What Almost a Decade of Somatic Experiencing Has Taught Me About Healing Trauma

I didn't go looking for Somatic Experiencing®. Honestly, I was sure that I didn't want to be in the therapy room anymore.

I had been treating trauma since 2004. For nearly a decade I showed up for clients carrying the weight of childhood abuse, neglect, attachment wounds, and relational trauma. I was EMDR trained. I had done a deep dive into the neuroscience of trauma. I understood what was happening in the brain when someone experienced trauma: how the amygdala fires, how the prefrontal cortex goes offline, how traumatic memory gets encoded differently than ordinary memory. I could explain it clearly and I believed in it.

I thought I had the whole picture, I didn't even recognize that I was missing a key piece, the body.

By 2013, that gap, along with the cumulative weight of doing trauma work with tools that felt increasingly incomplete, had burned me out. I stepped away from direct clinical work and moved into an administrative role in mental health. It felt like the right call at the time. I needed distance from the room. I wasn't sure I'd go back.

Then in 2016, my boss offered to pay for a Somatic Experiencing® training. I had never heard of SE. I said yes mostly because the opportunity was there and the cost wasn't coming out of my pocket. I had no idea what I was walking into.

What happened in that training changed the direction of my entire clinical life, and to be honest my personal life as well. I fundamentally was changed.

I remember sitting in those early SE trainings and feeling something shift. Not just intellectually, but in my own nervous system. This was a language I hadn't been taught, and it was answering questions I didn't even know I had been asking. SE wasn't just a new technique to add to a toolkit. It was a fundamentally different way of understanding how human beings heal from trauma, one that started with the body rather than asking the body to catch up to the insight.

Here was the missing piece. The thing that had been absent from every cognitive approach I'd worked within for years.

Not long after beginning the training, my life changed. My husband was in the military and we relocated to Alabama. I left that agency. I could have let the SE training go. It would have been easy to chalk it up to an interesting experience and move on. Instead, I made the decision to continue the training on my own, out of my own resources, because I knew I had found something I genuinely believed in.

That conviction was tested again when I was introduced to Trauma-Focused CBT around the same time and encouraged to pursue certification. I started the process and then made a deliberate choice to opt out. TF-CBT is a solid, evidence-based model and I'm not dismissing it. But I had already found where I was going. I wasn't willing to divide my focus or dilute my commitment to SE by chasing a credential in a different direction.

And then there was the decision that still feels significant to me when I think about it. I went back to the therapy room.

The same room I had burned out of and walked away from in 2013. SE brought me back to it. I remember knowing, with a clarity I don't always have about professional decisions, that I had found something that would genuinely change what I could offer clients and how I could sustain myself doing this work. I wasn't willing to stay in administration and keep that at arm's length. I needed to be in the room with people, doing this.

That was nearly a decade ago. I have been in that room ever since.

SE Is Not Something You Learn and Then Apply

What I understand now that I didn't in those early trainings is that Somatic Experiencing® is not a protocol. You don't follow a script. You don't move through a predetermined sequence of steps. What you do instead is learn to track: the subtle shifts in sensation, the almost imperceptible impulses toward movement, the places where a nervous system gets close to something and then contracts away from it.

That kind of tracking takes time to develop. Not months. Years.

In my early SE-informed sessions, I could feel myself catching things after the fact, noticing a moment that mattered a few beats after it had already passed. I was learning to read a language my training had never taught me to pay attention to. It was humbling. It was also one of the most profound professional experiences of my life and a personal one too, because SE was simultaneously teaching me things about my own nervous system that years of talk-based approaches had never touched.

What I have now, after nearly a decade of this work, is something that took those years to build: the capacity to be present with a nervous system without rushing it, without filling the silence before it needs to be filled, without subtly pushing toward resolution before the body is ready to offer it. That presence and attunement are not something I could have offered a client in 2017 the way I can offer them now.

What Experience Looks Like in the Room

In somatic work, experience doesn't make you louder or more directive. It actually does the opposite.

Over the years, I've learned when to speak and when to stay quiet. I've learned the difference between a pause that wants to be held and a pause that wants to be gently met. I've learned that what looks like resistance in a nervous system is almost always protection, and that protection deserves curiosity, not pressure.

I've also sat with clients who have tried other somatic approaches and felt worse: overwhelmed, flooded, like something had been pushed open before they were ready. This can happen when the pacing is off, when the window of tolerance isn't understood or honored, when the practitioner is moving toward healing faster than the client's nervous system can safely follow. I will be honest, I have made my fair share of mistakes.

Part of what I brought back into the therapy room after my burnout was a hard-won understanding of what doesn't work in trauma treatment. The cognitive approaches weren't wrong. They were incomplete. Insight alone doesn't reach the places where trauma actually lives. And pushing a nervous system toward processing before it has enough safety and resource doesn't heal it. It dysregulates it further.

Pacing is everything in this work. And pacing, the felt sense of it, the art of it, comes with experience.

Why This Matters for Developmental and Betrayal Trauma

The clients I work with, adults healing from developmental trauma, childhood wounds, betrayal, and broken trust, come in with nervous systems that have been shaped by relationships that weren't safe. Their systems learned, often very early, that vulnerability is dangerous, that connection leads to harm, that the body is not a place worth returning to.

For these clients in particular, the quality of the therapeutic relationship and the pacing of the work are not secondary concerns. They are the work.

A nervous system that learned to survive by shutting down, bracing, or staying on high alert does not heal quickly. It heals carefully, incrementally, relationally, through repeated experiences of something going differently than it has before. That process requires a practitioner who can stay regulated themselves, who doesn't need the client to move faster to feel like the session is "working," and who trusts the body's own intelligence even when progress looks invisible from the outside.

That is what I bring to this work. Not just the training, but the years inside it, including the years before SE when I learned firsthand what was missing from a purely cognitive approach to trauma and what it costs a clinician to keep working without the right tools.

A Note on Choosing a Somatic Therapist

If you're searching for a Somatic Experiencing® practitioner, I want to offer you something to consider that most therapist directories won't tell you: the credential matters, and so does how long someone has been working within it.

SE is growing in visibility. More practitioners are completing their training every year, and that's genuinely good news for the field. But a clinician who finished their SE training two years ago and a clinician who has been integrating it into clinical work since 2016, with prior years of trauma treatment experience before that, will offer meaningfully different experiences. Not because the newer practitioner isn't skilled, but because this modality deepens with time, repetition, and the kind of hard-won clinical judgment that only comes from years in the room.

Ask potential therapists when they completed their SE training. Ask how long they've been integrating it into their work. Ask what populations they've primarily used it with. You deserve to have that information when you're making a decision about who to trust with your healing.

Still Learning After All These Years

I want to close with something I hold as true alongside everything above: I am still a student of this work.

SE is a living practice. I continue to study, to receive consultation, to sit in my own process. The more I understand about the nervous system, the more I appreciate how much there is still to learn. Nearly a decade into SE-informed practice, with over twenty years of trauma treatment behind me, I am more curious about this work than I was when I started, not less.

I also still carry gratitude for the burnout that led me here. I didn't understand it at the time, but leaving the room in 2013 was its own form of wisdom. My nervous system was telling me something important before I had the language to hear it. Finding SE in 2016 gave me that language. It gave me a way to work that I can sustain. And it gave me something I didn't expect: a reason to come back.

If you're somewhere in Michigan carrying the weight of developmental trauma, childhood wounds, or betrayal, and you're wondering whether somatic therapy might be right for you, I'd love to talk. Reach out and we'll start with a conversation.

Nina Keeler is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (SEP) based in Detroit, Michigan. With over 20 years of clinical experience, including trauma treatment since 2004 and SE-informed practice since beginning her Somatic Experiencing® training in 2016, she specializes in adult developmental trauma and betrayal trauma. She works virtually with clients throughout Michigan.

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