Somatic Experiencing treatment with tsunami survivors in Thailand: Broadening the scope of early intervention.

been asked to provide information to local caregivers on topics such as normal responses to trauma, cop-ing strategies after catastrophic events, and posttrau-matic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults and children. They were also asked to bring the brief stabilization model (now called Trauma First Aide [TFA], derived from Somatic Experiencing [SE]) to schools and evacuation camps. SE is an integrative, mind–body trauma treat-ment developed by Peter A. Levine (1996) that focuses on the resolution of posttraumatic-stress activation through re-establishing self-regulation. Because trauma begins with a conditioned response, it is important to extinguish the conditioned associ-ations (Scaer, 2006). In Somatic Experiencing, this is accomplished by identifying and restructuring motoric and other psychophysiological patterns that underlie a wide variety of traumatic responses. Using sensorimotor processing to restructure trauma-based psychophysiological patterns, SE links somatic with emotional and cognitive processing to help the mind–body system disentangle traumatic linkages On December 26, 2004, an underwater earth-quake caused a deadly tsunami, the after-math of which had a catastrophic effect on