SE is based upon the observation that wild prey animals, though threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized.  Animals in the wild naturally regulate and discharge the high levels of energy arousal (fight/flight) associated with defensive survival behaviors and chronic stress.  This provides animals with a built-in “immunity” to trauma and stress that enables them to return to normal in the aftermath of highly charged life-threatening experiences.

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SE does not require you to re-tell or re-live the traumatic event, which is helpful especially in the case of pre-verbal trauma.  Working through the trauma narrative can be done more safely using SE, as it works more gradually to build capacity and resilience than typical prolonged exposure techniques.  SE offers the opportunity to engage, complete, and resolve—in a slow and supported way—the body’s instinctual fight, flight, freeze, and collapse responses.  Individuals locked in anxiety or rage then relax into a growing sense of peace and safety.  Those stuck in depression gradually find their feelings of hopelessness and numbness transformed into empowerment, triumph, and mastery.  SE catalyzes corrective bodily experiences that contradict those of fear and helplessness and seeks to restore a sense of aliveness and pleasure.  This resets the nervous system, restores inner balance, enhances resilience to stress, and increases people’s vitality, equanimity, and capacity to actively engage in life.

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Processing trauma is not the same thing as simply talking about it. Focusing exclusively on the story or cognitive content can trigger a highly activated state of survival energy with no opportunity for resolution of the built-up charge in the body.  Unlike traditional talk therapy, SE emphasizes the renegotiating of traumatic or stressful experiences to achieve resolution and experience empowered vitality and balance, as opposed to finding temporary relief through talking, medicating or catharsis (a large buildup of venting of emotion or energy).  SE’s guidance of the bodily “felt sense,” allows the highly aroused or frozen survival energies to be safely experienced and gradually discharged.  SE “titrates” your experience (breaks it down into small, incremental steps) so that you can remain embodied and present, rather than evoking a mindless catharsis or becoming flooded.   SE can support you to befriend and come back into your body in a safer way, and work through disassociation and fragmentation to greater wholeness and presence.