How to Release Trauma From the Body: The Sequel to The Body Keeps the Score (A Dublin Somatic Therapist Explains)

The Body Keeps the Score named where trauma is stored. But how does it actually move out? A Dublin somatic therapist on Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, the gazelle, the unfinished survival response, and the hopeful mechanism by which the body — given the right conditions — finally lets it go.

By Abi Beri  |  Integrative Therapist & Nervous System Specialist  ·  Somatic Therapy Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, Kildare & Online

TL;DR. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014) has become one of the most-searched mental health books on the internet — and rightly so. It named something clinicians had described for decades but the wider public had not fully understood: trauma is not only a memory in the mind, it is a physiological state held in the body. The book named where it is stored. But it left a question hanging: how does it move out? That question is what this article — and Peter Levine’s decades of work in Somatic Experiencing — answers. The short version: when a threat hits any mammal, the body mobilises a huge charge of survival energy. In wild animals, once the danger passes, that charge is discharged — visibly, through trembling and deep breaths — and the system returns to calm. In humans, the discharge is often interrupted (we cannot fight, we cannot flee, we freeze — or we override the trembling for social reasons afterwards). The unfinished survival response stays in the body as held charge. The good news: the mechanism to release it is still intact. Given safety, presence, and small doses, the body still knows how to complete the cycle. This is the core insight of Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine) and the wider trauma-informed somatic field (Bessel van der Kolk, Pat Ogden, David Berceli’s TRE). This article walks through the mechanism, why we override it, the SE principle of ‘safety with sensation in small doses’, and the safety framing for gentle practice. For people in Ireland, somatic therapy is available in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and across Kildare in person, and online globally. IMPORTANT: significant trauma charges are safest processed with a trained somatic practitioner.

Key facts at a glance

• The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk, 2014) established for the wider public that trauma lives in the body, not just in memory.
• Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (developed from the 1970s onwards) is the leading modality specifically focused on how the body releases stored trauma.
• The core insight comes from watching animals — wild animals routinely survive extreme threats but rarely develop PTSD, because their bodies discharge the survival energy through trembling and deep breaths.
• In humans, the discharge is often interrupted (freeze response in the original moment, or social override of the trembling afterwards). The survival charge stays in the body as an unfinished cycle.
• David Berceli’s TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) is a specific method for inducing therapeutic tremors that complete the discharge.
• The healing is gradual, layered, and works best in small titrated doses of ‘safety with sensation’, not in dramatic catharsis.
• Significant trauma charges are best worked with in relationship with a trained somatic practitioner — not alone.
• Available as a free 45-minute guided talk and as part of integrative somatic therapy with Somatic Experiencing-informed practice in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and Kildare (and online globally).

What The Body Keeps the Score didn’t quite finish

Quick answer: Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book brilliantly established that trauma is stored in the body. But it left many readers with an unanswered practical question: if the body keeps the score, how do you get it to let go? The specific ‘how’ is the domain of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and the wider somatic trauma tradition.

You have almost certainly heard the phrase. It has become almost famous, and for good reason — it named something true that changed how a lot of people understand themselves. The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea: what happens to us — the frightening, the overwhelming, the traumatic — does not just live in our memories as a story. It lives in the body. In held tension, in a nervous system stuck on high alert, in the flinch, the brace, the exhaustion, the sense of carrying something you cannot quite name.

When people really take that in, it is a relief at first — oh, it is not all in my head, my body is actually holding this — and then, very often, it becomes a kind of despair. Because it raises a question it does not answer. If the body keeps the score… then how, exactly, do you get it to let go of it? If it is stored in there — how does it get out?

This is where Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing comes in — a body of work developed independently of van der Kolk, over four decades, that focuses specifically on the mechanism by which the body releases stored trauma. Van der Kolk himself cites Levine’s work extensively in his book. The two are complementary. This article is the ‘what happens next’.

The gazelle: the animal insight that founded Somatic Experiencing

Quick answer: Peter Levine spent decades observing wild animals in the field. Wild animals routinely survive extreme threat but rarely develop PTSD. After a chase, they visibly discharge the survival energy through trembling and deep breaths, then return to grazing. Levine’s question — why don’t wild animals get traumatised? — founded an entire field of trauma work.

Picture a gazelle on the savannah. A cheetah bursts out of the grass. The gazelle explodes into a sprint — a massive, total mobilisation of the body: heart hammering, muscles firing, a huge surge of survival energy, everything thrown into the run.

Let us say it gets away. The cheetah gives up, the danger passes. Now — here is the fascinating part, the part that unlocks everything.

The gazelle stops. And it shakes. It trembles all over, sometimes quite dramatically, for a minute or two. Its legs shudder, its body quivers, it might take some deep spontaneous breaths. And then — the trembling stops, the body settles, and the gazelle simply goes back to grazing. Calm. Completely fine.

No trauma. No flashbacks. No gazelle lying awake that night replaying the chase. It shook, it settled, it grazed. Done.

This is the question that founded an entire field of trauma work, largely through American psychologist Peter Levine: why don’t wild animals get traumatised? They live under constant, extreme threat. By rights they should be nervous wrecks. And they are not. Why?

The answer is in the shaking. That trembling the gazelle does afterward is not random. It is the body discharging the enormous survival energy it just mobilised. The system revved up completely to save its life — and then, when the danger passed, it deliberately, physically released all that charge through the trembling, and returned itself to calm. It completed the cycle. Threat, response, discharge, settle. The whole arc, start to finish. Nothing left over. Nothing stored.

The clinical heart: the unfinished survival response

Quick answer: In Levine’s clinical model, ‘trauma’ is best understood as an unfinished survival response. The body mobilised a charge for fight or flight; something prevented the completion (freeze in the original moment, or social override afterwards); the survival charge stayed in the body as held tension, waiting decades later to do the thing it never got to do.

Here is what happens to us. When threat hits a human being, the same thing happens as with the gazelle. The body mobilises a huge charge of survival energy — to fight, or to flee. Heart pounding, muscles ready, the whole system throwing everything into meeting the danger. That is the response. That is the body doing exactly the right thing.

But — and here is where the human story diverges from the gazelle’s — very often, we cannot complete it. We cannot fight, and we cannot flee. Think of the situations where trauma really lodges: a child who cannot fight the adult who is frightening them and cannot run away either. Someone trapped, pinned, overwhelmed, too small, too outnumbered. A situation where the mobilised energy has nowhere to go — you cannot fight, you cannot flee, so the body does the only thing left, and freezes. Shuts down. Goes still, because action is impossible. This is the freeze response — the dorsal vagal shutdown in Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory.

And here is the crucial part. That enormous survival charge — the energy the body summoned to save you — never got used. Never got discharged. The gazelle ran, and then shook it off. But you could not run, and you never got to shake it off. So the charge stayed. In the body. Held. Frozen mid-response. The survival energy is still in there, mobilised, waiting, decades later, to do the thing it never got to do.

That is what ‘the body keeps the score’ actually is, mechanically. It is not just a memory stored in muscle. It is an unfinished survival response. A fight that never got to happen, or a run that never got to complete, still held in the body as charge that was never discharged. The threat is long gone — but the body does not know that, because from its point of view, the response was never completed, the cycle never closed, the danger never officially declared over.

Which is why you can understand your trauma perfectly, talk about it endlessly, know exactly what happened and why — and still flinch, still brace, still carry it. Because the thing that is stuck is not a story that needs understanding. It is a physical charge that needs completing. You cannot think a frozen survival response to completion any more than the gazelle could think itself calm. The body did the holding, and the body has to do the releasing.

Why we override the shaking (the human problem)

Quick answer: Humans have the same discharge mechanism as animals — after a fright, the body often tries to tremble. We routinely override this because trembling in front of people feels undignified. So the mechanism that would prevent trauma from lodging gets shut down by culture, and the charge settles in for the long haul.

You might wonder — if the body knows how to shake it off, why don’t we? Partly because, in the original moment, we genuinely could not — the response was trapped. But partly, honestly, it is culture. The human body, after a shock, often does try to shake. You have felt it — the trembling after a car nearly hits you, the shaking after a fright, the quivering after something intense. That is the gazelle mechanism, firing correctly, trying to discharge the charge.

And what do we do, every single time? We stop it. We clamp down. Someone hands us a cup of tea and says ‘you’re alright, deep breaths, pull yourself together.’ We are embarrassed by the shaking. We think it means we are falling apart, when in fact it is the exact opposite — it is the body putting itself back together, doing the precise thing that would prevent the trauma from lodging. And we shut it down.

This is exactly the problem David Berceli’s TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) addresses. Berceli, a bioenergetic analyst who worked in war zones with traumatised populations, developed a specific set of exercises that reliably induce therapeutic tremors — neurogenic tremors — that allow the body to complete the discharge that culture normally interrupts. TRE has been used in humanitarian and clinical settings globally.

The Somatic Experiencing principle: safety with sensation, in small doses

Quick answer: The core principle of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing is titration — small, gradual doses of contact with the stored charge, always paired with established felt safety. This is the opposite of catharsis. The body releases what it can hold safely. Trying to force release re-frightens the system and produces more trauma, not less.

This is the key clinical principle, and it is worth understanding clearly. In Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, the healing is done through TITRATION — small doses of contact with the stored charge, always paired with established felt safety. This is the opposite of the Hollywood catharsis model, which imagines healing as one huge cathartic release. That model is mostly a myth, and pursuing it can actually re-traumatise a system.

The mechanism is precise. The body releases charge when it feels safe, not when it is pushed. A fast, forced discharge re-frightens the system. So the work goes slowly. Establish safety — through connection to the ground, the present moment, felt-sense support. Then, from that safety, lightly notice the charge. Not diving into it. Not away from it. Just letting both be true at once: I am safe, and there is some old holding here. That combination — safety and sensation together, in small doses — is exactly the condition the body needs to begin, at its own pace, to let go.

The healing then happens as a series of small completions over time. A little discharge. Rest. A little more, another day. The body completing, gradually, the responses it never got to finish. This is why trauma healing done well is slow, layered, patient work. It is not that it should be faster. It is that going faster does not work.

Catharsis myth vs Titrated release — a comparison

The Hollywood catharsis myth	The Somatic Experiencing reality
One big cathartic release solves it.	Small titrated doses, over time.
Force the charge out.	Establish safety, let charge move.
Dramatic, tearful, purgative.	Quiet, layered, mostly undramatic.
Bigger reaction = more healing.	Bigger reaction often means overwhelm.
Push through the fear.	Never push. Titrate.
Can re-traumatise the system.	Specifically designed not to re-traumatise.
‘Release’ is the goal.	Completion is the goal — sometimes without dramatic release.

A gentle safety-framed practice (do not skip the safety framing)

This is a very gentle version of the practice from the audio. IMPORTANT — significant trauma charges are safest processed with a trained somatic practitioner. Do not force anything. If big feeling arises or you feel overwhelmed, STOP, open your eyes, look around, feel your feet, come back to the present. Stopping is not failing. Knowing when to stop is the skill.

• 1. Establish safety first. Feel the ground beneath you. Feel how solid it is. Feel it taking your weight. Let yourself feel held. This is the signal the body needs — the danger is not here now.
• 2. Orient to the present. Look around you. Notice where you are. This room. This present moment. Let the body register — we are safe. It is over. We are here.
• 3. Notice, from safety, any place of held charge. A tightness. A bracing. A held tension. You are not going to do anything to it. Just notice it, with friendly attention, FROM the safety you established.
• 4. Hold both together. I am safe, AND there is some old holding here. Both true. That combination — safety and sensation together, in small doses — is exactly the condition the body needs.
• 5. Let whatever moves, move. A breath. A small shift, a sigh, a tremble, a settling. If it comes, let it. If nothing comes, that is completely fine — you have shown the body it is safe to be noticed.
• 6. Come back deliberately. Whatever happened or did not, come back. Feel the ground again. Look around the room. You are here. You are safe. That was enough.

Frequently asked questions

How do you release trauma from the body? Not through understanding, insight, or story. Trauma releases through the body — via completion of the unfinished survival response. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and David Berceli’s TRE are two leading modalities specifically designed for this. The mechanism is safety with sensation, in small titrated doses, over time.

What is Somatic Experiencing? A body-based trauma therapy developed by Peter Levine from the 1970s onwards. Based on his observation of how wild animals discharge survival energy after threat, it works with the body’s natural capacity to complete interrupted survival responses. It is one of the most established somatic trauma methods, taught internationally by Somatic Experiencing International (SEI).

What is TRE? TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) is a specific method developed by David Berceli that uses a set of physical exercises to induce therapeutic tremors — neurogenic tremors — that allow the body to complete the discharge of held survival energy. Used clinically and in humanitarian settings globally.

Why don’t wild animals get traumatised? Because they discharge the survival energy immediately after threat, through trembling and deep breaths. The cycle completes; nothing is stored. Humans have the same mechanism but often cannot complete it in the original moment (freeze response), or override the discharge afterwards for social reasons. Peter Levine’s observation of this pattern founded Somatic Experiencing.

Is somatic therapy better than talk therapy for trauma? For the physiological residue of trauma (held charge, chronic activation, freeze response, somatic symptoms), body-based methods often reach what talk therapy alone cannot. For meaning-making, integration, and life-navigation, talk therapy has strong contributions. Most trauma work benefits from both, in combination.

Is trauma release therapy safe? Done well, with a trained practitioner and appropriate titration — yes, and among the most effective interventions for trauma. Done wrong, with catharsis-forcing or without safety framing, it can re-traumatise. This is why credential and safety matter.

Do you offer Somatic Experiencing in Dublin? I am trained in somatic methods and work integratively with SE-informed principles, along with Family Constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work. In Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and across Kildare in person, and online globally. Free 20-minute intro at somatictherapyireland.com.

Should I do trauma release exercises alone? For small everyday charges — the leftover activation from an argument, a shock, a stressful day — gentle practice done alone is often fine. For significant trauma or complex PTSD, the work is safest in relationship with a trained practitioner. This is not a limitation of the method — it is a feature. Titration and holding matter.

Working with Trauma in the Body — Somatic Therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Kildare

If something in this article has landed, you are welcome to bring the work deeper. I am an Integrative Therapist trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work. I work with clients one-to-one in Dublin city, Naas, Newbridge and across Kildare in person, and online globally. For trauma work in particular, the relational holding matters — the same principle that makes the gazelle safe in a herd applies to us. A regulated nervous system co-regulating with yours creates the conditions the body needs to release what it has held.

Sessions are 60 minutes, weekly or fortnightly. There is a free 20-minute intro call before any commitment, with no expectation. Book at somatictherapyireland.com.

About the author

Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist based in Dublin, Ireland. He is trained in somatic methods, family constellations, polyvagal-informed practice and inner child work, and has recently completed his Higher Diploma in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy at IICP College Dublin, continuing on the MSc. He is IPHM-accredited. He sees clients in person from a practice base across Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and the wider Kildare area, and online globally. More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.

Further reading & cited authorities

• Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books. (Foundational Somatic Experiencing text — the gazelle appears here.)
• Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
• Berceli, D. (2008). The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process. Namaste.
• Ogden, P., Minton, K. & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body. Norton.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.
• Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Holt.
• Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton.
• Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Routledge.
• Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother’s Hands. Central Recovery Press.

Authoritative resources (external links)

• Somatic Experiencing International (Peter Levine) — traumahealing.org · Peter Levine’s training body — the global home of Somatic Experiencing, the modality this piece teaches.
• Trauma Research Foundation (Bessel van der Kolk) — traumaresearchfoundation.org · van der Kolk’s research lineage — this piece is positioned as the sequel to The Body Keeps the Score.
• David Berceli — TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) — traumaprevention.com · Berceli’s TRE method — the specific practice of using trembling / neurogenic tremors to complete the discharge cycle.
• Polyvagal Institute (Stephen Porges) — polyvagalinstitute.org · Porges’s polyvagal theory — the freeze / shutdown response underneath ‘the unfinished response’.
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (Pat Ogden) — sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org · Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy — parallel trauma-informed body-based method.
• Prof Robert Sapolsky — ‘Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers’ — profiles.stanford.edu/robert-sapolsky · Stanford neuroendocrinologist whose animal-stress research provides the biological context for the gazelle example.
• Wikipedia — Somatic Experiencing — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_experiencing · plain-English explainer of the method.
• Wikipedia — Fight-or-flight response (including freeze) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response · the sympathetic mobilisation the gazelle discharges and humans often don’t.
• IICP College Dublin — iicp.ie · the integrative counselling and psychotherapy college in Dublin where I trained.
• IPHM (International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine) — iphm.co.uk · my accrediting body.

If what surfaces feels overwhelming — Irish mental health resources

• Samaritans Ireland — samaritans.org/ireland · free, 24/7 emotional support · call 116 123 (referenced in the talk).
• Pieta House (Ireland) — pieta.ie · free crisis support · call 1800 247 247 or text HELP to 51444.
• Aware Ireland — aware.ie · depression and anxiety support · call 1800 80 48 48.
• HSE Mental Health (Ireland) — hse.ie/mental-health · the Irish national health service mental health gateway.