There are reactions that don't fit with what you think you know about yourself. A door slams, and your heart keeps pounding long after the sound is gone; a hard conversation that your body keeps fighting hours later, when your mind already decided to let it go; a smell, a tone of voice, and suddenly you're on guard without knowing why. You know where it comes from — or you think you do — and still the body responds as if the threat were right here. Today, we call that trauma. But it's a word that took more than a century to come clearly into view.
When something has no name, it's hard to see
I like to begin here because something about it still strikes me as revealing: what we don't name is hard for us to see. The linguist Guy Deutscher tells this with an example that has become famous — in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes a "wine-dark" sea and a sky "of bronze," yet he never says that anything is blue. Nothing is blue in Homer. For a long time it was thought that the Greeks saw differently; today we understand something more interesting: they didn't yet have a stable word for that color, and without the word, blue stayed somehow diluted within experience. Perception and language hold each other up. Something similar happened with trauma: it existed long before we could see it, and we didn't fully see it until we were able to name it.
Bessel van der Kolk reconstructs that history in The Body Keeps the Score. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the word trauma belonged almost entirely to physical medicine: traumatology, a traumatism — blows, falls, accidents. In the two world wars, the closest we came to naming the psychic wound was shell shock, a term that referred only to detonations, as if the blast of a shell had knocked the mind out of the body. That's where the "thousand-yard stare" comes from: that lost gaze we now recognize as a state of dissociation. The word trauma, in its psychological sense, only takes off in the seventies and eighties.
The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress entered the diagnostic manual in 1980, in large part through the pressure of Vietnam veterans, who needed a legitimate name for what they carried. It was an enormous step forward and, at the same time, it had a limit: it focused on a single event and placed the emphasis on the memory, rather than on what kept happening in the person's body and nervous system. Van der Kolk and his colleagues later proposed the concept of a disorder of extreme stress — what we now call complex trauma — to name wounds sustained over time. But something was still missing.
From the event to the biography
That something began to appear in the nineties, with the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, carried out by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) together with Kaiser Permanente. More than seventeen thousand people answered an inventory that made it possible to score how much adversity they had lived through as children. The finding was twofold. On one hand, how widespread childhood trauma was, even among the most privileged classes. On the other — and here is the bridge that most interests me, the one joining mental health and physical health — they found a direct correlation between that score and the adult prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cancer, addictions, and premature death.
What that study let us see is that early adversity is not a small-scale version of adult stress. A child is still forming: their capacity to self-regulate, their resilience, work in another way. That's why the same event can more easily derail a system that is still being built. Van der Kolk called this developmental trauma, and he fought for years to have it included in the DSM as a diagnosis of its own — a proposal that was rejected. It's around these years that trauma stops being merely a psychological idea or merely a physical injury, and begins to be understood as both at once. That's where the approaches that work directly with physiology take off. Among them, Somatic Experiencing.
Peter Levine and the wisdom of the animal
Peter Levine consolidated much of this work beginning in the sixties and seventies, with a doctorate focused on the physiology of stress in wild animals. In his practice he treated Nancy, the patient at the center of the story in his book Waking the Tiger. In that session, Nancy shared the image of being stalked by a tiger; Levine told her "run," and Nancy's legs began to move as if she were running, even though she was lying on the table. Trembling, intense sweating for nearly an hour — and when the episode ended, her symptoms had disappeared. That scene left him with a question that would shape his work: why could a physical discharge resolve a physiological state of panic?
He found the answer by watching animals. An impala chased by a cheetah — like the one in the image that opens this text — activates a massive response: the nervous system mobilizes all the available energy toward the limbs to flee or fight. Within that same circuit is also the freeze response. And if the animal survives, it does something we rarely allow ourselves: it discharges. It shakes, trembles, breathes deeply and spontaneously, moves quickly — and with that it releases the residual energy that was mobilized to secure survival. Afterward, it goes back to grazing as if nothing had happened.
Levine proposed that humans have the same subcortical structures as that impala — the same ancient defense machinery — but on top of it we carry the neocortex, the brain that judges and anticipates. And that brain, out of fear or social conditioning, suppresses the tremble, interrupts the shaking, orders "just calm down" before the discharge can complete. The energy that was mobilized to save us then stays trapped in the nervous system, ready to reactivate at any signal that resembles, however remotely, the original threat. That, at the somatic level, is trauma: not so much the event that occurred, but the response the body started and could never finish. By the eighties, Levine showed that it was possible to treat, in this way, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress in veterans — the hypervigilance, the flashbacks, even convulsive movements resembling those of Tourette's syndrome — understanding them as protective impulses that were left incomplete in the system.
Peter Levine tells how Somatic Experiencing was born. (Source: YouTube, Somatic Experiencing International)
A broad map of trauma
Little by little, that work stopped being only for war veterans, and the interventions were refined to accompany other forms of wounding. Today they make up the modules of the Somatic Experiencing training, organized into a kind of taxonomy. There is relational trauma, which encompasses the mark left by certain experiences within our bonds — abandonment, over-demand. There are accidents and high-speed events: crashes, falls. There is pre- and perinatal trauma, which covers what happens from conception through the earliest years, when there is still no language to make sense of experience — which is why it's called preverbal. And there are the broader categories: natural disasters, war, abuse, torture, and horror — this last understood as being forced to witness the abuse or torture of another.
Studying that map over three years is what allows us to accompany an enormous variety of events, leaning on concepts that are extremely simple and elegant and that, at the same time, hold a depth that never stops surprising me.
Titration and pendulation: the heart of the method
Talking with my teacher and friend Alejandra Martí about what truly sets Somatic Experiencing apart from any other technique, she sums it up in one word: titration. The underlying proposal is to work with the greatest amount of information the system is able to tolerate without becoming disorganized — not a drop more. That's why we dose the stories, why we modulate how many signals we attend to at once when someone reports what hurts, angers, frightens, or unsettles them. It isn't about approaching the core of the trauma head-on, but about touching its edges.
Peter Levine explains titration. (Source: YouTube, Peter Levine, PhD)
Alongside that careful management of information, Levine proposes pendulation, and with it two sibling dynamics in which trauma tends to be stored. Undercoupling speaks to us of dispersed, disconnected information — memory loss, gaps in the timeline, numbness, dissociation. Overcoupling is the opposite: an almost inevitable chain reaction, where one memory triggers another, and another, and another, like a flaky pastry of the finest layers pressed together. To pendulate is to dance between two forces of high gravity: a vortex that pulls toward distress and a counter-vortex that holds toward wellbeing. We approach the first by orbiting, never head-on, each time a little closer — and then we return. We call that resourcing: keeping in awareness at all times four basic resources — safety, wellbeing, stability, and grounding in the body.
Peter Levine describes pendulation. (Source: YouTube, Somatic Experiencing International)
How trauma gets stored in chains of overcoupling. (Source: YouTube, Somatic Experiencing International)
To those four resources we add orientation: having a sense of where and how we are in space and time, using the senses. And all of it is woven while always keeping in mind the flow of the nervous system — the activation of its different branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic, which bring with them different kinds of energy and of capacity to relate to our surroundings, as I explore in the piece on Polyvagal Theory. They are simple concepts, and yet they never finish revealing their depth.
What this looks like in session
There's an almost protocol-like example. When someone comes to my practice for the first time, we don't go straight into the verbal interview: we begin with a bodily interview. We take time for the person to recognize the space they're in — to be curious with their senses, to notice the intensity of the light, the state of the room, to check whether the seat they chose feels right and to confirm it not with the head, but with what their physical sensations report back to them.
That act of consulting the body has a name. In English it's called felt sense, and it's worth being precise about its origin: it was not coined by Peter Levine, even though he uses it constantly, but by the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, a collaborator of Carl Rogers. In Spanish we find it as sensación sentida, as it's translated in his book Focusing. It's that bodily perception, still without words, that knows something before the mind can formulate it. While the person orients themselves in the space and, through what their body reports, gradually confirms a felt sense of safety, we verify together that they feel safe, trusting, with enough ground to begin their process.
Peter Levine tells how Eugene Gendlin coined the term felt sense. (Source: YouTube)
From there, each step we take toward the difficult events, the uncontrollable reactions, or the unstoppable memories, we take by measuring how far we can go without the person becoming overwhelmed, without losing contact with their resources and their agency. And here enters a care I consider non-negotiable: attention to retraumatization. For Levine, when we relive a story — when we retell it without shelter — the body lives it again, because what the mind sees, the body feels. To retraumatize is to experience once more the helplessness, the overwhelm, the freeze. That's why, when we work from a trauma-informed perspective, we help the person visit those places always by the hand of their own awareness — of knowing that, if they made it to the session, it's because they managed to survive.
This is held up by an attitude I speak of often: recognizing that the body, that the person, did the best they could — even if they no longer want to keep doing it the same way. The system always does the best it can; so much so that it was able to bring someone back to therapy. And as we strengthen, with awareness, the sense of personal agency, new solutions, alternate paths, other ways of being and staying can begin to emerge. There's nothing to install from the outside: the work accompanies what the organism already wants to complete. You aren't broken — you're interrupted. I share this same care with Core Energetics and, when the point of entry is an inner part carrying the fear or the tension, with Internal Family Systems (IFS).
My path in Somatic Experiencing
I tell all of this from my own training, too — as a student and now as an assistant. I was fortunate that my first module — the one on safety and resources — was taught by Maggie Kline, a close friend of Levine's and an expert in child play therapy. It was, quite literally, a module where we played: that's how we built a safe group container. With Lael Keen, who taught the second, fourth, and sixth modules, I learned titration, undercoupling, pendulation, and somatic touch; she is a Rolfing practitioner, so she commands manual work like few others, and through her hands touch became a language of my own.
Russell Jones, whom we in the South know as Jonas, taught us about falls, dissociation, high speed, titration, and overcoupling. With him the most valuable thing was the work with breath and his way of demonstrating the power of an accompaniment that waits — that fosters the space for spontaneous reactions to emerge. Already as an assistant, I've been able to support the teaching of Mariana Boccuzzi, a clinical psychologist, systemic family therapist, and Somatic Experiencing teacher, who carried "less is more" into her classes and let me integrate the systemic lens with the somatic one. Mariana is passionate about the appeasement, or fawn, response — that very particular reaction in which all three branches of the nervous system are active at once: part of the fight and flight freezes, while another, hypervigilant and coming from the ventral system, stays in the service of reading the aggressor's needs in order to avert the aggression. With her I've learned both the basics and the most complex parts of somatic work, and she has been my supervisor in systemic family therapy for more than two years.
And with Ale Martí, thanks to her wisdom, I've been able to work drawing on resources from the Bates method atop all the foundation that Somatic Experiencing offers. Soon, in the hybrid training that begins in July 2026 and runs through 2028, I'll be an assistant to the teachings of Mariana Boccuzzi and, for the first time, of Marilia Castro — another turn of this path that never stops teaching me.
The premise of Somatic Experiencing that resonates most with me is still the simplest: the body already knows how to heal. With the right conditions, the movement toward wholeness happens naturally — not all at once, but in a gradual, genuine, and verifiable way. If you'd like to understand better the general framework I work within, you can read about what to expect from therapy or about what a first session is like. And if something in what I describe here resonated in your body before your head, that may be a good sign to ask yourself when to begin.
References
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Gendlin, E. T. (1978). Focusing. Everest House / Bantam Books.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D. et al. (1998). Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.
Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books.