Spreading somatic experiencing as an approach to recovery and resilience in war and crisis

Trauma is a physiological state, not an emotion or a behaviour. When a defence response — fight, flight, or freeze — cannot be completed, the mobilised survival energy stays in the system, and the body keeps responding as though the threat were still present: sleeplessness, hypervigilance, and irritability, or numbness, isolation, and shutdown. War leaves whole populations carrying these wounds, soldiers and civilians alike.

Crisis response, in Ukraine and worldwide, still works mostly through talk and cognition. Body-based approaches stay at the margins, though they reach where the problem actually lives. Many helping professionals reach out to us because their cognitive tools fail with traumatised people. Somatic Experiencing answers what both they and their clients need: without asking anyone to retell what happened, it works directly with the body’s capacity to recover and builds self-regulation people can use while danger continues.

We aim to establish Somatic Experiencing in Ukraine as an effective tool for trauma-responsive communication, individual recovery, and community resilience. From there, we want to carry it into crisis response, human rights work, and peacebuilding worldwide.

We organise Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) Training in Ukraine, currently educating the second cohort of Ukrainian SEPs. It is open to helping professionals and crisis responders — psychologists, social workers, medics, first responders, and community helpers who already sit with traumatised people every day. With supervision and advanced training, we support Ukrainian SEPs in anchoring Somatic Experiencing deeply within the crisis response. In addition, we offer somatic psychoeducation and self-help tools to a wider circle of helpers.

We offer Somatic Experiencing not primarily as a therapeutic approach but as a way of approaching life and work under pressure — one that helps people communicate when tension runs high, care for others without harming themselves, and rebuild trust amidst disconnection. Since the method was developed in peacetime, we also adapt it to ongoing threat, fresh loss, and the pressures of a society at war.