Living = Trauma

Peter Levine has spent much of his life working with trauma and traumatised people, and has developed an approach called Somatic Experiencing® that focuses on including, and putting emphasis, on the physiological aspects of trauma. He believes that working with the trauma through the body is necessary to any trauma resolution and a required step before addressing emotional and cognitive issues. That is because trauma is experienced in the body - see the video on the limbic system. If we are are still in this hyperarousal mode of being then we cannot access our language or problem solving area of the brain so easily so we have to work through this to be able to access feelings and the words to describe them.

What is good today, is we know we can do much more to help ourselves if and when we experience trauma. More about this later when I look at Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory in more detail.