The feelings and trauma we internalise as children and adults result in somatic memory—where your body holds onto the emotional and physical symptoms that you experienced during a turbulent time.
Unresolved trauma from narcissistic abuse can leave you feeling drained, exhausted, or in a hyper-vigilant state as you stay in the trauma responses of fight, flight, or freeze. This releases the stress hormone, cortisol, which negatively affects mood, memory, sleep, focus, digestion, and your immune system.
The longer you ignore or avoid the trauma, the deeper it roots.
Somatic Experiencing is a mind-body approach to heal the physical and psychological symptoms from trauma. It works by using your body’s natural self-regulating systems to restore balance and encourage deep healing and post-traumatic growth.
As you become aware of sensations in your body (soma), Somatic Experiencing seeks to gently re-establish the natural flow of your life energy, supporting the safe release of symptoms from the nervous system, putting the past to rest, and restoring body, heart, and mind to a relaxed wholeness.
In this way, you can reverse the distressing cycle of symptom escalation and gain steadily more confidence in your abilities to address trauma in a safe, conscious, and life-affirming manner.
Somatic Experiencing uses a ‘bottom up’ approach to healing one’s trauma. We start with your available resources, then work with the basic parts of the brain-stem and body – the survival centres – rather than the cerebral or rational parts. It is here that trauma was introduced and continues to have an effect on us.
Over time, as your body becomes more stabilised and your survival centres develop a more healthy balance, the higher brain centres can begin to make clear meaning of the events. This helps the past be left in the past and allows us to create a peaceful new memory as a result.
As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (Intermediate), I’ve received the latest education in somatic experiences and have the training and tools to help my clients restore mental and physical balance and discover post-traumatic growth and wellness.