Somatic Experience Therapist in Asheville, NC

Fight, Flight Or Freeze

Somatic Experiencing is a therapy that is based on the fight or flight response. When we experience danger in our life we naturally fight or flee to find safety. If we are in a situation where we can’t successfully fight or flee, we freeze. When we freeze the initial fight or flee impulse gets stuck inside our nervous system, unable to complete itself, waiting to be released. As it is stuck, this energy creates problems in our being such as depression, anxiety, anger outbursts, dissociation, addiction, auto-immune/physical disorders, and more. Somatic Experiencing helps to access this stuck energy and to provide safe and right conditions for this energy to finally be completed and released, restoring the individual back to normalcy and peace.

For example, if a child had a parent who abused his boundaries, the child would have naturally wanted to use his fight response by saying, “Stop” or “No” but couldn’t because he didn’t feel safe to do that. This impulse stays stuck inside the body, wanting to complete itself, and could come out in unhealthy ways such as anger outbursts, passive aggressiveness, or even physically in bodily pain such as chronic headaches. Somatic Experiencing would give this client a chance to safely and successfully complete this fight response by creating the right conditions in therapy to assert himself the way he initially needed to.