Introduction
On Saturday, March 27, 2021, the first-year Somatic Experiencing training resumed. I took days five and six, finishing on Sunday the 28th.
The first half of the beginning year runs six days in total: four days from February 26 to March 1, and two more on March 27 and 28. The second half comes in late October and late November.
Why Animals Do Not Develop Trauma
SE grew out of a question: why is it that animals do not develop trauma?
When an animal meets a predator it fights or it flees. When neither is available, a third option appears — it freezes. Animals have a way of discharging that energy, which is why, it is thought, the experience does not become trauma.
Trauma here means being held for a long time by an injury to the psyche, or carrying its negative effects.
We tend to look for what caused a trauma.
What I find interesting about SE is that the cause is not treated as the problem. What matters is that the energy of the shock stayed in the body, incompletely, and was never finished with.
Coaching and counselling would ask how the trauma came about and work from the story. SE asks what happened in the body, and follows the changes in the autonomic nervous system. That is the part I find fascinating.
Peter Levine demonstrated clinically that the trauma resolves only when that energy is discharged, as it is in animals, and built SE around this.
Resolution means completing a process that was left unfinished inside the person. That is where the interest of SE lies.
The beginning year spends twelve days on how what was observed in animals applies to human beings.
Where Rolfing and SE Overlap
Peter Levine came out of Rolfing, and it shows. I want to write about where the two overlap.
As long as we live on this planet, gravity is acting on us. Rolfing asks where in the body weight is felt, and works from the idea that posture organizes itself when the relationship with gravity is in order.
In walking, for instance, organized movement means the lower body receives the ground fully — landing with gravity — while the upper body moves freely. The lower body feels gravity, which is grounding; the upper body lengthens from that base and moves. Two directions, downward and upward, and the movement becomes as natural as it can be.
Rolfing uses the words oriented and orientation to mean where a movement is initiated from.
Sitting works the same way. Feet on the floor, sitting bones supported by the chair — both downward — and the torso lengthening up from the sitting bones.
What I notice in sessions is that people tend to fall into one of two groups:
- those who are good at getting the feet on the ground — Ground Oriented
- those who are good at moving the upper body — Space Oriented
You have probably heard people described this way: someone with their head in the clouds, or someone clearly grounded but not going anywhere.
Four Things That Shape Orientation
What interests me is that orientation is shaped by four things:
- Physical — what is changing in the body
- Coordination — how the body works together
- Perception — how one sees the world
- Meaning — what one makes the world mean
Rolfing works through fascia, viscera and the musculoskeletal system, and organizes the first two. The third and fourth are held to follow from that.
That is not to say they go untreated. During Phase III of the basic training, a set of notes by Pedro Prado called “Psychobiological Goals” is handed out, setting down what may arise in each of the ten sessions — not in the body, but in the psyche and in the relationship. They get less time than the hands-on material, but the view itself is passed on.
What I learned most from the SE training was to look at the third and the fourth slowly, from the angle of what changes in the body when trauma occurs.
The Boundary Exercise
The most interesting part of the six days was an exercise about how one sees the world.
In pairs, one guiding and one receiving, you lay out a ribbon or rope six or seven metres long and set your own boundary. Then you step inside it and put into words what the body is doing.
Doing this myself, my heart started going and I could not settle for a while. Something felt threatening at forty-five degrees off to my left, and I said I could not look there. The guide told me to feel the soles of my feet, and I gradually came back.
Then we moved on to imagining a stuffed animal and bringing it closer. Inside four metres my body reacted; my chest tightened.
What was interesting is that when I stayed with the state inside the boundary and put strong attention around my back, the tension stopped coming, even as the toy came nearer.
Merely imagining something as unthreatening as a stuffed animal produced that much change inside. It gave me some sense of how much we are affected simply by looking around us in ordinary life.
For what it is worth, when I
- turn more than forty-five degrees to the left, or
- raise my eyes or head above the midline of my gaze
my field narrows, my muscles tighten, and the world seems to shrink.
It differs from person to person, but a narrowed field may come from past trauma — being shouted at, a traffic accident, an injury.
SE also uses the word orientation, for looking around at one’s surroundings. That how one sees the world, and what one makes it mean, should show up as bodily symptoms is what I find remarkable.
Conclusion
People carrying trauma have lost the boundary between themselves and their surroundings, and building that is where the work starts. To some degree, though, this is true of everyone.
Disturb the boundary even slightly and the autonomic nervous system activates. What I want to keep in mind is to intervene slowly, in small amounts, so as not to over-activate it.
The six days of the first half were spent on the basic vocabulary of SE. The view of trauma had been passed on in the basic Rolfing training as well, in the notes. But when a whole system is put in front of you for six days, what you take in is entirely different.
Before late October I plan to receive several individual SE sessions. I am curious what that will bring. There are things I am thinking about in relation to trauma, and I will be watching for those as well.
Note, September 2026
The SE curriculum runs three years — beginning, intermediate and advanced — twelve days each, thirty-six days in all.
I stopped after the beginning year. The first six days are what this article describes; the second six came in late October and late November of 2021, as scheduled. I never wrote about the second half. At some point I intend to set down SE as a whole.
I stopped because the beginning year gave me enough to work with. What it covered was the basic vocabulary and how to follow sensation in the body. Getting that into my own sessions took a while on its own.
The advanced year, when held in Japan, was to be taught by Pedro Prado.
He is the person who wrote the “Psychobiological Goals” referred to above. I read those notes during Phase III in 2015, began SE six years later, and, had I continued, would have been taught by the man himself. At the time I did not see the connection.
Rereading the notes now, other things stand out.
Sessions four, five and seven describe discharges of the autonomic nervous system, the need to bring the timing of touch into line with them, the value of proceeding in small amounts, and the importance of holding a safe container. The vocabulary I later learned in SE is already there. Session ten describes how a ten-series ends: the practitioner should be prepared to let the client go, and being able to receive whatever gratitude comes at the end is itself part of the closure.
I did read some of it at the time. But reading and taking in are two different things. It was considerably later that I came to understand what any of it meant.
There is a layer of people between Rolfing and SE. Pedro Prado, who wrote those notes, is an SE instructor and comes to Japan often for SE trainings. Lael Keen, an advanced Rolfing instructor, is an SE instructor as well, and Peter Levine, who founded SE, is himself a Rolfer.
The same people stand on both sides. That much can be said as fact; it does not make the two systems the same thing. But where people move back and forth, something is probably shared.