I have been a counsellor for over a decade. In that time I have worked with people carrying some of the heaviest things a person can carry; complex trauma, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, addiction, bereavement. I have sat with people in the middle of things that were, by any measure, very hard. And across all of that experience, one thing has become increasingly clear to me: talking has limits.
That is not a criticism of talking therapy. The therapeutic relationship, the quality of presence, attention and trust between two people in a room, remains the foundation of everything I do. But there are things that don’t live in language. Things that are held in the body rather than stored in memory. And for those things, the most precise and empathic verbal intervention can only go so far.
That is what led me to Somatic Experiencing®…
What is Somatic Experiencing, and why does it matter?
Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) is a body-centred approach to trauma resolution developed over fifty years by Dr Peter Levine. It is what practitioners call a bottom-up therapy: rather than beginning with thoughts or narratives and working downward, SE begins with the body and works from there.
The central insight is that trauma is not only a psychological event, it is a physiological one. When we encounter something overwhelming, the body mobilises a survival response. When that response cannot complete, because we were frozen, constrained, or simply had no way to act, the energy of that response can become bound in the nervous system, held there indefinitely. It expresses itself not only as emotional distress but as physical symptoms: tension, chronic pain, fatigue, a hair-trigger startle response, or a body that cannot seem to settle, however safe the circumstances.
SE works by creating the conditions in which that bound energy can move; gently, gradually, without the need to relive or recount what happened. The goal, as Peter Levine frames it, is completion: the body finally doing what it needed to do and couldn’t.
You can read more about SE on the Somatic Experiencing International website →
How this training has shaped my practice
I am currently at intermediate level in my three-year SE professional training with SOS Internationale. Alongside the core training, I have completed specialist work on trauma and the breath with Leal Keene — an area of SE practice I find endlessly rich, because breath is one of the most immediate and honest signals the nervous system gives us. I have also participated in master classes with Peter Levine himself, focused on connection, presence and rhythm in SE practice — the quality of attunement that makes the difference between SE that is technically correct and SE that actually lands.
Throughout all of this, the thinking of Babette Rothschild has been a constant thread. Her work on the window of tolerance — the idea that effective trauma therapy is not about pushing through, but about gently expanding the range of experience a person can tolerate without being overwhelmed — and her insistence on knowing when to stop before you start, have shaped my approach in ways that go beyond SE into everything I do. Slow is not cautious. Slow is how the work actually gets done.
Why I came to this personally
I want to say something briefly about why this training has mattered to me beyond the clinical.
Like most therapists, I have my own history with the things I work with. I have experienced what it is to carry something in the body for a long time; a physical pattern, held in a specific part of my body, connected to something that happened. I worked with it in different ways: through physical treatment with an osteopath and chiropractor, and through my own personal therapy. Both helped. But it was not until I began working with an SE practitioner that I understood what it meant to let the body tell its own story, to offer it a response it had been waiting for, and to feel the quiet shift that followed.
That experience did not make me an SE practitioner. But it made me understand, in a way that no amount of reading had managed, why this approach reaches places that other modalities do not. And it confirmed that this training was the right direction for my practice.
What this means for clients right now
I am currently offering a small number of SE sessions at a reduced rate. This is a deliberate choice to create dedicated SE space in my practice while I work toward full qualification, and while I can still offer this work at a lower cost than will be possible once I qualify.
These are not introductory sessions. They draw on everything I have learned to date; the core SE training, Leal Keene’s breath work, Peter Levine’s master classes, and over ten years of trauma-informed clinical practice. The reduced fee reflects where I am in the qualification process, not the depth of the work itself.
If you are curious about SE, or if you have a sense that something you are carrying lives more in the body than in memory or thought, I would encourage you to get in touch. There is a small number of places available, and this rate will not continue beyond my qualification.
Want to know more or book in? Go get in touch →
About me
I am a qualified integrative counsellor and NCPS accredited registrant based in Bristol BS1. She offers counselling, psychotherapy and clinical supervision in person and online, and is currently at intermediate level in her Somatic Experiencing® professional training with SOS Internationale.