I’ve been trying to research somatic experiencing therapy, and all I’ve been able to find out is that nobody says it’s a scam. I’m at the point now where it’s the best option I can find for my goal. Can you expound on why it’s probably helpful for this or for trauma?
It’s helpful for this in two ways. The one I mentioned explicitly was that it trains awareness of your physical and emotional state, which is a precursor for monitoring how different things affect those states, which is a precursor for changing your environment to change your state.
But the whole experimental framework is also based on an SET technique called emotional titration. The goal of emotional titration is to move fluidly between emotional states in a range that feels good for you. It’s useful here for smoothly transitioning between Quiet and intellectual mosh pit, and then back.
But trauma victims also classically become dissociated and then stuck in a handful of emotional states (e.g. gritted teeth calm and hysterics, with no in-between), and titration can help them expand their emotional ranges and thus respond more proportionately to stimuli. It also lets them process past trauma in manageable chunks (with the size of the chunk often going up over time), without overloading them or leaving something repressed forever. Where something like CBT picks an emotional state for you and attempts to force you into it unresponsively, SET is all about testing small emotional movements and seeing how they feel.
In terms of scams, I think SET is on the better half of the distribution of therapy modalities but the default advice still holds: individual practitioners can be good or bad at it, or good or bad for you, your practitioner matters more than the official modality. A focus on skill-building rather than processing in-session means you’re more likely to graduate and less likely to pick up therapy as a multi-year hobby, which I think is a positive.
I’ve been trying to research somatic experiencing therapy, and all I’ve been able to find out is that nobody says it’s a scam. I’m at the point now where it’s the best option I can find for my goal. Can you expound on why it’s probably helpful for this or for trauma?
It’s helpful for this in two ways. The one I mentioned explicitly was that it trains awareness of your physical and emotional state, which is a precursor for monitoring how different things affect those states, which is a precursor for changing your environment to change your state.
But the whole experimental framework is also based on an SET technique called emotional titration. The goal of emotional titration is to move fluidly between emotional states in a range that feels good for you. It’s useful here for smoothly transitioning between Quiet and intellectual mosh pit, and then back.
But trauma victims also classically become dissociated and then stuck in a handful of emotional states (e.g. gritted teeth calm and hysterics, with no in-between), and titration can help them expand their emotional ranges and thus respond more proportionately to stimuli. It also lets them process past trauma in manageable chunks (with the size of the chunk often going up over time), without overloading them or leaving something repressed forever. Where something like CBT picks an emotional state for you and attempts to force you into it unresponsively, SET is all about testing small emotional movements and seeing how they feel.
In terms of scams, I think SET is on the better half of the distribution of therapy modalities but the default advice still holds: individual practitioners can be good or bad at it, or good or bad for you, your practitioner matters more than the official modality. A focus on skill-building rather than processing in-session means you’re more likely to graduate and less likely to pick up therapy as a multi-year hobby, which I think is a positive.