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Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences Paperback – Illustrated, 7 July 1997

by Peter A. Levine (Author)
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Nature's Lessons in Healing Trauma...

Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.

Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    North Atlantic Books,U.S.
  4. Publication date
    7 July 1997
  5. Dimensions
    15.19 x 2.11 x 22.83 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    155643233X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1556432330
  8. See all details
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No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
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  1. Body sensation, rather than intense emotion, is the key to healing trauma.
    Highlighted by 3,775 Kindle readers
  2. Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever-tightening circles of dangerous re-enactment, victimization, and unwise exposure to danger.
    Highlighted by 3,090 Kindle readers
  3. The healing of trauma is a natural process that can be accessed through an inner awareness of the body.
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Nature's Lessons in Healing Trauma
Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question--why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through a heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed. --From the Author

Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal as well as an intellectual spirit to harness this innate capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question - why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. --From the Back Cover

From the Author

Nature's Lessons in Healing Trauma
Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question--why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through a heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ North Atlantic Books,U.S.; Illustrated edition (7 July 1997)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 155643233X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1556432330
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.19 x 2.11 x 22.83 cm
  • Customer reviews:

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Peter A. Levine

Peter A. Levine

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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
3,488 global ratings

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2024
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My experience reading this book was truly mind blowing. This book is so easy to understand and really insightful it opened up a new way of thinking for me when it comes to trauma. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and learned a whole lot. I’m very thankful for this book and will definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking to learn about trauma responses and effective ways to heal from trauma.
5 people found this helpful
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Rachel I
5.0 out of 5 stars a brilliant guide on trauma
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2023
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Peter Levine is a leading light on trauma. He explains why some of us are traumatised by events and some are not. It’s a fascinating read. At the end of the book, he gives a step by step guide to how to treat trauma immediately after an event with adults and children. Extremely valuable.
11 people found this helpful
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DLEE
5.0 out of 5 stars For those suffering affter effects of trauma
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 December 2020
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This is a work of art and amazing for anyone suffering the mysterious after effects of trauma.. maybe without knowing what is wrong with us. So often these effects are physical mysteries. They can be and are resolved and this book will guide you. All professional therapists and Doctors must read it. This is vital information and wonderful understanding of how we can heal with great ease . Childhood or adult surgeries or other things seen as common place that can lead to a lifetime of dysfunction with no known cause healed in a little time to bring a life time of health and ease. Do read it.
17 people found this helpful
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Joseph Augustine
4.0 out of 5 stars Circle of trauma, circle of grace...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 June 2019
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Peter Levine is widely acknowledged as the originator of SE (Somatic Experiencing) with 12,000 plus trained practitioners world wide. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997) explores the intricate role of a forceful turbulence inside the body - similar to a tornado (see later) - that manifests under ‘real’ life-threatening experiences of shock; and what can happen in the “difference between this inner racing of the nervous system (fuel in the engine) and the outer brake of the body’s survival mechanism involuntarily applied as an immobility ‘freeze’ response. The resulting trapped energies not only contribute to a pervasive loss of life force - a less secure and spontaneous personality (cf. concept of Freudian ‘fixation’) - but can also be compared to the ‘Medusa complex’ [coined by Bachelard, 1948] and defined as the human confusion facing death that turns human emotion into stone through petrification: “mute, paralysed fury responds to the danger of the obliteration of an individual consciousness by an external Other” (Wiki).

Walter Bradford Cannon (1915) first proposed that animals react to threats “with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system preparing for fighting or fleeing” (Wiki); but unlike animals releasing its coiled springs in natural flight, humans are burdened by the weight of their own consciousness in the maladaptive coupling of fear and states of self-perpetuating arousal to the ‘immobility response’, creating distorted orienting responses of hyper- or hypo vigilance. If the instinctive reptilian urge to discharge intense survival energy is suppressed enough “then the function of the other two brain systems is profoundly altered, which explains Levine’s concept of ‘reenactment’: the emotional brain translates energy into anger and shame, while the rational brain creates the idea of justice and revenge - which according to J. Gilligan (2001) “is the one and only universal cause of violence.”

The neo-cortex in humans helps create the conditions of heightened anxiety ([anxious = Greek word for press tight/strangle] for “why humans don’t just move into and out of different [nervous system regulating] responses as naturally as animals.” Firstly, there is a thwarting of the restorative instinctual responses generated naturally at the reptilian core with more subconscious identifications (top-down processing) - “what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories that fit their needs” (cf. Plato’s essentia). Secondly, humans are often drawn into situations that repeat the original trauma since the “drive to complete and heal it is as powerful and tenacious as the symptom it creates.” Thirdly, the complexes (Jung) presented by symptoms become a “way to manage and bind the tremendous energy of the unresolved residue combined in both the original and self-perpetuated response to threat.” This safety valve “as uncompleted physiological responses suspended in fear”, can range from the intrapersonal (aggression turned inwards) to the interpersonal, i.e. having the capacity to destroy the quality of relationships by ”excessive cautiousness, inhibitions, dangerous reenactments, victimisation, or unwise risk-taking etc.”

While “the animal’s innate drive to return to a state of dynamic equilibrium” allows these creatures the opportunity to shake the shock in the system out, Levine’s clinical approach is more like heroically using trauma’s reflection of Athena’s shield (upon which was placed medusa’s head by Perseus). This is explained as “not confronting directly...but learning to swim within the energies of the body senses” through the cultivation of a ‘felt sense’ of clarity (sword), instinctual power (horse) and fluidity (wings).” Thus SE attempts to replicate in an ever so subtle and gentle way the wild animal’s innate wisdom, approaching the instinctual healing magic of the animal ‘trembling response’.

What I was not expecting, though, to find in a book addressed to budding felt sensors’ (covertly developing their first-chakras and clairsentient abilities I suspect), is an ethereal theory of healing with curious diagrams of how “a split-off whirlpool (trauma) sucks away life-energy in the body” and that nature [somehow miraculously] responds by creating a counter-vortex to balance the turbulent force of the trauma vortex! What Levine goes on to describe is “the ‘renegotiation’ of natural restorative laws of centrifugal energy between healing and trauma vortices” in a figure-of-eight balancing motion he terms ‘pendulation’ - rather than either the typical ‘re-enactment’ of emotional flooding into the original wound by individuals who get “sucked in” to their vortex (with symptoms as described above), or its avoidance (phobia). It is clear, therefore, the metaphysics of SE renegotiation incorporates a healing process of the ruptured body which “begins with the healing vortex picking up support and resources needed to successfully negotiate the trauma vortices, then slowly releasing the tightly bound energies at their cores by ‘unwounding’, i.e. by moving towards the center of the trauma vortices so that its energies are released.

As an exercise I thought it useful to model some of SE’s principles within the context of other healing modalities widely available today. The jury is rather out for me as to whether the same results are not ordinarily achieved through other psychotherapies. Firstly, take balancing motion stemming from “rotating the healing vortex in an opposite direction of the trauma vortex so the vortices then break up and dissolve, and are integrated back into mainstream.” This motion approximates (and pre-dates) Eileen McKusick’s Biofield Tuning (2014) [see review] ‘click, dragging and dropping’ distorted energies (“kerfuffles”) collected from the bioplasmic field and integrating them into the vortices of the sacral system. Secondly, there is an emphasis on the client within SE having an undeniable experience, i.e. making a conscious registering of the turbulence between a healing vortex and counter-vortex in the direction of release to “bridge the chasm between heaven expansion and hell contraction [trauma is a condensed energy] uniting these polarities.” In SE this is mainly achieved by developing a ‘dual-consciousness’ or mindfulness of dissociation while somatically experiencing what is occurring in the immediate environment; most importantly, witnessing positive results tends to reinforce future healing processes, though nevertheless it can be said dual-consciousness is the basis of a raft of therapeutic approaches including NLP and Psychosynthesis. Thirdly, SE skilfully adopts a process called ‘titration’ meaning small incremental differences in the client’s responses and behaviours “opens up, watches and validates” the healing cycle - “which cannot be evaluated, manipulated, hurried or changed.” I would argue slow incremental changes are par for the course of a great number of therapeutic modalities and thereby creates the governing conditions for a (reptilian) rhythm and timing that exists at a slower pace (than the mammalian and cortical parts of the brain). Fourthly, reptilian healing may turn out to be equated with theta and/or delta frequencies harnessed by binaural beat technologies. Theta waves, for example, are connected to experiencing and feeling deep and raw emotions, and is involved in restorative sleep; it also has a slow frequency range of 4 Hz to 8 Hz containing the Schumann resonance frequency of 7.83 Hz. Delta waves (0 Hz to 4 Hz) are even slower and have been found to be involved in regulating the Immune system, natural healing and restorative deep sleep. Fifthly, part of the grace of the nervous system is it is constantly self-regulating and processing so that some other time can exist either in the here-and-now or a future-now “when we are stronger, and more resourceful and better able to do it.” This principle alone forms the core of practically all the modalities offering a humanistic and existentialist slant, such as Gestalt.

Finally, as is so poignantly put we are “living in a culture that does not honour skilful ‘renegotiation’ of the internal world of dreams, feelings, images and sensations as sacred.” Extending this world to make connection with the reptilian aspect of our selves serves as an incredible contribution to healing science that establishes the credentials for a missing link of ‘sensation’ in the unified mind-body therapies.
77 people found this helpful
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J. L. Threadgold
5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful and effective approach to Trauma
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 May 2009
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I am a therapist, and a focusing teacher. This is the best book on Trauma that I have read. Peter Levine draws on years of experience, and explores how bloked energy related to our bodily responses, such as our Fight Flight and Freeze mechanisms, are the cause of traumaitc symptoms. He also explores how bodily awarness, and working through and completing those bloked processes can lead to the cure of those same symptoms. A book of hope, that is easy to read, easy to understand, and provides real hope for people experiencing traumatic symptoms.

I would recommend this book to Therapists and Lay people alike ! John Threadgold
20 people found this helpful
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Elizabeth
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 July 2023
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Good read
5 people found this helpful
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Yvonne
5.0 out of 5 stars Great help
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2022
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Fantastic help book if you want to help yourself and understand what you're body and mind have gone through. First part of healing is to get help and the best way is to understand
5 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, practically not helpful.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2022
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The beginning of the book promises healing. It offers good information, if you are looking to heal (why would you not?) this book is not useful. The exercises in the book are an introduction and help you understand what the author is saying, but they are no more than that. As with many books it becomes repetitious but offers no real solution. A good read if you want to understand trauma but ultimately disappointing and not useful if you want to heal and get on with your life.
18 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Reviewed in the United States on 12 March 2024
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I read this book for a trauma recovery certification. It’s educational and helpful with personal healing.
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Noemí
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent
Reviewed in Spain on 20 December 2023
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What to say, Peter Levine is an amazing author and this book is a great tool to learn more about trauma and how to work with it
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Mk
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in Germany on 31 January 2022
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A very good book, I recommend it
3 people found this helpful
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Juan Carlos
3.0 out of 5 stars No me encantó
Reviewed in Mexico on 30 August 2018
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No se me hizo tan interesante
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chiara grazia rosi
5.0 out of 5 stars ottimo prodotto
Reviewed in Italy on 25 October 2019
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ottimo libro, molto utile, scritto in maniera molto chiara e fluida. i concetti sono espressi molto chiaramente, Assolutamente consigliato a chi si occupa di terapia.
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