What to Expect From a Somatic Experiencing Coaching Session
Each SE coaching session typically starts with an invitation to notice.
Regardless of your experience with somatic healing therapy, noticing what the body is doing is a great place to begin.
Why is this? Because the nervous system is where fight flight freeze and fawn response cycles originate. Noticing sensations gives us information about how this complex system is responding in this moment.
A specific place to bring your attention to is your breath. Without changing anything, observe whether your breath is deep or shallow. Can your attention settle here for a moment to see if anything changes? If something does change, notice what, where and how.
Next, from a place of sitting be curious if extra support might be helpful to your body. Try adjusting your legs, leaning back into the chair, or resting your head are all good places to start. Make one change, and see how the body responds. Really pay attention to the details of what’s here in the body.
After a moment or two, bring your awareness to any thoughts, emotions or beliefs that are showing up.
As content, stories, images, sensations or emotions emerge, one at a time we can work with them. Having a trained professional come alongside with empathy can help the body settle more deeply. Along the way, we’ll stop to pause and notice what changes might be happening.
Depending on the level of activation in the body, the nervous system can be more expansive or constricted. The work of trauma resolution is to take note of what sensations are here, asking nothing of them, and pay attention to where support might also be present in the field of awareness.
It is not unusual for some bodies to create constriction around ease and calmness as some bodies associate rest with threat. We work with whatever is here and part of the work is noticing what’s here without judgement.The nervous system doesn’t ask permission from me, so what it does is on my behalf, but not actually “me”. This understanding can be enormously helpful.
As a trained Somatic Experiencing Practitioner I’ll make sure your nervous system doesn’t get too overwhelmed too quickly (causing more stuck energy to form). Listening fully and catching when gestures or subtle body movements appear, can let these rigid patterns move through.
We won’t know how your body will respond until we’ve worked together a little. You’ll find some skills will resonate at first and others won’t. As you go along, you might rediscover some that you didn’t like at first, now seem like magic. I’ll help you develop keener awareness for both.
Releasing energy can create repair in the body. Resolution frees up the energy and allows room for curiosity about the situation or more agency to navigate through situations that previously would have been too much.
I’ve been practicing tools for 8 years, and I still find myself in situations and relationships where more learning is needed. But, I catch issues more quickly, which still surprises me. It is my experience that trauma resolution is never done for some bodies, but the relief created along the way is powerful and life changing.
For me, somatic experiencing at first felt awkward as I got used to leaning inward for the first time in my life. There is still grief that emerges for the years I missed this deeper connection. Now, there is more room to be more of me, more understanding more flexibility, and more positive associations of how my body acts on my behalf with such wisdom.
