Decreasing Stress Injuries and Increasing Resilience with Somatic Experiencing - a Trauma-Informed Approach for Outdoor & Experiential Education Programs

stacylynn12
Jan 2
4 min read

By Stacy Earlywine, Experiential Consulting Associate Consultant

I’m delighted to have this opportunity to join the team at Experiential Consulting and to share with you - what is Somatic Experiencing (SE), why I feel so passionately about it, and what I think it may be able to offer individuals and organizations in the outdoor and experiential education communities.

What is SE?

It is a monumental challenge to adequately summarize what, for me, has become a way of life. SE is at its core, a body-oriented practice that helps prevent or heal trauma and other stress injuries and teaches us how to optimize our nervous system function for physical, mental and emotional health. Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, SE is the result of the multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, with more than 45 years of successful application. And, it is so much more.

SE found me when I was struggling to help a few particular individuals in my Structural Medicine practice who had low back pain. When nothing I was trained to do seemed to be helping, I started to realize that their pain was not due to tight hamstrings or a tilted pelvis but to a nervous system that was living in a state of constant sympathetic arousal. Simply put, their bodies were braced from the inside out all the time in preparation for something bad to happen - a fear based response from some previous threat that, without their conscious input, kept them in a fight or flight response on a body level. I knew I needed to learn how to work with their nervous system in order to be able to help them.

Through the three year program at Somatic Experiencing International, I learned, applying Polyvagal Theory, how the nervous system is rarely considered and yet, vitally important when attempting to create safety within ourselves and all of our relationships - personal and professional. For the outdoor and experiential education community it must be considered alongside our efforts to improve staff training in technical skills, updating policies and procedures and incident response protocols from a physical injury perspective.

What might an SE session look like?

Every session is different, but examples of things that we commonly do in SE practice include:

Tracking Sensations: Noticing physical feelings (e.g., tightness, warmth, tingling) as you recall a stressful memory, without getting overwhelmed.
Pendulation: Gently moving attention between a stressful sensation and a comfortable, resourceful feeling or image to build resilience.
Titration: Introducing small, manageable bits of the traumatic memory or sensation to avoid re-traumatization.
Stress Release: Allowing natural physical releases like shivering, sighing, trembling, or yawning to complete a stuck stress response.

In terms of working with a group (or organization) to proactively develop SE practices, we might start with an overview of how the nervous system works, explore different ways in which our bodies are designed to process stress, and practice different methods of noticing / tuning into the messages our bodies are giving us. By developing these skills and somatic practices proactively, we may be better equipped to respond and support each other (and ourselves) during times of stress or even crisis.

My personal story

Let me give you an example that illustrates how I came to see SE as not only a vital component in understanding my own personal mental health struggles, but also as THE modality in which I could personally have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people.

I am a climber. With a bachelor’s degree in dance, climbing - at least the physical movement aspect of it - came quite naturally to me. But the head game was something else. I know that I never came close to my potential as a rock climber, not because I couldn’t do the moves but because I couldn’t keep my head in the game. I also had a slow complex. Let me explain. When I’d head out into the mountains with a group of peers, all relatively the same age, drive and fitness level, I could not keep up. Slogging uphill on trails or snow, I’d be out of breath and struggling to breathe. I was tested for asthma and was given an inhaler. It didn’t help. I worried about my heart but was told it was just fine. The more I struggled to breathe, the slower I was. I’ll spare you the interim years of my saga but what I now know is that my shortness of breath was due to anxiety. Which was due to my perception of being slow, which fed the beast, made me feel like an undesirable partner and shook the foundations of my confidence.

How does SE relate to outdoor & experiential education?

The way I see it, my worry over being perceived as a weak team member compounded itself, manifesting in the physical symptom of shortness of breath, which slowed me down, which increased the worry, which … you see where this is going. This is an example of how a nervous system issue might easily be mistaken for a physical issue and in attempting to manage the risk, the proverbial mark could be missed. A team member who is having shortness of breath and is slowing the group down COULD be a risk but, at least in my case, the problem was never going to be fixed with an inhaler or increased cardio training. This was not about training harder or caring more or getting better equipment - it was about changing the context within which I was engaging in these adventures.

There is so much more to say about SE. It’s changed my life, and the trajectory of my career. Understanding the principles of SE can help an organization decrease the likelihood of a traumatic incident and prepare staff should something go wrong, to support participants in a trauma informed manner. Understanding more about the nervous system allows teams to monitor for and decrease the prevalence of stress injuries among staff. Becoming SE informed creates a more resilient organization that weathers difficulties with more ease. A traumatic incident doesn’t have to leave the people involved traumatized when the team can hold the space for the body to release the stress chemistry that was produced during the event.

If you are curious and would like to know more, please reach out. I love talking about SE!