The neuroscience of selfhood and agency validates the kinds of somatic therapies that my friends Peter Levine13 and Pat Ogden14 have developed. I’ll discuss these and other sensorimotor approaches in more detail in part V, but in essence their aim is threefold: to draw out the sensory information that is blocked and frozen by trauma; to help patients befriend (rather than suppress) the energies released by that inner experience; to complete the self-preserving physical actions that were thwarted when they were trapped, restrained, or immobilized by terror.
