Peter A. Levine is an American psychologist and body-oriented therapist who developed Somatic Experiencing (SE), a method for resolving trauma by tracking and completing the body’s interrupted defensive responses. Levine holds doctorates in both medical biophysics and psychology and studied stress and trauma across disciplinary boundaries — ethology, neuroscience, and clinical psychology.
Levine’s central insight comes from observing how animals in the wild recover from life-threatening encounters. Prey animals discharge threat-response activation through involuntary trembling, shaking, and deep breathing — completing the physiological cycle that the sympathetic nervous system initiated. Humans, Levine argues, frequently interrupt this discharge through social conditioning, medical immobilization, or cognitive override, leaving the activation bound in the nervous system as chronic tension, hypervigilance, or dissociation.
SE works through titrated attention to somatic awareness: the practitioner guides the client to track bodily sensations at the edge of traumatic activation, allowing the nervous system to complete its interrupted response in small, manageable increments. This approach avoids flooding the system with traumatic material and works within the body’s own capacity for self-regulation.
Notable works
- Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)
- In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (2010)
Related
- somatic experiencing — the method Levine developed
- Stephen Porges — neuroscientist whose polyvagal theory informs SE