ABSTRACT
Stress physiology illustrates how energy produced during traumatic experiences can become held in the body, creating symptoms of discomfort, rigidity, and PTSD. Such symptoms often interfere with healthy sexual functioning. Somatic psychotherapies are aimed at incorporating the soma into clinical practice. This chapter will explore Somatic Experiencing, created by Peter Levine, as it might be applied to work with sexual trauma and other sexual difficulties. Somatic Experiencing (SE) is an experiential psychotherapeutic model designed to assist the individual in moving through and completing healthy, active, defense responses in order to restore the person’s sense of vitality and re-instill fluidity and flexibility within the cognitive-emotional-physiological system. This chapter will utilize six main organizing concepts of SE interventions and explain how they support an individual to expand their capacity for the felt sense (interception and proprioception) and bring on greater fluidity and flexibility within the nervous system. Clinical case studies are used as examples of how a clinician might employ titration, pendulation, SIBAM, and uncoupling in order to support a client’s increased capacity to be with more of the trauma, process more of the bound energy, and eventually arrive at an enhanced sense of completion, integration, and resolution; thus, relieving intrusive symptoms.
