Training for Professionals in Healing Trauma

Growing scientific evidence indicates that the dynamics of traumatic stress and its symptoms have significant biological components. Developed by Peter A. Levine, PhD, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a powerful yet gentle method for addressing the psychobiology of stress and trauma.  Healing trauma without re-traumatization!

The Somatic Experiencing® training offers both a comprehensive understanding of our biological capacity to heal and the skills necessary to facilitate this natural process.  Clinical, medical, and community professionals who deal with the aftermath of trauma can learn how to recognize and support this healing in the context of their work and in their own experience. This body-focused approach understands that traumatic stress symptoms are often expressions of incomplete or fixated lower brain functions of fight, flight, and freeze. SE® helps people complete these responses and restore their inherent self-correcting, self-regulating mechanisms. Integrating these lower psychomotor processes with higher brain processes of cognition and feeling creates a more flexible neurological system, and enhances capacity to enjoy a wide spectrum of human experience.  The results are freedom from trauma symptoms and a greater sense of aliveness, spontaneity, connection and joy.

ARIEL GIARRETTO, LMFT, CMT, has been specializing in the treatment of both shock and developmental trauma since 1993. She practices in the US, Europe and Canada as a somatic psychotherapist, a Somatic Experiencing® instructor and consultant. For 11 years she was on
staff at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur as a workshop and group leader, a private counselor and  bodyworker. She has offered trainings to the Trauma Center at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital on secondary traumatization and patient PTSD prevention. She has special training in pre and perinatal
trauma and has a successful private practice in the Bay Area.