One of the powerful ways that I’ve seen Somatic Experiencing benefit my clients is in the way that it helps them reconnect with their intuition and their resilience in an embodied way. For many of my clients dealing with PTSD, this can be the key to helping them unlock their innate ability to heal and to ultimately achieve Post Traumatic Growth.
What are the Common Symptoms of PTSD?
There are many definitions for trauma, but the one that I like the most is an overwhelm of a person’s nervous system as the result of an event that feels like it is too much or it comes on too soon or too fast. Two different people can experience the same event and one can move on with their life more easily and the other may struggle with the lingering effects of trauma.
Therapists and the media tend to focus on all of the negative impacts of trauma, of which there are many. A phrase that appears frequently in headlines and on social media is “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” shortened simply as “PTSD.” PTSD is a serious psychiatric disorder that describes intense or disturbing thoughts, feelings and images that continue to occur for a person long after the traumatic experience is over.
Common Symptoms of PTSD include:
- unwanted upsetting memories
- nightmares
- flashbacks
- emotional distress
- physical reactivity
These PTSD symptoms can be highly upsetting and can affect many aspects of a person’s life. People can experience deep despair, depression, anxiety, grief and loss in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. However, through this struggle and the meaning a person attaches to it, there are ways that people with PTSD can eventually experience the transformation of what has come to be known as Post Traumatic Growth.
What is Post Traumatic Growth (PTG)?
Emblazoned on coffee mugs and riddled throughout popular culture, inspirational messages of overcoming adversity are everywhere. However, the idea that struggles can yield positive results is not new. The title of Kelly Clarkson’s 2011 hit song, Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You), simply paraphrases nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ubiquitous quote “(Out of life’s school of war—) what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” While not specifically naming post traumatic growth, Nietzsche’s words nevertheless affirm that a positive transformation out of trauma is possible.
In the mid-1990s, psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun were noticing in their practices that, as people try to make sense of themselves and the world after a trauma or a highly stressful situation, they often go through a kind of transformation. They coined the term “Post Traumatic Growth” and set out to document this in their research.
Tedeschi and Calhoun found that there were five areas in which people experienced this personal growth:
- A sense of new possibilities
- Relating to others (either getting closer to people in your life already or helping other people going through hard times)
- Personal strength or resilience
- Spiritual change or deeper connection with spirituality
- Appreciation of life
Post Traumatic Growth isn’t some kind of toxic positivity — the idea that we must suppress difficult emotions because we must be happy! Transformation occurs not from the experience itself, but from the struggle to get through it and make sense of it – the meaning making.
Post Traumatic Growth comes from authentically wrestling with the pain and despair and coming out eventually on the other side. This makes Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy an effective way to help you through this process.
5 Ways Somatic Experiencing (SE) can help you achieve Post Traumatic Growth (PTG)
What is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a type of therapy that integrates both mind and body to help restore resilience to the nervous system and resolve symptoms of stress and trauma. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter Levine who has spent over 40 years studying and teaching others about how to heal from traumatic events. He says: “human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation.”
Somatic Experiencing is uniquely effective at bringing about post traumatic growth in that it allows someone to discharge pent up survival energy left over from the trauma, creating more feelings of empowerment and more space for new meaning making to occur.
5 Important Ways Somatic Experiencing Can Help You Achieve Post Traumatic Growth
- Resourcing: Resourcing is the process by which you identify who or what in your life (“resources”) has helped you get through tough times. SE helps you connect with your resources in an embodied way, really building out those moments when you feel that support or recognize your own strength within. This resourcing can help you experience Post Traumatic Growth by helping you acknowledge your own resilience, appreciate the relationships you’ve built or the way your spirituality has helped you.
- Integrating Body and Mind: One of the central concepts in SE is that trauma lives in the body. Therefore, you cannot fully recover from PTSD by just talking about it. SE will teach you to track and tolerate big emotions and your bodily sensations — this helps enormously to regulate an intense experience. As you build this skill, you begin to trust yourself and your intuition more. This helps you bring more of your authentic self to relationships and recognize your resilience more, two key areas of PTG
- Meaning Making: When we experience a traumatic event, we quickly take in some implicit meanings about ourselves and the world around us — “the world is unsafe” “people can’t be trusted” or “I deserved it,” for example. If our trauma has not been unpacked , sometimes we act upon those beliefs without even realizing it because they are out of our conscious awareness. By slowly tracking sensations, emotions, and impulses, SE gives us the opportunity to allow the various channels of our experience to come back to our awareness. People who logically understand “it wasn’t my fault” finally start to really know this in a deeper way.
- Connecting to Your Life Force: Life force can be defined as vitality, an animating impulse, or a will to live. Oftentimes when we experience trauma, our nervous system goes into a freeze response that allows us to survive — however, this experience is meant to be time-limited. If we remain in freeze, we can experience depression, numbness or chronic medical problems. Somatic Experiencing allows us to discharge the freeze response and reconnect with our life force, allowing us a renewed appreciation of life and an opportunity for growth in this area of PTG.
- Integration: SE aims to help clients integrate their trauma experience – or allow unresolved trauma responses to come to completion. Accessing the somatic memory and discharging pent up survival energy allows for healing and ultimately more resilience in the nervous system. Incomplete trauma responses may mean that a person is on high alert, waiting for disaster to strike again. Integration allows people more options and new possibilities because they can be more flexible — they can let down their guard when it makes sense and pay better attention to true threats. They can allow themselves to take in safety and experience joy again.
Somatic Experiencing as a Way Forward
If you are in the middle of something right now, or if the highly stressful situation is ongoing or very recent, all of your energy is going toward surviving and getting through, and that’s okay. Just know that the very wounds that haunt you have the ability to transform you instead of just anchoring you to the past.
Somatic Experiencing therapy offers unique ways to support your resilience, release trauma and empower you to eventually move toward Post Traumatic Growth.
Post Traumatic Growth FAQs
What is Post Traumatic Growth and how can Somatic Experiencing help achieve it?
Post Traumatic Growth refers to positive psychological changes that occur as a result of struggling with and overcoming trauma. Somatic Experiencing, a therapeutic approach aimed at healing trauma, can help individuals achieve Post Traumatic Growth by facilitating the release and resolution of traumatic stress held in the body, promoting resilience, and fostering a sense of empowerment and self-discovery.
How does Somatic Experiencing differ from traditional talk therapy in facilitating Post Traumatic Growth?
Unlike traditional talk therapy that primarily focuses on verbal processing, Somatic Experiencing (SE) incorporates the mind-body connection to address trauma. By working with sensations, emotions, and bodily responses, SE helps individuals access and release trauma stored in the body, leading to a deeper and more holistic healing process conducive to Post Traumatic Growth.
What are some powerful ways in which Somatic Experiencing can support Post Traumatic Growth?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) offers several powerful ways to support Post Traumatic Growth. Firstly, it helps individuals develop greater self-regulation skills, allowing them to effectively manage and navigate intense emotions associated with trauma. Secondly, SE promotes body awareness, helping individuals reconnect with their bodily sensations and restore a sense of safety and resilience. Lastly, through gentle and gradual exposure to trauma-related sensations, somatic experiencing facilitates the completion of the body’s natural stress response cycles, fostering the transformation of trauma into personal growth.
Additional Resources
For a deeper dive into SE, check out my resource entitled “What is Somatic Experiencing?”
Learn more about SE: Somatic Experiencing International
More information about Post Traumatic Growth:
