You Don't Need to Release Your Trauma

Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, just made that up

This is the second part of a series debunking the interconnected work of Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, and Bessel van der Kolk. If you missed part one, you can catch up here:

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What’s the deal with Peter Levine?

My first impression of Peter Levine was that he is a charming eccentric who bears a striking resemblance to the illustrations of Roald Dahl’s BFG with his jughandle ears and pointed nose. He’s the kooky Berkeley uncle of this group who likes to go hot tubbing naked at Esalen and will regale you at Thanksgiving with insights he gained from Shamanic rituals. Levine seems to have contributed to a necessary correction in the field of psychology by reminding academics that humans experience the world through our bodies, and that our experiences are sensory and not purely cognitive.

Peter Levine and his doppelganger, Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant illustrated by Quentin Blake.

The more I dug into Levine’s work, though, the more it became apparent that Levine’s theories and his trademarked intervention, Somatic Experiencing (SE), are not evidence-based. Levine’s conjecture that trauma is “frozen” in the body and that SE will “release trauma” has given many people the impression that they have to engage in a mystical process to release their pent-up traumatic experiences even though there is no evidence to support this. While you may not have heard of Peter Levine or SE directly, his buddy Bessel van der Kolk widely disseminated Levine’s ideas in his bestselling self-help book, “The Body Keeps the Score.” These ideas have trickled down through the culture and spawned a genre of wellness influencers who create videos promising to release your trauma if you do their “somatic” hip-opening exercises.

In his books “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma” and “In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness,” Levine makes claims that are not supported by research and makes promises he cannot keep. He has contributed to fears that everyone has the residue of trauma lurking in their bodies by broadening the definition of trauma until it applies to any stressful experience. By exaggerating the degree to which traumatic memories are repressed, Levine (along with van der Kolk) has promoted the widespread fear that hidden trauma is causing somatic symptoms, even for those who have no memories of unpleasant experiences.

In short, the more I researched Levine, the more convinced I became that he is a wildly successful quack who seems to sincerely believe his own grift.

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Levine opened his Ergos Institute in 1972, four years before he completed his doctorate in 1976. His first book, “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma” was published in 1997, twenty-five years after Levine founded his institute. Levine writes, “Somatic Experiencing is new and is not subject to rigorous scientific research at this time. What I have to support the validity of this approach are several hundred individual cases in which people report that the symptoms which once impaired their ability to live full and satisfied lives are gone or greatly diminished.” I wouldn’t consider an intervention “new” after a quarter of a century. Two and a half decades seems like plenty of time to conduct some clinical trials, but Levine does not cite any studies to support any of the claims he makes in “Waking the Tiger.” Fans of Maintenance Phase will recognize this as a time-honored grifter tactic. In place of double-blind clinical trials that systematically test the efficacy of an intervention, grifters often rely on unverified testimonials or anecdotal evidence.

I want to take a moment to reflect on the questionable ethics of implementing an untested therapeutic intervention on hundreds of people. Let’s say I had an idea to start using tarot card readings as an intervention with my clients. I could argue that using tarot cards taps into Jungian archetypes and allows clients to access their intuition. Let’s imagine that I called this Intuitive Experiencing and opened an institute to promote it before I completed my graduate degree or became a fully licensed clinician. Then I practiced this tarot therapy for twenty-five years without clinically testing it; possibly without gaining informed consent from my unsuspecting clients; trademarked it; published a book promoting it; and charged clinicians thousands of dollars to become certified practitioners of Intuitive Experiencing. This is essentially what Peter Levine did with Somatic Experiencing, but instead of using tarot cards, Levine was inspired by wild animals, shamans, and vegetotherapy (a widely rejected intervention developed by Wilhelm Reich, a disgraced psychoanalyst described by the FDA as a “fraud of the first magnitude.”)

What is Somatic Experiencing?

Levine likes to repeat an origin story for SE in which he had a flash of insight and told a patient who was having a panic attack to run away from a tiger. Levine claimed this patient, Nancy, began making “running movements” with her legs and then began to shake. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that the adrenaline rush from Nancy’s panic attack caused her shaking, Levine interpreted her shaking as a “release” of pent-up “energy” that had supposedly been trapped in her body since a childhood tonsillectomy. He claimed that this single intervention cured Nancy of panic symptoms forever. This story appears in both “Waking the Tiger” and “In An Unspoken Voice” and is where the title and the tiger-themed covers of Levine’s books come from.

Levine mentions in passing that Nancy first had a panic attack while taking the GRE. This sounds like a common reaction to test anxiety to me, but Levine attributes Nancy’s panic symptoms to the “trapped energy” from her childhood tonsillectomy decades before. He notes that after her session with him, she “subsequently entered graduate school, where she completed her doctorate without relapse.” I can’t help but wonder whether Nancy overcame her panic symptoms because once she was a graduate student, she didn’t need to take high-pressure standardized exams like the GRE anymore. Either way, an anecdote like this is unverifiable and offers an N of 1.

This story sets the scene for Levine’s central thesis that when the “immobility response” is activated (aka the instinct to freeze when threatened), energy becomes trapped and that trauma symptoms “stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.” Levine insists that “without passing through the primitive ‘immobility response’ and releasing the residual energy, they will often remain stuck in the traumatic maze.”

During SE treatment sessions, Levine claims that he reconnects patients with their instinct to move through their trauma, thereby discharging their trapped energy. He accomplishes this by encouraging clients to pay attention to subtle signals from their bodies about where their energy is trapped, which can be indicated by muscle tension, twitching, or really any vague sensation. (Writing that straightforward sentence required sifting through about forty pages of gobbledygook. After reading and re-reading it, I think that’s the gist of what Levine does in sessions.) Levine takes it as a sign that trapped energy has been discharged if a patient starts shaking, trembling, twitching, has “changes in skin temperature,” or “micro-movements.” So, basically, just about any sensation or movement in your body could be interpreted as proof that your long-trapped energy has been released.

Gabor Maté wrote the foreword to this book.

I see obvious shortcomings in this premise. Levine (and later van der Kolk citing Levine) claims that people who are able to take action while experiencing trauma are less likely to experience lasting symptoms because they are “discharging” their “survival energy.” Of course, Levine offers no evidence to back up this claim (or any other). This claim is undercut by the fact that first responders are at significant risk of developing PTSD even though they are not immobilized by the disasters they respond to. Firefighters and EMTs are great at taking action in a crisis, but are often haunted afterward by the carnage they saw, and plagued by intrusive thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, hypervigilance, and other trauma symptoms.

Levine acknowledges the distinction between single incident trauma (i.e. a car accident) and “developmental trauma” (i.e. being neglected or repeatedly abused as a child) but he fails to account for how his treatment is supposed to help victims of developmental trauma. His intervention relies on the premise that trauma symptoms are the result of “incomplete physiological responses suspended in fear” and that through SE, you can complete this thwarted response, thereby “discharging” it (i.e. Nancy completing the impulse to run from her childhood surgery). Are survivors of developmental trauma required to complete a physiological reaction for every traumatic event they experienced? Levine doesn’t say. He glosses over that.

This premise of the incomplete physiological response also fails to account for the many people who have trauma symptoms from experiences that were psychological and not physical; for example, survivors of coercive control, and therapists who experience vicarious trauma. While Levine offers many examples of traumatizing experiences such as car accidents, surgeries, sexual assault, combat, etc. he never acknowledges that some trauma is exclusively cognitive. I would argue that there is no immobility response to vicarious trauma, no thwarted action that needs to be completed, and yet therapists often experience intrusive thoughts and nightmares about stories their clients have shared. While other trauma treatments may have historically neglected to account for the role of the body, Levine’s method only accounts for the body and overlooks the impact of psychological trauma.

Levine vaguely credits “shamanistic healers from many cultures” who “encourage the ‘lost soul’ to return to its rightful place in the body” for inspiring his approach. In “Waking the Tiger,” he claims, “You need a strong desire to become whole again. This desire will serve as an anchor through which your soul can reconnect to your body.” It’s unclear how your soul reconnecting to your body meshes with Levine’s central thesis of shaking off the immobility response. Levine digresses deeply into woo-woo New Age territory in this book with talk of lost souls, shamans, auras, reconnecting with our “natural” selves to be more like animals, and countless vague references to “energy.”

A woman sitting in a Reichian orgone accumulator.

Influence of Wilhelm Reich and Vegetotherapy

I’m not quite sure where to file this, but it’s too weird to leave out. While Levine credits everything from shamans to his own prophetic insight for inspiring SE, he conspicuously omits the most likely inspiration for his approach: Reichian vegetotherapy.

The clues to this influence are sprinkled throughout his books. Levine openly admires Wilhelm Reich, who died in prison after illegally selling “orgone accumulators.” Reich claimed to have discovered orgone, a “life energy” that was generated by orgasms, which Reich claimed could cure cancer when trapped in high concentrations in his devices. Reich was essentially laughed out of Europe by the psychoanalytical establishment for these and other bogus claims, but gained a cult following after moving to the United States during World War II. Reichian therapy experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 1960s when Levine was a student.

In the acknowledgments for “In An Unspoken Voice,” Levine describes Reich as “A giant, whose broad shoulders I stand on” for “his monumental contribution to the understanding of ‘life-energy.’” Levine writes several pages about Reich in “In An Unspoken Voice,” glossing over the predatory, discredited, and criminal elements of Reich’s legacy, instead depicting him as a victim of overzealous prosecution who died “an embittered visionary.”

Levine includes a footnote in “In An Unspoken Voice” for a 1978 paper he wrote titled “Stress and Vegetotherapy” which appeared in The Journal of Energy and Character.¹ This footnote pointed me towards vegetotherapy, which Reich developed before his orgone accumulator debacle. Reich believed “stored emotions” created “body armour” that trapped neurosis and caused symptoms in the body. Reich “would press his thumb or the palm of his hand hard (and painfully) on [patients’] jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity.^[76] He wrote that the purpose of the massage was to retrieve the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression. If the session worked, he would see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, which he called the ‘orgasm reflex’.”²

Levine uses the terms “trapped energy” and “release” when describing SE instead of “body armour” and “orgasm reflex,” but in many ways, SE appears to be directly descended from this quackery. In the interest of keeping this essay a readable length, I won’t go into more detail than that, but will leave you with this photo of Levine conducting a training session for SE at the Ergos Institute, doing something that looks suspiciously similar to descriptions of Reich practicing vegetotherapy.

Peter Levine conducting a training, from Levine’s website.

Repressed Memory and Broad Definitions of Trauma

One of the hallmarks of wellness grifters is that they make broad, vague claims about the symptoms their interventions can cure. In the prologue to “Waking the Tiger,” Levine writes, “If you are experiencing strange symptoms that no one seems to be able to explain, they could be arising from a traumatic reaction to a past event that you may not even remember.” Right out of the gate, Levine establishes that his audience is anyone who has any symptoms that conventional medicine has been unable to diagnose. Even if you have no memory of anything traumatic happening to you, Levine claims he’s got your cure because you probably just forgot that you’ve been traumatized.

Later in the book, Levine writes:

“Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don’t even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some time in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress. Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic.”

This characterization of trauma as a common occurrence makes the word “trauma” almost meaningless, as in Levine’s definition, the term “trauma” can be applied to common everyday events. The benefit of this diffuse definition of trauma is that it means that everyone is a potential customer for SE, not just the 3.6% - 6.8% percent of Americans that the NIH estimates has PTSD. Levine stokes fear with this characterization by implying that, while you might be feeling fine right now, your trauma symptoms may just be lying dormant, waiting to strike at the slightest provocation.

Throughout the book, Levine repeats this claim that everyone has been traumatized whether they remember it or not, and that trauma is manifesting in their body whether they know it or not. I’m hesitant to wade too deeply into the debate about traumatic memory because it’s a contentious minefield. Both Levine and van der Kolk have been criticized by academics for their depictions of recovered memory. For an in-depth analysis on this, check out “Remembering Trauma” by Richard McNally.

While some patients might find SE helpful for accessing traumatic memories and working through them, I worry that SE sends many people on fishing expeditions to uncover trauma that may not be there, or may not be causing them problems in the present. Levine himself acknowledges that these fishing expeditions can lead to inventing memories of trauma that did not occur. In “Waking the Tiger,” he encourages readers to do an exercise where they look through a family photo album and dwell on any physical sensations that might arise:

“A traumatized individual may end up believing that he or she was raped or tortured when the actual message the organism [your body] is trying to convey is that this sensation you are experiencing feels like rape or torture. The actual culprit could just as easily have been a terrifying medical procedure, an automobile accident, or even childhood neglect. It could literally be anything.” [emphasis Levine’s]

Levine offers no guidance on how to distinguish between whether the images your mind produces as a result of his exercise are real or imagined. It is not difficult to see how this could cause considerable harm. This is a particularly dangerous exercise for anyone with OCD who is already prone to overscrupulousness, or anyone with a history of delusional or psychotic symptoms, but Levine includes no warnings and encourages readers to engage in the exercises in his books without professional help.

This idea that everyone has repressed memories of trauma impacting their health is a particularly problematic framework for people with chronic conditions who often experience doctors dismissing their symptoms for years as somatic or stress-related before receiving a diagnosis. This idea has contributed to people—especially women—doubting their own experience of their bodies and blaming themselves if they have symptoms with an unidentified cause.

I’ve lost count of the number of women on my caseload who have speculated that they might feel crummy all the time because they are repressing the memory of some distant trauma, or failed to adequately “release” a trauma that they thought was laid to rest. Often, my impression is that they feel crummy because their labor is being exploited or they are being emotionally abused by their partner right now in the present. The fixation on releasing some mysterious trauma from the past is often a red herring that distracts and deters people from taking action to improve their current circumstances. I will go into more detail about this in the next installment in this series that will debunk “The Body Keeps the Score.”

What Else is Wrong with Somatic Experiencing?

The biggest problem with SE is that there is no evidence to support Levine’s premise that trauma symptoms are caused by energy that is trapped in the body. “Waking the Tiger” is a flagrantly unscientific book that has been widely embraced by the psychiatric community and filtered into the collective cultural consciousness. As a result, the unverified claims Levine makes have been accepted as facts. Levine’s later book from 2010, “In An Unspoken Voice” contains more citations and references to neurobiology, and while the appearance of footnotes at the end of the book lends it an air of credibility, if you comb through those footnotes as I did, you find that they provide no further evidence to support Levine’s claims. There are many literary references in the footnotes, and Levine frequently cites his own books, as well as a few unrelated studies that do nothing to bolster his case.

Keith Cox, PhD and R. Trent Codd, III wrote an excellent critique of van der Kolk and Levine, and made this observation about SE:

“The rationale for SE is typically couched in discussion of neurobiological systems and thus, to the less scientifically critical reader, the treatment can appear to be based in a wealth of neurobiological research. Most readers are not able to discern that the theory of SE is empirically untested and thus neurobiological rationales for the treatment are theoretical and do not provide direct evidence for the treatment’s effect on PTSD. We fear that in some settings, proponents for SE and other “somatic” treatments use vague neurobiological talk to give the imprimatur of there being a scientific basis for the claim that SE is a superior treatment for PTSD. Indeed, the first author has heard individual providers report being surprised at the limited clinical data for SE as they believed the treatment was based in neuroscience.” [emphasis mine]

Levine’s idea that trauma is trapped in the body and must be released serves as the foundation of van der Kolk’s claims that “the body keeps the score.” I don’t dispute the fact that the chronic stress caused by experiencing active PTSD symptoms is detrimental to health; but the idea that our bodies are storing up our traumatic experiences; that they are harming us whether we know it or not; and that this stored energy needs to be “discharged” is a fiction invented by Levine and perpetuated by van der Kolk that is unsupported by evidence.

Levine claims on his website that “his work has been taught to over 30,000 healers in over 42 countries.” To date, there is only one randomized controlled outcome study of SE that was conducted with a small number of participants in 2017. Ideally there would be a higher standard for establishing the safety and efficacy of an intervention before teaching it to tens of thousands of people.

In “Waking the Tiger,” Levine makes the claim that “contrary to popular belief, trauma can be healed. Not only can it be healed, but in many cases it can be healed without long hours of therapy; without the painful reliving of memories; and without a continuing reliance on medication.” This is an attractive promise and it’s easy to see why it would appeal to trauma survivors who want to believe that they can find quick and easy relief from their symptoms. It also appeals to those experiencing ennui who long for a unifying theory that explains their disparate symptoms and promises to cure them in one fell swoop so they can live happily ever after. This is the promise Levine makes with SE, but I am skeptical that he delivers.

I agree with Levine that trauma can be healed, and sometimes fairly quickly, but through interventions with a stronger evidence base like Trauma-Focused CBT and EMDR. Both of those methods require revisiting details of the traumatic experience. Sometimes EMDR can resolve long-standing trauma symptoms in a few sessions. I would argue, though, that there are often lasting cognitive distortions from traumatic events that require a longer course of therapy to unravel, even once the debilitating physical symptoms of trauma have resolved. Grifters love to sell you a quick fix, but unfortunately, their promises are empty.

Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk schmoozing at an event, from Levine’s website.

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Check out the third and final installment of this series:

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1. I tried and could not find this original article or any trace online of the journal it was published in. If someone else is better at tracking down old journals and can find this online, please share it because I’m dying to know what it says.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich#Vegetotherapy