PETER A. LEVINE - Healing trauma: a pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body

I wish to thank the many people that I have worked with, for their courage and for the privilege of having let me walk with them on their journeys. In particular I am indebted to the children and babies who have graced me with their miraculous innocence and soaring spirits. Through their childs play they have illuminated the wisdom of the organism to heal and to become whole.

To my parents, Morris and Helen, I give thanks for the gift of life, the vehicle for the expression of my work, and for their continued full and unequivocal support from both sides of the physical plane. To Pouncer, the Dingo dog, who has been my guide into the animal world as well a constant companion, and who at the age of seventeen, joyfully, chased his last rabbit: thank you for showing me the vital joy of corporeal life.

I thank my many amazingly talented studentsand colleaguesboth for their support and for challenging me; particularly my appreciation goes to the dedicated teachers of Somatic Experiencing for continuing to bring this work into the world. I thank, especially, my dear friend Maggie Kline for her generous help and support for this and other projects. In addition, I offer appreciation to Maureen Harrington for her help. I also thank Mitchell Clute of Sounds True, for his artful production, as well as Alice Feinstein and the other production people at Sounds True for their creativity and professionalism. And, finally, my gratitude is to Tami Simon for her vision and ongoing support in bringing these ideas and tools to the public.

I thank, finally, fate, destiny, synchronicity, or even blind luck and coincidence for my unusual path in life and work. I have had the opportunity and honor to share such deep and rich experiences with so many of my clients, students, and colleagues over these many short years.

For the last 35 years, I have been studying stress and trauma, as well as helping people heal from its effects. I am often asked how I can work with a subject as morbid as trauma without becoming burned out or depressed. My answer to this question is that witnessing the transformation that takes place in people when they master their traumas has proven to be a deeply sustaining and uplifting experience in my life. How can that be?

Let me begin by telling you a little about myself. I began my career as a scientist in the radical environment of Berkeley, California, in the mid-1960s. While studying the effects of accumulated stress on the nervous system, I began to suspect that most organisms have an innate capacity to rebound from threatening and stressful events. At that time, I had no knowledge of psychological traumathe term would not be defined in its modern form for another 15 years. I was experimenting with different stress reduction techniques that employed the new idea of a mind/body connection.

During this early research, a singular event occurred that would forever change the direction of my work. A psychiatrist who was familiar with my stress research asked me to see a patient of his who was suffering from various psychosomatic symptoms, such as migraines, PMS, chronic pain, and fatigue, as well as severe panic attacks. The psychiatrist thought that this patient would benefit from learning how to relax her body.

As I began working with this patient (lets call her Nancy), she began to relax. Suddenly, without warning, she panicked. Terrified, and with no notion of what to do, I saw in my minds eye the fleeting image of a tiger poised for attack. It appeared dreamlike, and, at that time, I had no idea where it had come from.

Theres a tiger coming after you, Nancy, I blurted out without thinking. Run and escape to those rocks. Run for your life! To my amazement, Nancys body began to shake and tremble. Her cheeks flushed red as she started to sweat profusely. After several minutes, she took a few spontaneous deep breaths. This response, which was scary for both of us, washed over her in waves for almost an hour. At the end she experienced a profound calm, saying she felt held in warm tingly waves.

Nancy reported to me that during this hour she saw mental pictures of herself at age four being held down and given ether anesthesia for a tonsillectomy. The fear of suffocation she experienced as a childand that she remembered and revisited during her session with mewas terrifying. As a child she had felt overwhelmed and helpless. After this one session with me, her whole host of debilitating symptoms improved dramatically, and she was able to get on with her life.

That experience with Nancy changed the course of my life. Ultimately, it opened new avenues in my ongoing research into the nature of stress and trauma, deepened my understanding of how trauma affects the body, and led to a whole new way of treating the debilitating after-effects that can take so many negative and destructive forms.

The effects of unresolved trauma can be devastating. It can affect our habits and outlook on life, leading to addictions and poor decision-making. It can take a toll on our family life and interpersonal relationships. It can trigger real physical pain, symptoms, and disease. And it can lead to a range of self-destructive behaviors. But trauma doesnt have to be a life sentence.

As a result of my years of research and clinical work, Ive developed an approach using physical and mental exercises that can help cleanse the body and mind of the debilitating effects of trauma. Over the last 30 years, I have witnessed transformation in the lives of literally thousands of people as they healed from traumatic events.

This is the Twelve-Phase Healing Trauma Program that I will be sharing with you in the rest of this book and in the accompanying CD. Using this program, you begin the healing process on Day One. And as you continue using the program in the weeks and months to come, you should experience a gradual healing process that helps you free your body and mind from the debilitating long-term symptoms of trauma.

Before we get to the details of how the program works, however, it will be helpful for you to know a little more about what trauma is and exactly how it gets into the body and causes such a wide variety of symptoms. In the brief overview presented in the opening chapters of this book, I give you what you need to know in order to understand this programhow and why it works.

Before beginning the exercises, its important that you read all the preceding material in the book. If youre familiar with what trauma is and how it can affect you, the exercises are much more likely to have a powerfully positive effect on your unresolved trauma.

I go into a great deal more detail about my research and the physiology of trauma in my bestselling book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (North Atlantic Books, 1997). If you would like to read more about theory and personal case examples, if you want to know more about the science of why this program works, I refer you to that book. That book also features a number of inspiring stories about people who have experienced significant healing from their own past traumas. Id like to reassure you, however, that youll find right here in this book all that youll need to know to make the Twelve-Phase Healing Trauma Program work for you.