TRE/Somatic Experiencing

[Dudov]

Have any of you dudes already done TRE, Somatic Experiencing or are familiar with Peter Levine's work? It helped me a great deal to release some of my uptightedness so just wondering if it helped any of you guys too.

[mrpaddy]

Can't say as I've heard of it. Is that some kind of Eastern thing? Tell us about it dude. Got any promising leads?

[Dudov]

Haha yeah it's kind of an Eastern Thing, but the theory behind it actually makes a lot of sense.

The main premise behind it is that what keeps people from chilling out and taking it easy like the Dude is "stored energy" in the body from unresolved trauma. I know this sounds far out but please read on. Trauma here doesn't necessarily refer to PTSD following war or rape. It can be any situation that causes stress really, like nihilists throwing a marmot at you in the bathtub for instance. Like animals, when facing a threatening situation, humans have three types of response:
a. Fight
b. Flight
c. Freeze or what's called "Tonic Immobility"

Fight and flight are well-known, but Freeze is what's interesting here. Freeze is a state animals go in when they can't escape from or fight back a predator. This allows them to "mentally escape" a threatening situation in a way and not be shit-scared when Death comes. Sometimes what happens though, is that an animal might enter in a state of Tonic Immobility, but not die straight away afterwards. For example, a lion might be chasing a gazelle and just as the gazelle is frozen and "ready" to die, the lion sees a human hunter approaching and decides to escape. What happens then is that no longer facing the threat of Death, the gazelle discharges the tension stored in the body to "get out" from the state of Tonic Immobility and go back to chilling out in the wild. This video sums it up quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZRiLGTtqjg

The problem with people is that when facing a Freeze situation, unlike animals in the wild, they can't easily "discharge" their stored energy to restore balance in the body. This is mainly because humans are scared of their own instinctual responses and can't really express them in the environment they live in - i.e. go try and "shake your energy off" in your office... If humans therefore want to be chilled out, they have to overcome this fear and find a way to release this stored up energy.

I suffered from anxiety  for quite a long time and this, along with Dudesim, has helped me TREMENDOUSLY in being more chilled out. This is a very rough summary though but feel free to check Peter Levine's books that go much deeper into it.

[jgiffin]

Hmmm, I hadn't thought about it that way before. It also seems like the low-to-mid level stress we are subjected to on a near continuous basis may figure into that equation. The fight or flight response was an evolutionary adaptation responsive to very dangerous, but acute, situations. Today, however, we aren't being killed by fire demons and danger snakes - it's the fucking arteriosclerosis, Alzheimers, and diabetes.

There's no opportunity to directly "discharge" the tensions constantly accumulating from today's stresses. Perhaps that helps explain the importance of exercise; if nothing else, as a mechanism to discharge the elemental energies that accrue. Or not. I dunno, man.