Introduction
This year, 2021, I began something new: three years of training in Somatic Experiencing. The first day was Friday, February 26, so I want to write about SE here.
Before that, though, I want to go back six years, to how I became interested in it at all.
A Book from the Rolfing Training
I had done what I could at the pharmaceutical company, so I took a year off and travelled around the world, from July 2014 to June 2015. During that year I took the basic Rolfing training in Munich, from August 2014 to March 2015. (I have written about that in detail — see Becoming a Certified Rolfer in Europe — The Certification Training of the European Rolfing Association.)
A Rolfing series runs ten sessions, each following a different sequence. Each time, the work goes through fascia, helping the client recover — without strain, naturally — a posture that costs them nothing.
A posture that costs nothing is not necessarily a correct one. It is something each of us finds for ourselves. We do know, underneath, which state is easy for the body; stress and the accumulation of a life make that place hard to locate. The point of a series is to find it again, together.
Learning the ten sequences takes close to seven hundred hours of training, much of it spent on knowledge about the body. At the same time, working on the body affects the mind.
What interests me is that Rolfing does not treat the mind. Rather than focusing on what has no substance, it works on what does — the body — on the understanding that the mind can be reached that way in the end.
That said, it would be false to say the mind never comes up in the training. Once the work goes deep, a small change at depth can bring up something a person would rather not have known, or feeling that has been held down. So when the deeper sessions begin, the training also covers how to think about that, at a basic level.
At the start of the training we were given a reading list, and on it was Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger – Healing Trauma. Levine is a Rolfer and the founder of SE. Ideas from that book came up in the training as well.
Why Animals Do Not Become Traumatized
According to the book, when an animal meets a predator it fights or it flees, and when neither is available, a third option appears — it freezes. What is interesting is that animals have a way of discharging that energy, so it 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 makes Levine distinctive is his view that the causal event is not the problem: what causes the trouble is that the energy of the shock stayed in the body, incompletely.
And he showed clinically, treating patient after patient, that the trauma resolves only after a process of discharging that energy fully, as an animal does.
What Levine emphasizes is that resolution comes through calling up the sensations felt inside that person’s own body, and taking that perspective seriously.
Somatic means of the body; experiencing means experience.
Going into the deeper sessions of a Rolfing series, one holds in mind that unresolved trauma may be present, and meets the client neutrally. Having that thought in the background makes it possible to stay steady.
Why Now
When I was first certified as a Rolfer, the truth is that trauma did not interest me at all. Posture would organize itself, and the mind would change along with it, and that was what held me. For the first five years of practice I was absorbed in the work itself.
What changed things was a recurrence of atopic dermatitis in 2020, which took a good deal of attention. It settled in the autumn of that year.
Thinking it over, the condition first appeared during my doctoral years, developing gradually under the pressure of academic harassment from my professor.
Which is to say: that was trauma, wasn’t it.
Something I had kept a lid on opened up, in the course of last year.
With that behind it, the thought grew stronger — that learning SE, as a way of reaching the autonomic nervous system through bodywork, might change something.
The Training Begins
The timing worked out. Notice of the Makuhari II training came through the Rolfers’ mailing list, I applied for the course starting on Friday, February 26, 2021, my paperwork went through, and the first day arrived.
Six days in the first half and six in the second, twelve days a year over three years, thirty-six days for the full curriculum, taught by Ariel Girretto, who is based in the United States. Because of the pandemic, the first year is being held over Zoom.
Conclusion
I cannot write about the content of the training, under SE’s rules. But since some people may be curious about SE, I would like to introduce as much of it as I can.
Note, September 2026
This article gives my reason for becoming interested in SE: that Peter Levine’s book appeared on a reading list during the Rolfing training, and that the ideas in it became the way in.
Looking back, there was a second way in.
During Phase III in 2015, a set of notes by Pedro Prado called “Psychobiological Goals” was 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.
The entry for session four says that the areas touched in that session are ones many people are unconscious of, or unused to having touched, and that receiving touch there can bring up a history of trauma. Discharges of the autonomic nervous system may follow, and the timing of touch may have to change. Proceeding in small amounts is strongly recommended, and because questions of boundaries can surface, keeping a safe setting and container matters.
Session five says the same about touch in breathing and direct touch on the belly: proceed in small amounts, track the pace of the discharges. Session seven repeats the caution, and adds that a safe container is extremely important for that work.
Proceeding in small amounts. Tracking the discharges. A safe container. The vocabulary I would go on to learn in SE was already there.
I read some of it at the time. But I did not know what it was saying. Reading and taking in are two different things.
The article says that trauma held no interest for me when I was first certified. I think that is accurate. But it was not that I passed it by out of indifference — I had no way of doing otherwise. It took time for what had happened to me to connect with those words.
Something similar had happened before. During Phase I in 2014, we were given Gallagher and Cole’s paper on the distinction between body schema and body image. I did not read that one either.
The moment something is passed on and the moment one can take it in rarely coincide.