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

By Peter A. Levine and Ann Frederick

Book Overview

The bestselling guide to healing trauma through the body, and the book that introduced Somatic Experiencing(R)

For nearly three decades, this book has reshaped how we think about--and heal from--trauma.

If you live with panic, chronic tension, numbness, or the sense of being stuck in a past you can't think your way out of, SE(TM) creator Peter A. Levine offers a different approach to healing. Trauma isn't only in the mind. It's held in the nervous system. It's not a flaw, but a natural process that, when properly supported, can help us self-regulate and lead to profound healing.

Dr. Levine's insight began with a simple observation: Wild animals face life-threatening danger constantly, yet they rarely develop lasting traumatic symptoms. After a close call, they shake and tremble, releasing the survival energy they mobilized for fight or flight. Humans often override that instinct, and the energy stays frozen in the body.

Translated into 24 languages and with more than a million copies sold, Waking the Tiger has become a foundational text for trauma survivors, therapists, bodyworkers, and anyone looking to learn more about the mind-body connection. Inside, you'll find:

Exercises for developing the felt sense, the awareness of bodily sensation beneath thought and emotionThe four core components of every traumatic reaction: hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation, and freezingCase stories showing how ordinary events, such as falls, surgeries, anesthesia, and car accidents, can cause trauma, not only violence or disasterEmotional first-aid guidance for adults after accidents and for children after falls and medical proceduresA fresh look at re-enactment and memory, including why reliving traumatic details isn't necessary to heal
Hopeful and grounded in biology, this embodied healing classic reframes trauma symptoms as incomplete responses and invites you to work with your body's innate capacity for self-regulation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155643233X
• ISBN13: 9781556432330
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The basics of understanding how trauma is stored in the nervous system

This book helped me to integrate several methodologies I am currently working with in my healing oroexsss, describing a unifying theory for a range of confounding afflictions which, outside the lens of trauma, are nearly impossible to explain. Levine describes how trauma is an incomplete cycle of the nervous system’s natural processes, what symptoms this can manifest as both physically and emotionally, and a few exercises to begin to work through it yourself. I don’t believe this book alone is enough to heal, but it has been a really important piece in my ability to integrate other healing modalities, to understand why they’re working for me, and to give me more direction for what to seek out next.

Book came in gross condition

I wanted to get into this book, but it has stains of unknown orgin

best treatment for trauma I have done

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.

Exciting and Promising Material for Trauma Healing

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.

Waking The Tiger

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 is a sourc of HOPE for trauma victims.

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!