We live in a culture that treats the body as a problem — something to control, to optimize, to override. The message, delivered a thousand times a day, is that something outside of you will make you feel satisfied. Complete.
Somatic Experiencing®(SETM) offers a different proposition: what if everything you need to feel safe, capable, and at home in yourself is already here? Not that you won’t feel pain — you will, that’s part of being human. But that you can learn to meet it. Tend to it. Move with it, rather than around it.
I spent years running from my body. I understand, viscerally, why people do. And I also know — in my bones, not just my mind — that the body is not the enemy. It has been trying to protect you. It has been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for you to return.
Somatic Experiencing® is the practice of learning to do exactly that.
A Personal Journey
When I was growing up, my body was not a place I wanted to live.
I was a short, curvy Jewish girl with serious eyebrows, in a home defined by scarcity and chaos. With six younger siblings, someone was always fighting, crying, or slamming a door. We lived in near-constant survival mode.
So I did what nervous systems do when they have no other option: I left my body. I found exits everywhere—food to numb the overwhelm, fantasy to disappear into, overachievement to create control, and eventually alcohol and stimulants to lift the depression that had become my baseline. By my twenties, these strategies had evolved into addiction and an eating disorder.
From the outside, I looked “functional,” even successful. I had a spiritual practice, was managing a respected wellness organization, and had relationships that seemed solid. But internally, I knew I wasn’t OK. I remember walking past a reservoir one morning, thinking about letting myself fall in—not because I wanted to die, but because I couldn’t imagine continuing to live that way.
That was 2014. With just enough support, including an aunt in recovery, I found my way into treatment. What followed was a slow, painstaking, and ultimately transformative process of learning to come back to myself.
In treatment, I found real respite. Therapy, community, and honesty gave me permission to stop pretending and tell the truth about my experience. For the first time, I felt seen, and the relief was profound.
Yet, insight alone couldn’t reach what lived beneath. Years of numbing had left deep reserves of grief, anger, and fear in my body, and they were beginning to surface. The tools I was offered – however well-intentioned – didn’t translate into something my body could understand.
Over time, through yoga and later formal training in Somatic Experiencing®, I came to understand that the body speaks a different language than the mind. It is slower, quieter, and cannot be reasoned with. It needs to be met on its own terms. Not to be fixed but accompanied.
You may not share my particular story.
But if you have ever found yourself reaching for something — sugar, wine, busyness, your phone — not because you wanted it, but because something in you needed quieting, you already know what I’m describing. If you have ever felt the gap between understanding something and being able to actually change it, you know it too.
What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Somatic Experiencing® is a body-based approach to resolving trauma, developed by Dr. Peter Levine and rooted in the study of how animals in the wild naturally discharge stress after a threatening experience. Humans have the same capacity — but we’ve largely lost access to it, through a culture that prizes thinking over feeling, productivity over rest, and stoicism over expression.
What makes SETM distinct from other trauma modalities is not just what it does, but what it doesn’t. It doesn’t require you to retell your story. It doesn’t ask you to relive the past to heal it. And it doesn’t treat the body as a problem to be solved, but as a living system with its own intelligence and its own innate drive toward wholeness.
SETM works by gently interrupting that cycle — not through force, but through attention. We learn to notice what is happening in the body, in small enough increments that the nervous system can begin to process what it could not before.
The Five Skills We Build Together
This is what I find most beautiful about SETM: before we ever approach the difficult material, we build the ground beneath us first. We spend real time learning that the body is safe, that it holds resources as well as wounds, and that it is capable of something it may never have been permitted — rest, pleasure, ease.
From there, we work together to develop five core capacities. These are not techniques. They are a new way of being in relationship with yourself.
The SETM pillars
Titration – Approaching difficult material in small increments — so the nervous system is gently challenged, never overwhelmed.
Pendulation – Moving attention between discomfort and relative ease — teaching the nervous system that relief is always available.
Resourcing – Identifying the inner and outer supports that create a felt sense of safety.
Tracking – Developing the capacity to notice — without reacting to — the sensations and feelings arising in the body.
Completion – Supporting the nervous system in finishing the biological responses interrupted during overwhelming experiences — so the body can finally settle.
I spent a long time wishing someone had offered me a map for this terrain. That’s the work I show up to do now. If you’re ready to begin — or even just curious what beginning might feel like — I’d be honored to be in that conversation with you. I offer individual sessions in Kentfield at Marin Integrative Recovery and online. You can find me at marinintegrative.com.
Chelsea Rappel is a Trauma-Trained Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and educator with over a decade of experience. Her training spans Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® Institute, Yoga Therapy in Holistic Healthcare (Stress Management Center of Marin), addiction counseling studies at California State East Bay, and extensive work in Buddhist psychology and Tibetan Yoga through the Nyingma Institute. She works with adults navigating traumatic and chronic stress, addictive patterns, anxiety and depression, grief, and dysregulation.
