. SE works somewhere prior to that, with the physical, physiological experience of threat and survival that underlies the story.

This doesn't mean we ignore memory or meaning. It means we approach them through the body, through sensation, movement, impulse, and the felt sense of what is happening right now. The body holds what the mind has been trying to process alone. SE creates the conditions for that held experience to finally move.

What makes SE particularly powerful is its orientation toward the nervous system's own capacity for regulation and healing. The therapist doesn't do the healing. The work creates the conditions for the body's own wisdom to complete what was interrupted.

Titration and pendulation

Two principles lie at the heart of SE:

Titration: working in small, manageable increments rather than plunging into the full intensity of traumatic material. SE moves carefully at the edges of difficult experience, allowing the nervous system to process gradually rather than flood. This is especially important for people with complex or early trauma histories, where the activation runs deep.

Pendulation: moving rhythmically between activation and resource, between difficulty and ease, between the charged and the settled. The nervous system learns, through repeated experience, that it can move between states — that activation doesn't have to be permanent, that there is somewhere safe to return to.

This pacing is not timidity. It is precision. It is what makes the work integrative rather than retraumatizing.

What Somatic Experiencing can address

Trauma & PTSD: working directly with the physiological activation underlying traumatic experience

Complex & developmental trauma: the accumulated nervous system impact of chronic adversity, neglect, or relational harm across time

Chronic stress & dysregulation: a nervous system that is persistently activated, collapsed, or oscillating between the two

Anxiety & hypervigilance: the body perpetually braced for something that may no longer be coming

Dissociation & numbness: a nervous system that has learned to disconnect from experience as a form of protection

Chronic physical symptoms: pain, fatigue, digestive difficulties, and somatic complaints with roots in unresolved activation

Freeze & shutdown: the collapse response that can look like depression but lives in the body as something more physical than emotional

Attachment & relational trauma: early experiences that shaped the nervous system's fundamental sense of safety in the world and with others

Shock trauma: accidents, medical procedures, natural disasters, sudden loss

What sessions feel like

Much of the work happens in the slowing down, in tracking what is present in the body right now, in staying with sensation long enough for it to move, in noticing the small shifts that indicate something is processing.

This attentiveness to the body is how the nervous system is given the chance to complete what it couldn't complete before. And the shifts, when they come, are often felt as something releasing, something settling, something that had been held for a long time finding its way through.

Sessions also draw on resource, on the felt sense of places, relationships, capacities, and experiences that carry safety and support. Building and returning to resource is not a warm-up. It is a core part of how the nervous system learns that regulation is possible.

My approach

I bring Somatic Experiencing into integration with EMDR, IFS, AEDP, and attachment-based approaches, which means the work is never confined to a single method. SE provides the somatic foundation: the attunement to the body, the careful pacing, the orientation toward the nervous system's own capacity to heal. Other approaches deepen and extend that work, into the inner world of parts, into the relational field, into the processing of memory and meaning.

For people with complex trauma, early developmental wounds, or a long history of feeling unsafe in their own body, this integrative foundation makes the work both deeper and more workable.

Something worth understanding

SE doesn't require you to revisit the details of what happened in order to heal. This surprises many people, particularly those who have been through approaches that required extensive retelling of traumatic events.

The nervous system doesn't need the story rehearsed. It needs the activation completed. SE works with the body's own intelligence, with what it is already trying to do, and creates the conditions for that process to finally move forward.

Healing, in SE, is less a destination than a gradual returning, to the body, to the present moment, to a felt sense of being able to inhabit your own life.

Format & availability

Somatic Experiencing therapy is offered online across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Sessions are 50–60 minutes. SE can be the primary approach of our work together or woven into an integrative frame, depending on your history and what your nervous system needs.