Does Somatic Experiencing (SE) Work? SE Practices For Healing: Monica LeSage (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Monica LeSage’s talk titled “Does Somatic Experiencing (SE) Work? SE Practices For Healing” at TEDxWilmingtonWomen conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Accident in Philadelphia

In October of 2007, I was feeling pretty good about things. I had just finished rock climbing at the nation’s second tallest rock climbing gym. And as I drove down these narrow roads to go meet up with some of my co-workers while I was on this business trip, there was a problem.

The roads are so narrow in Philadelphia because it is one of the oldest cities in the U.S., I didn’t see that the stoplight that was at my intersection was red. I saw the light ahead. It was green, so I was in the middle of the intersection when a taxi came from the other side. As that taxi hit me, my car rolled one and a half times, struck a street light, spun around the other way.

It took firemen a little while to get me out of the car, and at the moment I was like, “I’m okay,” or so I thought. But because of the nature of the accident, they took me to the hospital and they worked me up as a full trauma.

So what that meant was there were four people that were cutting off my clothes, stripping me, poking me to draw blood, and this whole time I was listening to the same thing happening to the girl that was in the back seat of the taxi. That’s when the shaking began for me.

And because they were concerned that the reason I was in that intersection is because I was inebriated, they wouldn’t give me any medication. So while we waited for the blood work to come back, I laid there shaking, cold, alone, not knowing anyone, because at the time I lived in California, which is a state on the other side of the country.

Six months later, when I would say to my physical therapist, “I am so glad I didn’t know that this was going to hurt for six months,” because I don’t know how I would have made it through the last six months if I would have known it was going to take this long.

A Turning Point with Nancy Bement

Six years later, when I called my therapist, Nancy Bement, and said to her, “I have never had a day without pain, I can’t work, I can’t even make my bed, I can’t vacuum, I have bouts of anxiety, bouts of depression, I don’t know what to do.” But that’s the day that everything started to change.

Nancy Bement is a counselor who teaches a process called somatic experiencing. And that is the reason I am here today. Somatic experiencing by Peter Levine. This is the process that he teaches through the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute. He taught Nancy how to do this process. And it is now a process that is available to anyone who has faced trauma.

ALSO READ: Chronic Disease Doctor: We Can Now Reverse Some Stage 4 Cancer? (Transcript)

If you would be willing to be so vulnerable with me right now, ask yourself, how many people hearing me right now have faced, and don’t raise your hand just yet, a car accident? Have you been attacked? Were you abused as a child? Have you lost someone and you felt like life could not go on? If I haven’t gotten to you and your story yet, how about worry? How many of you face stress at work that is so severe you end your days with your hands and fists just shaking? Now show of hands, did I call out your story? Look around and know this process can help you.

Understanding Somatic Experiencing

So here is how. Let’s talk about this process. It has about nine steps. Peter will talk about this in the trainings that he runs. But there are three specific steps that have made a tremendous difference for me. And they are the things that you can start doing today so that if you end up in a situation like this, it does not have to get locked in your body the way it got locked in mine.

Here are the steps. The first thing you need to know is, become comfortable with trembling, like I’m doing right now up here on stage. Trembling is the body’s natural mechanism for release of energy. And when we face something that is really dangerous, that our brain recognizes is a threat to self, like failing on the red carpet, what can happen is we need to let that energy go. And our body does it through trembling. And so what I didn’t know back in the trauma room years ago is that it was okay, that it was safe, that it was normal, that it was natural.

Reconnecting and Finding Safety

But now you know. So if you face a situation, you can become comfortable with trembling. Well the second thing that we need to do is to get reconnected with a human, or reconnected with the present. The thing is with trauma, and even with severe stress, is it makes us shut down. It’s called collapse or freeze in terms of the psychobiology of all of this. And it makes us retreat. It makes us want to pull in. It’s literally a thing why we close our eyes and we might pull in.

ALSO READ: Transcript: Creativity in Cooking Can Solve Our Biggest Challenges by Jose Andres

But the way we get out of it is to reconnect, to make eye contact, smell something. Like flowers are a fantastic way to reconnect with the present if you don’t have a human that’s right there. For me, for years, it’s been my dog Midas. Midas’s warm ears I could touch. And at times I can just look out and start to see the trees that are around me.

And then I get a breath. And that’s how we reconnect with the present, or reconnect with a human.

And the last thing that we need to do is find a safe place in our bodies. For those of us who have faced trauma, our bodies don’t feel safe anymore. There might be a place that hurts literally. Like if you’re skiing and you break your leg, your leg will be excruciatingly painful. Well, feel that. You’re not going to even probably have a choice.

But then kind of imagine that you are like a copy machine. Like a copy machine goes, and there’s a light that scans for whatever document it is in front of it just to see what is. That’s what we need to do with our brains. Scan throughout the rest of our bodies. Find a place that’s more open, more loose, more connected, something that’s more comfortable.

And then what you do is you go back and forth with your attention between that place in you that might be hurting, that might be tight, that might be shaking, and then to that place in you that feels better, more open, more loose. In this process, that’s called pendulating.

The Unique Approach to Trauma

But see, here’s the magic with somatic experiencing. For those people who have faced trauma or significant stress and overwhelm, for some of us, we just want to get it out. We want to tell the whole story. It’s almost like you just want to throw up if you had the flu and you know you’d feel better. That’s not the way trauma works.

And what somatic processing identifies is that you need to just touch into the smallest amount of survival energy and then let that move through you. And that’s what’s really unique about this process. So total, the process, the three things that you can leave and be prepared to face trauma with today, first and foremost, become comfortable with trembling. Then get reconnected with the human or reconnected with the present through one of your five senses. And then try to find a safe place in your body. And if you can’t find that safe place in your body, at least reconnect to the present through one of your five senses. So what do we do with this information?

ALSO READ: The Hidden Forces Behind Your Food Choices: Sarah Lake (Transcript)

Empathy and Understanding

It depends on what your story is, what you come in here with today. For some of us, you are that person that’s already faced this. So you just take a baby step. You put your toe in the water of what you faced, what you’ve endured. Don’t dive in. It’s a deep pool. But you put your toe in. That’s what you do.

If you live with someone or love someone who’s faced a traumatic situation, you start to raise your awareness to what trauma does to the brain. Literally a man last night heard that I was talking about a process for trauma, and he said, “You have to listen to me. I want to tell you my story.” And he said, “You know, the worst, worse than being attacked by four people, worse than being hit on the head with a brick, is the fact that no one understands why it still bothers me. I lost my last relationship because my girlfriend was such an optimist. She said, ‘Why can’t you just get over it? There’s not anyone who’s going to attack you again.’ So if you’re the loved one of someone who’s faced this, start to understand.

And if you’re the bystander of a traumatic situation like this, your next step is to know that if you see something, like I literally saw someone get their finger cut off at the end of my driveway who was doing construction last month, and I literally kneeled down. I lowered my voice, and I said, “Help is on the way. We called 911. I don’t know if you can feel anything right now, but you’re not alone. Help will come.”

And then I went back to my house after the ambulance was gone, and I got to use this process again, because then that was my own trauma. But this is the power. So no matter where you go from here, after hearing this information, your story will be different. But it doesn’t have to be one of loss and bracing. It can be one of freedom, and that is the power of somatic experiencing. Thank you.