Somatic Experiencing Therapy
in Athens, GA and online across Georgia
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a form of somatic therapy (a body-based approach) used to work with trauma, chronic stress, and nervous system overwhelm, developed by Dr. Peter Levine. Rather than relying on talking alone, SE helps you notice what’s happening in your body and works with your nervous system directly, in small, manageable steps, so it can shift old survival patterns and find its way back to regulation. The goal isn’t to relive the past, but to help your body feel safer and more at ease in the present.
What Nervous System Regulation Actually Means
The terms “somatic” and “nervous system regulation” are everywhere right now: from breathing exercises to cold plunges, and expensive multi-day retreats to five-minute hacks online. While it’s great that awareness about regulation and somatic techniques is growing, it can also make it hard to know who to trust.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) isn’t a hack or a wellness trend. It’s a clinical approach developed over decades to work with your nervous system’s stored history and the patterns your body built to survive. Rather than learning to feel more calm for an afternoon, SE is designed to expand your nervous system's baseline capacity over time, designed to support lasting change.
An important note: Being regulated does not mean you are calm all the time. It means that your nervous system can respond to threats and emotions as needed, and can come back to a sense of settling when a threat has ended. Our goal is not for you to be unaffected by life, but for you to be able to respond to things in a way that aligns with who you want to be in the world and allows you to best care for yourself.
The Body Remembers: How Somatic Experiencing Reaches What Insight Alone Can't
While talk therapy can be very beneficial, it may only address one piece: your cognitive awareness. Having insight into a pattern doesn’t necessarily change how your body reacts to a trigger (like pain or stress), since these responses often move faster than your thoughts can catch up.
Somatic Experiencing works with these patterns directly, tracking sensation, automatic movements, and other nonverbal signals your nervous system is already giving you. Instead of only working top-down (thoughts → feelings → behavior), we can meet your nervous system right where it is, often starting with the body itself.
This allows for change that insight alone can’t reach, without needing to fully understand why a pattern exists before being able to support it. Understanding the “why” is welcome and often even more possible when we learn to gather more information from the body, but it’s not a requirement for helping you feel better.
We often talk about the brain and the rest of the body as if they are separate entities, but they are interconnected parts of one system. When something overwhelming happens, natural survival response states (fight, flight, freeze) engage to keep us safe, creating chemical and physical changes that help us react quickly, without thinking.
When trauma or chronic stress can’t be fully processed or discharged, the body may become stuck in a high alert state. This may show up as a racing heart, a stomach that won’t settle, or a body that stays braced and tense long after the danger has passed.
How Somatic Experiencing Works
Somatic Experiencing uses a few key concepts to guide this process:
Titration - Traumatic events often feel like “too much, too soon, too fast.” To avoid re-enacting the same pattern of overwhelm (or flooding) in sessions, we work with small, manageable amounts of activation. This allows us to work at your nervous system’s pace, gently growing your capacity to feel more without becoming flooded.
Pendulation - Much like breathing in and out, it is natural for your body to be able to activate to address a threat and then move back to a sense of safety and settling. Because this may have been interrupted by trauma or chronic stress, SE guides your nervous system to practice and re-establish this innate pattern.
Felt sense - Learning to tune into the whole-body experience of a feeling is key to renegotiating nervous system patterns. Tracking physical and internal sensations alone can often bring about a shift and can also help process implicit memories in the body (such as things that happened before you learned to talk or parts of a traumatic experience that feels murky when you talk about it).
Ultimately, these lead to:
Renegotiation/discharge - When we aren’t able to complete a survival response (fight, flight, freeze), it may become “stuck” - the body reacts as if the threat is still happening. SE guides the body to “complete” these responses by engaging the felt sense and allowing the body to respond to the feeling on its own terms, in its own time. As the body discharges this stuck energy, it can reconnect to a sense of safety, knowing the threat is not currently happening and it has what it needs to respond to future threats.
This is the work we’ll do together, helping your nervous system find its way back to regulation, one session at a time.
What Does A Somatic Experiencing Session Look Like?
A Somatic Experiencing session typically blends conversation, nervous system education, and gentle body-based exercises, paced to what your nervous system can handle that day. It’s not a formula or a “one size fits all” approach. Each session is tailored to your individual needs and may look different depending on what your nervous system responds to.
Getting started
The first 1-3 sessions will focus on getting to know you and your nervous system. They’re also your chance to get to know me and ask any questions you have.
Assessment: We’ll discuss what brought you to therapy now and what feels most important to address together.
History and patterns: Sharing your story can feel important and meaningful, and it helps me understand where you’re coming from. We’ll also identify nervous system patterns that tend to show up no matter what the story is. This can be done without sharing every detail, especially if the details are difficult to talk about.
SE exercises: I like to teach a couple of these early on. They offer support for when we talk about difficult topics, and can be used at home between sessions from the start. These are also a way to assess what your nervous system finds most supportive.
Treatment planning: Using what we learn, we’ll identify your goals for therapy and ways to track your progress, so we can begin building an effective somatic support plan tailored just for you.
Ongoing Sessions
Ongoing sessions vary depending on what your nervous system is open to each time we meet. You’re always welcome to say “no” to any exercise I offer, and honoring that response is an important part of SE (even if you’re not sure why your body is saying no).
These are some elements you might expect from sessions:
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Learning how the nervous system works, including mapping your own patterns.
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Finding ways to connect with a felt sense of safety (or simply neutrality) in your body.
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Noticing physical sensation, the body’s cues for telling you how it’s doing and what it needs.
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Talking about your feelings and experiences is still available to you, and can be an important element of SE.
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These help you connect with the felt sense of your body’s boundaries and stay connected to them in difficult moments.
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This can vary greatly, from wiggling your fingers and toes to walking around, pushing against a wall with your hands, or gentle stretching, all adapted to what your body can comfortably do that day. Movement can help the body shift out of freeze and complete survival responses.
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For those who connect with it, imagery can make an abstract feeling more tangible and easier to track.
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Only if and when you want it, such as a hand on your shoulder or simply sitting beside you. It’s always your choice and never a part of the work unless you want it to be. In person, the touch is physical; for virtual sessions, we might imagine this supportive touch and see how it feels for you.
Session by session, we support your nervous system in developing new options. Rather than “fixing” or forcing yourself to do things differently, these shifts become a natural response that brings more ease, resilience, and aliveness to your day-to-day life. One sign it’s working is when you tell me about a situation where you responded differently than in the past, without having to think too hard about it.
Learn more in the SE 101 overview from Somatic Experiencing International (SEI).
Somatic Experiencing can help adults with a wide variety of experiences, such as PTSD, complex trauma (CPTSD), chronic pain, medical trauma, anxiety, burnout, and other sources of nervous system overwhelm. It can also be helpful for neurodivergent adults (including autistic and ADHD adults) whose nervous systems are often overtaxed.
Somatic Experiencing offers practical, body-based ways to shift patterns that kept you safe in the past but now feel like they’re holding you back.
Who Does Somatic Experiencing Help?
Somatic Experiencing might be a good fit for you if…
Your body reacts before your mind can catch up (feeling jumpy, always bracing, or shutting down).
You understand your patterns, but can’t seem to make the shifts you know would be helpful.
Talking about what happened can feel overwhelming or flat, or the memories are murky.
You feel numb or disconnected from your body, or flooded by sensations.
You’ve developed pain or fatigue that seems to flare with stress.
Medical experiences have left you feeling unsafe in your body or shutting down at the doctor’s office.
Generic regulation advice never aligned with how your nervous system works.
While SE is a trauma-informed model, it can be helpful for anyone wanting to feel more regulated and connected to their body, whether you identify with having experienced trauma or not.
A note about fit: It’s my job to help you determine if this model and my expertise are the right approach for you. I’ll be honest if a different model or level of support would serve you better, and I’m also happy to coordinate with other health professionals you work with.
Still have questions? Let’s talk it through.
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to see if SE is the right fit for you.
FAQ
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Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented therapy for trauma and chronic stress. Instead of focusing only on thoughts and stories, SE tracks body sensations and nervous system responses, using gentle, paced exercises to help your system complete stuck survival responses and return to a sense of safety. Learn more about how SE works.
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Somatic Experiencing is an emerging approach with promising but still-developing research. Randomized trials have found reductions in PTSD symptoms, though results vary and more research is needed. I combine SE with my years of experience in psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which offers more options when talk therapy alone does not resolve body-based symptoms.
Read the research: Brom et al., randomized trial in PTSD; Andersen & Lahav, randomized trial in chronic low back pain with PTSD symptoms; More in SEI’s SE research library
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Talk therapy is valuable and works mainly with thoughts and understanding. Nervous system responses often move faster than thought, so insight alone doesn’t always change how your body reacts. SE includes conversation, too, but also works with body sensations and nervous system responses to support change from the bottom up. Learn more about how SE differs from talk therapy.
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No. Some context may help, but details are not required. In SE, we work with nervous system patterns that are present in the body now, so I can support you with these patterns even if I don’t know everything that happened in the past. When it comes to talking and any SE exercise, we always go at the pace your body can handle. Learn more about pacing and titration.
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“Somatic release” isn’t a term we use in SE, and it often refers to big, cathartic moments. Natural discharge (like a deep breath, a wave of warmth, or a shiver) can happen in sessions, but we don’t chase it. Because we work in small, titrated steps, change tends to be subtle and build over time, which is more sustainable and less likely to overwhelm your nervous system. Learn more about what you can expect from SE sessions.
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No. You’ll still have hard days and get triggered sometimes. Regulation isn't about staying calm all the time; it’s about responding in a way that helps you take care of yourself and return to a place of settling once it’s safe to do so. Learn more about nervous system regulation.
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Somatic Experiencing practitioners complete a three-year professional training through Somatic Experiencing International (SEI) and earn the Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) certificate. I’m a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) with an SEP certificate, and I also serve as an assistant at SEI trainings, helping teach SE to other practitioners across the country. Learn more about me.
Tired of feeling stuck and on edge?
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to talk about whether Somatic Experiencing could help your nervous system find more ease.