Peter Levine

Professional Life
Peter Levine, Ph.D. has studied the effects of stress and trauma for more than three decades and he holds doctorates in both Psychology and Medical Biophysics. He worked for NASA as a stress consultant while the Space Shuttle program was being developed and has shared his expertise while teaching at various facilities throughout the world, including pain clinics, hospitals, and treatment centers. He also contributed his talents at the Hopi Guidance Center in Arizona and has served on many distinguished committees and organizations, including the World Psychologists for Social Responsibility, to further the presidents’ initiative to form effective response to ethnic and political warfare and wide ranging disasters. Levine is a member of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute faculty and the founder of Somatic Experiencing.

Contribution to Psychology
Somatic Experiencing is a therapy form designed to address trauma-related issues through the use of the body’s own sensory processing mechanism. Levine introduced the innovative therapy in 1997 with the publication of his book Waking the Tiger. Levine used his vast experience of observing wild animals to develop his Somatic Experiencing. By watching how wild animals handled life-threatening events, and how they recovered from them, Levine theorized that the way to facilitate healing from trauma was to mimic the adaptation that animals used when presented with a life-threatening episode.

 
Somatic Experiencing strives to deregulate the autonomic nervous system (ANS) after a traumatic event back to its original state of regulation by identifying and recognizing the felt sense. Levine believes that the traumatic event disrupts the body’s ability to self-regulate and therefore causes lingering traumatic stresses and emotions. Similar to focusing, somatic experiencing uses the client’s own sensory perception to track their felt sense while in a one on one session with a therapist. The goal is to help the client dissipate any physical stress or tension that remains in the physical body. The ANS is activated during a traumatic event, and the fight or flight mechanism causes the survival responses to engage, but never fully discharge. Therefore, the stress and tension from the survival responses are remnant in the physical body, causing the post-trauma symptoms to linger. Clients are initially exposed to the traumatic event in very small amounts through “titration,” and slowly experience more as their tolerance increases.

Somatic Experiencing is practiced in two primary areas of treatment:

1) Developmental trauma - Developmental trauma is usually trauma that occurred over a long period of time, perhaps throughout childhood, that caused significant psychological impairment.

2) Shock trauma - Shock trauma is recognized as a specific traumatic experience that occurred only once, such as natural disaster, witnessing a violent act, or a car accident.