Why isn’t talk therapy enough? How do we heal trauma? Peter Levine is the author of “Waking the Tiger”, and also the creator of Somatic Experiencing–a method to release trauma from the body.
Highly recommended.
TRANSCRIPT
All right, diving right in, folks, we’re taking you deep into Peter A. Levine’s Waking the Tiger, a book all about healing trauma.
Oh, yeah, this one’s a classic.
Exactly. So we’re going to break down Levine’s approach. It’s all about understanding trauma, not as like a disorder, but as something the body inherently knows how to move through.
Yeah, he flips the script on how we view it. It’s really pretty amazing. One of the things that always gets me…
Go for it.
Is how Levine just nails it when he says trauma is more than a feeling.
Right.
It’s energy, straight up energy that gets stuck in our system.
It’s wild to think about the body holding onto these experiences.
Oh, absolutely.
There’s this one story really stuck with me. Woman, her son gets hit by a car. Oh, gosh. And in that moment, she describes this just like visceral reaction. Her heart just drops, blood runs cold, legs turn to lead.
It’s so powerful that imagery shows how trauma, it’s not just in your head.
The whole body.
Yeah, a full body thing. And it’s not always like right there on the surface either. Levine brings up the chow chilla kidnapping.
Oh, right.
Those kids seemed okay at first.
Yeah, yeah.
But the long-term effects were just devastating.
It makes you wonder how many of us are carrying this stuff around. But if we’re talking about this freeze response,
humans and the animals experience it. Why do we seem to get stuck with the trauma while animals, they bounce back?
It’s a great question. Levine uses this analogy with Impales. They freeze when there’s danger.
Sure, sure.
But then when the threat’s gone, they shape, tremble, get rid of that pent-up energy. Back to normal, basically. But us humans,
complicated brains, fear of death, all that, we get caught in the freeze, can’t complete the cycle.
Okay, I get the Impala thing. But how does a shaking deer equal healing trauma for us? Seems like a big jump.
It’s a fair point. What Levine found is that this interrupted freeze response, it leads to a whole bunch of symptoms. He calls them the four horsemen of trauma.
Oh, that sounds-
Yeah, ominous.
Yeah, ominous, right. So what are they?
All right, so we’ve got hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation, and then helplessness. Each one’s a different way the body tries to deal with that stuck energy.
Okay, the four horsemen, pretty intense. Can you break those down a little more?
Sure. Let’s start with hyperarousal. This is like your alarm system stuck on racing thoughts, can’t sleep, jump at the smallest things, just constantly on edge.
So that wired and tired feeling everyone’s talking about these days, that could be trauma related.
Could be. Now, constriction, this is like slamming on the brakes, holding your breath, muscles all tense, focus narrows like tunnel vision, frozen in fear.
Take that woman with her son, her whole world just shrinks down to that moment.
Exactly. Now, dissociation, this one’s trickier. It’s like you detach from reality, spaced out, numb, almost like you’re watching yourself from outside. It’s a way to cope when things are just too much.
Okay, that was definitely a head scratcher. And then helplessness. I think we’ve all felt that, but what makes it different in the context of trauma?
Well, it’s this intense powerlessness. You can’t act, can’t protect yourself. Like Levine uses the example of imagine you’re hiking and suddenly there’s a rattlesnake. Oh yeah. In that split second, everything else vanishes. All that matters is the threat and you can’t do anything about it.
Chilling. So are these four horsemen in everyone who’s experienced trauma?
Not always all at once or to the same degree, but they represent how our bodies get stuck in that freeze response. And the important thing to remember is that these are natural reactions.
Not like personality flaws or?
No, no. Our body’s doing what they gotta do.
It’s not our fault we react this way.
Exactly. And that’s where Levine’s work is so important. So these
four horsemen, not flaws, just our bodies reacting. But what’s kind of scary is how Levine says even little things, especially in childhood, can trigger them.
Yeah. It’s easy to downplay those early experiences. Oh, I barely remember. Couldn’t have been that bad. But Levine says our bodies remember even if our minds don’t.
It’s true. You block things out.
He talks about childhood surgeries even, like getting your tonsils out. Think about it. You can’t do anything when your tonsils out. Think about it. You’re four years old.
Oh, yeah.
Strapped to a table, terrified, having to breathe in ether.
Not exactly the lollipop you get after, right?
Exactly. That can be super traumatic for a kid, but we don’t think of it that way. Levine even has a story. This guy, his tonsillectomy as a kid, led to panic attacks, all sorts of problems as an adult.
And he didn’t connect the two for years.
It took him a long time.
Like that saying the child is father of the man. We think we outgrow stuff, but it stays in our nervous system. This makes me think about those little annoyances that make me go crazy. Could that be something deeper? How do we know it’s just stress versus actual unresolved trauma?
That’s where those four horsemen we talked about, they become super important. Take hyper arousal, for example. It’s more than feeling stressed. It’s that constant on guard feeling. Your nervous system is in overdrive all the time. Scanning for danger, jumpy, can’t sleep, thoughts racing.
So those things a lot of people just call anxiety that could be from trauma.
It’s possible. Levine’s point is these symptoms aren’t just in your mind, they’re in your body. And a lot of times it’s your body trying to tell you something’s wrong.
That’s deep. So if we notice these signs, what can we do? We mentioned somatic experiencing. Levine’s approach to healing trauma. But I’m still a bit hazy on how it works. It’s not about reliving the trauma, right?
No, no. Somatic experiencing. It’s about helping your body finish that freeze response we talked about, getting that energy unstuck. You work with a trained therapist. They help you become aware of the sensations in your body. Maybe there’s tension, tightness, or even just an urge to move a certain way.
So it’s less about talking it out, more about tuning into your body. That’s pretty different from how most people think about therapy. How did Levine even come up with this?
It’s pretty cool. He got the idea from watching animals in the wild. Remember those impalas shaking off their fear? That’s what somatic experiencing is trying to tap into, our own natural ability to heal.
Like we’ve forgotten how to listen to our bodies.
Exactly. And that disconnect, it has consequences.
Levine disagrees with the idea that trauma is just a psychological problem. He says it’s a biological process that’s gone wrong and the healing has to happen in the body too.
Like we’re trying to fix a broken leg by just thinking about it. This makes me think about how in the West we separate mind and body. But Levine’s saying it’s all connected. What about the emotions though? Trauma is not just physical.
Of course not. But Levine says the emotions that come with trauma, the fear, the terror, that helplessness, it’s often because of the trapped energy. When your body completes that freeze response, the emotions lessen naturally.
So it’s like you’re addressing the root cause and as the body heals, the emotional stuff starts to work itself out.
That’s the idea. You’re not ignoring the emotions, you’re letting the body heal and then you can deal with the emotions in a healthier way.
Okay, that makes sense. So we’ve been talking about personal trauma, but you mentioned Levine also talks about societal trauma, right? Now that’s a whole other level.
Oh yeah. This is where it gets really interesting. Imagine that freeze response, not just in one person, but in a whole community after a disaster or ingrained in a culture that’s been oppressed. That’s societal trauma.
Like the whole group’s nervous system is thrown off. But if individual healing is already hard, how do we even start to heal from something that big?
Levine thinks the key is getting back in touch with those things that connect us, that help us regulate. Things like physical touch, rhythm, movement, especially important in early childhood.
Like how rocking a baby calms them down.
Exactly. He describes this study in Norway. They had mothers and babies from different cultures, groups that didn’t trust each other. And they had them sing and dance with their babies and the mothers, the babies, they started connecting the music, the movement. It created a sense of safety.
Wow.
Yeah. It bridged the gap between them.
That’s powerful. Music and movement can heal cultural divides. So even with huge societal trauma, there’s hope if we focus on connection.
That’s what Levine’s saying. It’s not about pretending the past didn’t happen, but about creating new experiences that build trust and a sense of shared humanity.
This is all so insightful, but it makes me think about the long-term consequences of all this unhealed trauma, personal and societal. What happens if we don’t address it?
It’s a big question and it’s something we’ll get into when we come back. We’ll look at how trauma can be cast down through generations and how those unhealed wounds affect us. And most importantly, what we can do to create a world that understands trauma better.
We’re back. And before we got into that whole societal trauma thing, we were talking about the long-term effects of, well, not dealing with trauma on a personal level. And Levine suggests that trauma, it can actually get passed down through generations.
It’s one of those ideas that takes a minute to process, right?
Yeah.
It’s not like you inherit the actual event, right? But more like the ways of coping, the emotional and physiological patterns. Think about it. If your parents, your grandparents, they lived with constant fear, hypervigilance. It affects how they parent, their relationships, even their own nervous system.
Like a ripple effect.
Exactly. They pass on these ways of being reacting to the world and it impacts the next generation, even if nobody’s doing it on purpose.
And it happens without them even realizing it.
Often, yeah. It’s not a choice. It’s like an unconscious adaptation to a world that feels dangerous.
Makes me think about those families where addiction or abuse is a pattern.
Generational trauma.
Could that be unhealed trauma being passed down?
It’s complicated, of course, but Levine suggests that, yeah, trauma that hasn’t been addressed, it can create this cycle of suffering.
Like a wound that never heals and the pain just keeps going. Right. Sobering thought.
But if we accept that trauma can have this impact, reaching so far, what do we do about it? Can we break free from these cycles?
Levine’s not all doom and gloom, thankfully. He believes that if we understand trauma and we work with our bodies to heal, we can start to create a world that’s more trauma informed.
Okay. What does that mean? Trauma informed. How do we even become that? Sounds like a huge task.
It starts with awareness, recognizing that trauma is way more common than we think.
Right.
It affects all kinds of people and it’s about learning to see the signs, not just in ourselves, but in others too.
Being more empathetic, like understanding why people react in certain ways, even if it doesn’t make sense to us at first.
Exactly. And on a bigger level, societal, it’s about building systems that support healing, not systems that make things worse. How do we treat people who are struggling?
Addiction, mental health issues, even just tough times. A trauma informed approach, it moves away from judgment and toward compassion.
It’s like changing the whole way we think about these things.
Yeah. It challenges the stigma, you know, recognizing that mental health struggles, they often come from real difficult experiences, not because someone’s flawed.
Creating a space where people feel safe to ask for help, talk about what they’ve been through, get the support they need without shame.
Exactly. It’s about building resilience for individuals and the communities.
Powerful. So anyone listening, if this is hitting home and they want to learn more, where’s a good place to start?
Well, Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger, it’s a great place to begin. It goes deep, but it’s written in a way that’s easy to understand.
And what about finding a therapist who does somatic experiencing? If someone wants to try that, where can they look?
There’s lots of good resources online. You can find practitioners near you. And even if you don’t jump into therapy right away, there’s stuff you can do on your own just to start paying attention to your body, those signals it’s sending.
Like what? Give us some examples.
Simple things. Notice your breath. Where do you feel tension? Spend time in nature. Even gentle movement, stretching, can help you become more aware of your physical self. It’s about tuning in, learning to listen.
Rediscovering that inner wisdom Levine talks about, that we have what we need to heal already inside us.
That’s it. That’s what he wants us to remember. We are not defined by our traumas. By understanding how trauma works in the body, by working with our bodies, and by creating a world that gets it, we can heal and we can thrive.
Beautiful. As we wrap up this deep dive, any final thoughts for our listener?
Just this. Healing IS possible. It might not be easy, might not be straightforward,
but it’s there for you. Trust your body, get support when you need it, and don’t give up on that journey of healing.
That’s perfect. And on that note, we’ll leave you to explore the wisdom of Waking the Tiger. Until next time, keep exploring, keep asking questions, and keep diving deep.
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