Coaching practices for Somatic Experiencing Honestly Explained During Conflict

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I’m stuck endlessly in my head
  • The moment a hard topic comes up I go stiff and grim, and that heaviness makes the whole thing feel like a standoff
  • I can talk about my feelings all day from the neck up, but the real stuff seems to be locked in my body
  • Somewhere in this I stopped seeing a problem we both have and started seeing the other person AS the problem
  • Every time I try to face the hard stuff I go straight at the worst of it to just get it over with, and it floods me

Practices that may help

  1. Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained
    Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, proposes that overwhelming experience leaves incomplete survival energy "stuck" in the body, and that gently completing and discharging that activation — in small, titrated doses, moving between activation and calm (pendulation) — helps the nervous system settle. The body-awareness skills it teaches are low-risk and increasingly studied, but the evidence base is still emerging and the "stored energy" model is a clinical theory, not established physiology. These are self-regulation skills; trauma work belongs with a trained professional.
  2. Track body sensation (the felt sense)
    Follow raw physical sensation with curiosity — tingling, warmth, pressure — rather than the storyline.
    Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained
  3. Easy Manner: bring a light touch when appropriate
    Use humor, lightness, and warmth to remind both of you that the relationship is bigger than this conflict.
    GIVE: DBT’s Skill for Preserving Relationships During Difficult Conversations
  4. Tracking shadow material through the body
    Notice where in the body suppressed reactions live — tension, constriction, or deadness are somatic shadow clues.
    Shadow Work
  5. Separate the person from the problem
    Treat the conflict as a problem you face together, not a contest you fight each other.
    The Third Alternative, Made Practical
  6. Titration (work in tiny, tolerable doses)
    Approach a hard sensation or memory in small sips, not all at once, so you stay regulated.
    Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained
  7. FAST: maintaining self-respect in difficult interactions
    Fair, no Apologies, Stick to values, Truthful — the self-respect compass for high-pressure conversations.
    DBT Interpersonal Effectiveness: Getting What You Need Without Destroying the Relationship
  8. Use fierce self-compassion to stay in hard conversations
    Stay present in conflict by meeting your own distress with compassion, so you don't flee or attack.
    Fierce Self-Compassion, Made Practical
  9. Practice congruent communication
    Say what you feel, about what you observe, while caring for both yourself and the other person.
    The Satir Model
  10. Responding to conflict without escalation
    In a conflict, address the problem without attacking the person.
    Ahimsa: Non-Violence as a Daily Practice

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