A body-based route through trauma

Unlike traditional talk therapy, Somatic Experiencing focuses on bodily sensations to process traumatic memories and restore a sense of safety and resilience. Whether you are living with childhood trauma, complex PTSD (C-PTSD), or the lasting effects of a single traumatic event, Somatic Experiencing therapy provides a gentle, proven pathway to recovery.

Many people searching for trauma therapy, nervous system healing, or alternatives to EMDR and CBT find that SE offers the deep, lasting relief they have been looking for.

Why the body, and not just the story

After something overwhelming happens, the nervous system can stay switched on long after the danger has passed. It reads ordinary life as threat. That shows up as hypervigilance — never quite able to settle — or as shutdown, the flat, numb, exhausted state that no amount of rest seems to touch. Neither of those is a thought you can argue with. They live below language, which is why understanding your trauma intellectually often changes so little about how you actually feel.

SE works at that level instead. Rather than asking you to recount what happened in detail, it follows what your body is doing right now, in the room, and works with the small shifts as they come.

What a session is like

We go slowly. You stay in charge of the pace throughout, and nothing gets pushed. Much of the work is quiet noticing — where a sensation sits, whether it moves, what happens when we pause. Between the difficult moments we deliberately return to what feels steady, so your system learns it can go towards something hard and come back again. That capacity to return is, in a real sense, the whole point.

You do not need to talk about the details of what happened for this to work. For many people that is exactly the relief — SE is particularly helpful when trauma is too overwhelming to put into words, or when you cannot identify a single source for how you feel.

Who it helps

• PTSD following an accident, assault, medical trauma or bereavement
• Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) and developmental trauma from childhood abuse or neglect
• Anxiety, panic, flashbacks, and sleep that never fully restores
• Emotional numbness, dissociation, or feeling disconnected from your own body
• Chronic illness, and the strain of living in a body that feels unreliable
• People who have tried talk therapy, CBT or EMDR and found something still hasn’t shifted

How it compares to EMDR and CBT

CBT works with thoughts and behaviour. EMDR works with the memory itself, using bilateral stimulation to reprocess it. SE works with the physiology underneath both — the activation that got stuck in the body when the event happened. They are not rivals, and plenty of people benefit from more than one. But if you have done the thinking work and your body still braces, SE is often the missing piece.