Customer Reviews

Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

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This exciting, insightful book reinforces the wholeness of the human vehicle, that our body and triune brain of instinct, emotion and rationality are totally connected to the human experience and to our connection with all of life. The book explains why humans are often frozen in trauma, unlike animals who daily cope with the unpredictability of nature and man. For humans, as is true for animals, the potential for trauma exists from birth through death, with at least one major difference - that humans have a harder time releasing trauma and many carry it all of their lives, which causes major interference with health, peace of mind and the ability to live joyfully and creatively. When human trauma remains unhealed, the energy of the trauma and accompanying emotions will remain locked within the brain and held within the body's musculature, tissues and organs awaiting discharge. Like Sleeping Beauty awaiting her restoration to life once the poisoned apple is dislodged, those with deep psychological scars have disassociated the memory from their minds and are living in a numbed, tensed body awaiting its release so the body can return to wholeness and optimum mental and physical health. The author persuasively asserts that psychological wounds are reversible and that healing comes when the physical and mental letting go occurs, similar to the way the tiger experiences the coming and going of threat, tensing in response to danger, and as the threat passes, the tiger's muscles shake, twitch and let go right then and there the fear related energy which now is forever out of mind and body. So, too, Peter Levine states, can humans learn to release long-held and/or current trauma without return. The book is well-written, peppered with healing stories, and details step-by-step instructions on how to listen to the wisdom of the body to release trauma and heal. Consider this book as one great step forward to expanding the frontier of body/mind energy work that is emerging as the most comprehensive and effective wellness paradigm of the future.

Peter Levine in "Waking the Tiger," postulates that trauma exists not in the event or in the story of the event, but is stored within the nervous system. Many common physical ailments are actually residues of thwarted trauma reactions incurred during such events as surgical procedures, falls, pre or perinatal stress and/or childhood accidents and traumas. The body has a natural, innate, and miraculous capacity to heal once these reactions are understood and guided.

Levine reinforces the holistic nature of the human being. Our bodies and brains connect instinct, emotion and rationality to our experience. Trauma may create damaging and often enduring symptoms. Human beings have a harder time than do animals in releasing trauma and may carry it throughout our lives. We often become frozen in trauma, unlike animals that can cope with the unpredictability of nature. This may provide a major interference with our health, peace of mind and the ability to live joyfully and creatively. When human trauma remains unhealed, the energy of the trauma and accompanying emotions remain locked within the brain and held within the body's musculature, tissues and organs, awaiting discharge.

The author writes about an oft-forgotten aspect of trauma, freezing or immobilization during a traumatic experience. Modern medicine/psychiatry emphasize the "flight or fight" response while often neglecting the freeze response. The concept of the freeze response in the face of overwhelming threat provides a missing link to symptoms such as dissociation that our old ideas of "fight or flight" fail to explain. Immobilization in the face of threat is an automatic biological response that is not voluntarily chosen by the victim. This provides redeeming message to trauma survivors.

Levine points out that our memories are not literal recordings of events, but rather, a complex of images that are influenced by arousal, emotional context, and prior experience. Memories may even transform over time as new experiences add layers of meaning to the images. While remembering the past can be an important aspect of therapy, appreciating the subjective quality of memories is crucial to integrating them appropriately into the healing process.

Those with deep psychological scars may have dissociated the memory from their minds and are living in a numbed, tensed body awaiting its release so the body can return to wholeness and optimum mental and physical health. The author asserts that psychological wounds are reversible and that healing comes when the physical and mental letting go occurs, similar to the way the tiger experiences the coming and going of threat, tensing in response to danger, and as the threat passes, the tiger's muscles shake, twitch and let go right then and there the fear related energy which now is forever out of mind and body. Trauma is stored energy that must be released.

I just logged on to order yet another copy of "Waking the Tiger", a thoroughly invaluable book which I am constantly recommending to friends, colleagues and clients. This groundbreaking book that has permanently altered the way I approach therapy, trauma, and the body. "Waking the Tiger" completes an essential piece that has been missing in therapeutic and medical practices, namely that trauma is not in the event or the story, but in the nervous system. Dr Levine, through his research and vast clinical experience, has discovered how so many common physical ailments and so-called medically untreatable syndromes are actually residues of thwarted trauma reactions incurred during routine surgical procedures, falls, perinatal stress and other childhood accidents and traumas. He shows us how the body has a natural and innate, and seemingly miraculous, capacity to heal once these reactions are understood and guided. It is a very exciting and empowering book, and offers new hope and common sense explanations to people who have up to this time been unable to understand their symptoms or to find relief.

Sometimes a trauma victim can conclude that life will always be anxious at best and torturous at worst. Levine provides not only words of HOPE but real active ways to move toward freedom, healing, hope and a reasonably happy life. When I found the book my first thought was, "when the student is ready the teacher will come." I have learned more that I expected and have started on a journey toward healing. Thank you, Dr. Levine!

After reading Peter Levine's book I found a practioner of "Somatic Experiencing" from his web site in my city. From the first day I saw her I have been releasing trauma in the gentlest way I have ever experienced. This method has helped me release trauma that no other method has ever done and releases from the deepest layers I thought I would just have to live with forever. I have very complex PTSD from years of severe and sadistic child abuse from several perpretrators. Talk therapy, journaling, art therapy were helpful but just couldn't clear the fear, grief, hopelessness, that I carried. Emotional Freedom technique was also helpful and some other body therapies but this is my favorite.

There is a LOT more to the healing techniques of Somatic Experiencing than in this book. I look forward to learning more techniques to clear the trauma from my body/mind. Somatic Experiencing is giving me the life I struggled so hard for in many years of previous therapy to attain. And it is so much easier, with less tears, hard work and pain! I have never experienced the levels of inner peace and calm that I have now. All my relationships are improving as well.

For someone like myself, this will take more than 6 sessions as one person mentioned. I have a highly skilled therapist who is trained by Dr. Peter Levine in Somatic Experiencing. I know it will take many months to complete my healing but I have accomplished more in 15 sessions with her than being in therapy off and on for 16 years, reading books, and doing all kinds of things to get my life back.

My life is just easier in every way. Thank you, Dr. Peter Levine, for helping me heal so I have a life worth living and making a difference in my son's life as well.

It is a gentle, beautifully written and compassionate book. To be read with care, slowly. As the concept of post traumatic stress takes hold in the general world, this book reminds us and guides us in how to listen to our own body/mind wisdom rather than to apply some theoretical formulaic solution. It is also a hopeful, joyful book that, without being heavy handed, leads towards a recognition of our own power to heal.

This book will seem somewhat vague at first, but it will sink in better if you re-read it several times, especially the later sections. Levine and Frederick capture the essence of post-traumatic stress; your whole body is perpetually reliving the traumatic experiences and triggering distorted thinking, feeling, and behavior that otherwise make no sense. Levine's hook is to compare human trauma reactions to animal reactions. This gives him a model to break down the blocked cycle of somatic and mental reactions into pieces: hyperarousal, constricted consciousness - sometimes wrongly called "repression" - dissociation, and helplessness in and/or avoidance of triggering situations. Like all good psychology books, it also makes useful analogies and comparisons so that non-sufferers can get a glimpse of what it's like.

I recommend this book together with Babette Rothschild's The Body Remembers. That book is aimed at a medical/clinical audience, not at patients, but it carries the same message in a different way: the frozen, endlessly repeated body reactions are the lever to freeing the patient. It's like an alarm that was never shut off. The feelings, thoughts, and memories will follow. This approach entirely circumvents the sterile "false memory" controversy and quasi-Freudian approaches that use catharsis and abreaction - these methods make the PTSD reactions worse, while distorting the patient's memories and feelings further.

The key is to DE-sensitize the patient, not to recycle the original trauma. Desensitization not only defuses the trauma, it allows the patient to remember the events more accurately. If the trauma is not defused, the patient cannot remember properly. Accurately remembering is a byproduct of successful treatment, NOT the starting point.

...I found "Waking the Tiger" an engrossing approach to the problem of how trauma creates damaging and often enduring symptoms. Dr. Levine's concept of the "freeze response" in the face of overwhelming threat provides a missing link to symptoms such as dissociation that our old ideas of "fight or flight" fail to explain.

Even more important to trauma survivors and their therapists is the redeeming message that immobilization in the face of threat is an automatic biological response that is not voluntarily chosen by the victim. This was vividly portrayed in an episode of the TV series "Cagney and Lacey" in which Cagney, a tough and well-trained police officer, becomes the victim of a rape and later struggles with the helplessness she experienced while it was occurring. The January 2003 issue of Clinical Psychiatry News reported that an overwhelming majority of victims of sexual assault describe a moderate or high level of paralysis occurring during the assault, consistent with Dr. Levine's observations. The "freeze response" is also addressed in an article on fear in the March 2003 issue of Discover magazine.

Dr. Levine also provides an astute protrayal of the nature of memory by acknowledging that memories are not literal recordings of events but a complex of images that are influenced by arousal, emotional context, and prior experience. Like a painting, memories may even transform over time as new experiences add layers of meaning to the images. While remembering the past can be an important aspect of therapy, appreciating the subjective quality of memories is crucial to integrating them appropriately into the healing process.

Reading Waking the Tiger was an extremely frustrating experience, for several reasons. Mr. Levine contradicts himself repeatedly in his writing. On the one hand he repeatedly claims that revisiting painful memories does no good to trauma victims. On the other hand, in the case stories he uses to illustrate his method, the trauma sufferers DO recall their memories, very vividly, as part of their healing. Also, time and again throughout Waking the Tiger, Levine hints at the healing techniques to be revealed to the reader later in the book. But when I reached the end of the book, those appearantly magnificently efficient techniques were still unrevealed - and the only substantial advice to the reader seemed to be to visit a practioner of Mr. Levine's techniques, thereby reducing the book to little more than an advertising poster.
I have major problems with Levine's general approach in this book. He presents dubious stories and anecdotes as if they were scientific evidence (all supporting his theory, of course), and his language is often inaccurate. To me, this book is just another product from the huge industry that thrives on other people's suffering, promising release but delivering nothing.

This book is interesting in that it examines the ways in which humans differ from animals in their response to trauma, and it tells some stories about the author's successes in helping adults and children heal from traumas. I was surprised to learn that medical procedures performed on small children can often be traumatizing, particularly if they are restrained against their will, but it makes sense. (Stop circumcising infants!)

But Levine's therapeutic methods are somewhat vague. He implies that he sort of hypnotizes people into re-enacting a story sort of like their original trauma, but not exactly, in a kind of dream state. In the re-enactment, the person successfully triumphs over their assailant by fighting back or running away. I'm not sure how a traumatized person could use this method on themselves. Levine's website offers a few links to therapists that have been trained in his methodology, but again, it's hard to know if they would be as effective in using it as he seems to be.

I have found the book Trauma Releasing Exercises to be much more helpful and to the point. Also, Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery is essential reading.