Just Like Nana

Dr. Peter Levine

• Amie Penny Sayler • Episode 5

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Content Warning: This episode includes mention of child sexual assault. 


In this episode of Just Like Nana, host Amie (Elizabeth) Penny Sayler is joined by Dr. Peter Levine to discuss how trauma lives in the body and, more importantly, how the trauma cycle can be completed to restore a sense of inner peace. 


They unpack the signs– persistent physical symptoms, repetitive relationship patterns, feeling disconnected from your own life– that point to the roots of your struggles, which are not just in your mind but etched into your physiology as intergenerational trauma. If any of this sounds familiar to you, this conversation will give you the guidance to take the next step in seeking support and releasing that held trauma. 


About Dr. Peter Levine

Peter A Levine, Ph.D., is the developer of Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma, which he has developed over the past 50 years. He holds a doctorate in Biophysics from UC Berkeley and a doctorate in Psychology from International University. He is the Founder and President of the Ergos Institute of Somatic Education and the Founder and Advisor for Somatic Experiencing International, where his work has been taught to over 30,000 healers in over 42 countries. He recently finished his Autobiography, An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey, and is the author of several best-selling books on trauma, including Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma; In an Unspoken Voice, How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness; and Trauma and Memory, Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past.



In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • 80% of the information flowing through your vagus nerve is sensory, explaining why trauma is a visceral, bodily experience rather than just a “brain disease.”
  • Trauma often manifests as chronic pain or tension and healing occurs by slowly and safely completing these defensive responses that were frozen in time.
  • Trauma isn't just personal; it can be an "energetic pattern" passed down through generations. 
  • Recognizing our ancestral webs can help us resolve issues that seem to have no clear origin in our lives. 
  • Reconnecting with the body often requires the presence of a "connected, empathetic other" to help discharge stored energy safely.



Connect with Dr. Peter Levine

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Theme music by Carter Penny.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I'm so excited. You're with us today at just like Nana today might need more than tea, I don't know, hot cocoa with little mini marshmallows. It's just such an exciting day. We have Dr Peter Levine here y'all he's been studying trauma, how to release trauma since the 1960s He's incredible. He's a gentle soul and a lovely human being, and could not be more thrilled than to be talking with him today. Dr Levine is the developer of somatic experiencing, which is a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma. He holds doctorates in both biophysics and psychology. He's the founder and advisor to the somatic experiencing Institute. He's the founder and president of the ergos Institute of somatic education. He's the author of many, many bestselling books on trauma, including waking the tiger, which has been published in over 29 languages. His most recent book is trauma and memory, brain and body in search of a living past, a practical guide for understanding and working with traumatic memory. He's also written an autobiography. He has served as a stress consultant for NASA in the early Space Shuttle development. One of his recent lifetime achievement awards, that that's what you want to say, right, is, well, there's too many lifetime achievement awards to name, but I'll tell you a recent one is from psychotherapy networker. He leads trauma healing courses for the public worldwide. He teaches specialized master class courses to Somatic Experiencing students. He's a senior fellow and consultant at The Meadows addiction and trauma treatment center, and his Somatic Experiencing trainings span so many countries, I think, he tells me in the interview, 55 countries on six continents, and it's just still growing, and we get to hear what he has to say today, just a trigger warning for those who need it that there is discussion of an assault that is sexual. So if that's too much for you, take care of yourself and don't listen. Also, you know, just want to reiterate, because Dr Levine makes it really clear how helpful and often necessary it is for someone to have a professional guiding them through the release of trauma that, if delved into too quickly or without support and guidance, there can actually be re traumatization. So again, just just a shout out for everyone to take care of themselves, to do what they need. Again, I am not a mental health professional. I'm not qualified to offer guidance or or healing trauma on my own. I'm simply a person who has worked for not as long as Dr Levine, and certainly not in the same manner, but for decades really on healing myself and my some, not all, of my own familial trauma, and just love talking about it and providing resources and different perspectives, because there's never going to be a one size fits. All do a B, C, and all is well, we are all, of course, unique individuals with different needs, different sort of paths that resonate with us, and we need to follow those. And so, just like Nana is simply an offering of information. Hey, have you looked at it from this perspective? Have you thought about this? Do you want to explore this further? And that's another thing to mention. I mean, this interview with Dr Levine is roughly 30 minutes or so. He's worked for somewhere around 60 years on trauma and resolving trauma. So of course, this half hour can't even begin to cover or summarize all that he's done. So all of these discussions with all of these experts and mental health professionals are really intended just to kind of provide a little glimmer, plant, a seed, if you will, of an idea that might be interesting to you might be effective. You and great explore that. And if it doesn't seem like the right fit, that's great, too. Thanks for listening. Dr Levine, I am just humbled and honored to have you here today, and just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, personally for all you've done to help me on my healing journey. So thank you.

Dr. Peter Levine:

Oh, great, that's good to hear. Thank you. Absolutely.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I would love to start if you're willing to share if you have a favorite or powerful memory of one of your grandma's and what you called her,

Dr. Peter Levine:

yeah, Grandma Bertha and but I think I called her grandma, and she was my mother's mother, my maternal grandmother. Oh my gosh, thank you for asking the question. I have this wonderful memory, because after a while, they bought a farm in out in the country, and Sue would spend time with them. We'd spend the summer there, and sometimes it would just come up for a weekend, for a long weekend during the winter. And we had orchards, and so we would pick the apples and bring them in, and my grandmother would cut them up, and she would make apple pie. But the best part of it was that she would put slices of cheddar cheese on the pie, and on top of the cheddar cheese, there was a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Oh, wow. And so that's my memory of grandma Bertha. What state was the farm in it was in upstate New York, in modern or Harriman, New York. Wonderful.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I bet it was just beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing that.

Dr. Peter Levine:

Sure. Actually the wonderful question you got me to reflect on that,

Amie Penny Sayler:

yeah, it's fun to remember our grandma's Yeah, yeah. So just like Nana focuses on their kind of different names for it, ancestral trauma, intergenerational trauma. And I want to be clear that our focus isn't on blaming anyone else for their own life experiences, doing the best they did with what they had all of that. It's just looking at, what are the effects you know, through families of trauma experienced by others. So I'm curious about what aspects of your work have focused on that familial or ancestral trauma.

Dr. Peter Levine:

Yeah, well, you know, I would say, in a way, all of it fair enough. I mean, yeah, you know, because I think originally we have the idea, you know, that we are the way we are because of things that our parents did to us, and which is a fairly limited worldview. But then it was more clear that these were also affected by generations who passed and through our even from our distant ancestors. And the first time I got to understand or I realized how important this was, I think I write about this in my autobiography, Autobiography of trauma I was seeing beginning to see people in this 1970s a number of the my clients reported the smell of burning flesh, and the number of them were vegetarians. Actually, some of them were vegetarians. So I became curious about that, and I asked them to query their parents about their family history. And it turned out that a number of them had parents or grandparents, probably that were in the Holocaust. It's a little hard even to speak about it absolutely. Could just imagine where the smell of burning flesh might have come. And then over the years, I've also worked with Not, not so, not as many, but number of African Americans. And it was clear, of course, that these effects are lingering in terms of, you know, systemic racism, but there was also this, this imprint from the times of slavery in the Civil War and slavery, but also in somatic experiencing. Yeah, so like you said, we don't look as victims. No, we look more as patterns, as energetic patterns in space time that are affected in all directions, as do our experiences affect those in front of us that come for the next generations from us. So again, to your question, yes, absolutely, we want. Look at the pattern and it's like a fractal. So the pattern may look like it's coming from things that have happened to us in this lifetime, but also in other lifetimes and in many, many lifetimes past. But again, that's more of a a mechanistic view that will really look at our cause and effect, but we're looking at basic patterns, and the patterns play out in the here and now and in somatic experiencing. Yes, of course, we're working with the traumas and the ancestral traumas, but we're working with them in a sense, as they play out in the here and now working and in the here and now, in the body, right? And that was really kind of the new thing that Somatic Experiencing brought into the world, that these are things that imprint our bodies, our bodily experience.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I want to talk about that because even when you were describing, unfortunately, some people's experience of, I'm smelling this burning flesh, or it's such a visceral, embodied experience with senses. What has your research shown you about how that trauma sort of lives in the body? I mean, is it a chemical? Is it energy? Is it an emotion? Is it every all of those things,

Dr. Peter Levine:

I can give you an easy response to that. It's all of those things, but particularly it's an energy pattern. One of the ways in the past, when I've worked, I occasionally do a workshop on working with our ancestral patterns, is I have the one person who's the focus, and then they have other people in the group represent parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so forth. And they don't say anything. They're just put in space in front of them and off to the side and so forth. Then what I do is I we have a whole, you know, like yarn for weaving, yes, many different colors of yarn. And we have each person hold one end, person who's being the subject, the focus, they're holding it in one hand, but they're going out to all of these different other ancestral representations. And again, the idea is just to feel into it, into the body. Because what you're doing here is you are setting up that energy pattern. So I don't have them speak, but just their energy being there. And then I'll work with the person who, again, is the focus on their here and now experience as they connect to that energetic dimension

Amie Penny Sayler:

that is incredible.

Dr. Peter Levine:

It is to see it. It's really is incredible.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I mean, humans, many of us are just so visual. So to have that actual visual and to see the web and the connections and the energy and really feel that in your body,

Dr. Peter Levine:

yeah, exactly the web of existence.

Amie Penny Sayler:

We could talk about trauma all day, but what you've done for so many is look at mechanisms for healing, and you you've talked about somatics. I mean, I think people have a general understanding of that, and it's becoming, I mean, largely in part, thanks to your work, becoming more commonplace for people to sort of hear about that, understand it. But can you tell us, from your perspective, what do you think of when you think of somatics? How does that help help us heal?

Dr. Peter Levine:

Yeah, you know, when I first started developing things in my work, in the late 60s and into the early 70s, there was no definition of trauma as PTSD, so it's still another like 1415, years in the future. So I had the advantage, I was going to say, disadvantage, but I had the advantage of not knowing that trauma was supposed to be a brain disorder, even a brain disease that the best you could hope for is helping people well, using certain medications, which can be helpful, of course, to try to change their thoughts, their negative thoughts, their negative beliefs. But that really didn't change. It really didn't shift, because, again, trauma is something that happens to us. Let's just say we see somebody that's had an accident, and our brains recognize injury and signal injury down into our guts so we see the injured person. We go, we clinch, yes, now there's a nerve. And I hope this doesn't get too technical, but it's, it's worth talking. A little bit about it, called vagus nerve, and it goes from the back of the brain the brainstem, the back of the brainstem, like Vegas, is like Vagabond same route, and it just travels all throughout the whole body, especially innervating the muscles, the muscles the organs below the diaphragm, but also the the lungs and the and the heart as well. And this nerve is the great majority of this nerve, which again is the largest nerve, is sensory. In other words, it's taking information from our guts and taking that information up into our brain, and 80% of those nerve fibers are sensory. They're coming from our guts and our organs. Only 10% is coming from our brain down to our organs. So going back to imagining that situation where you come out and you see somebody who's injured, and your guts go. Now that's the brain again, recognizing injury, sending the signals down to the guts, and the guts twist, but then the sensory part, which is the majority of that nerve, actually send that information back up to the brain brainstem, where it's amplified, so it goes from us to and maybe that night we're laying in bed, and all of a sudden we become aware of a twisting in our guts, and then there's an image from earlier that day, that accident. Yeah, that's, I'm not saying that that's going to be traumatizing, but it shows how this can progress. So again, if somebody has this going on, you know, for many years, then it can give rise to chronic gastrointestinal symptoms like a gastric deflux, and also to irritable bowel and those kind of things. And when I first started working with people again, there wasn't that definition of trauma as PTSD, as intrusive imagery and so forth, but this is really something that happens in the body, and in order to heal from the trauma, trauma, in a way, it has to unhappen in the body. You know? Again, here I can give you another example. Yeah, please say, as a child, that somebody has been hit by a parent, a guardian or a oldest sibling, and if that happens, you know, once or twice, it's not a big deal. It doesn't really affect us going on in our lives. But if it becomes habitual, becomes chronic, we start to brace against being hit. Right? That's obviously something the body does, yeah itself. So many people portray the trauma as chronic pain. So if you can imagine, if your shoulder is held in this position for a long time, we develop chronic pain. Pain very common representation of the trauma response. So I might ask a individual, a client, if they feel the pain, can they get in contact with a tension that might be underneath the pain, and usually after a little help, people can do that fairly readily. And then I might say, as you feel that tension, can you explore what might happen if that tension actually increased even more? And the person might say, Oh, my shoulders go up like that again. That's that defensive response, that protective, yeah. So I say, okay, that's important, but here we're going to do it very slowly, like 150 is the time and just the small amount, and then releasing and letting it go, and then become aware of sensations, feelings, thoughts. So if anybody wants to join us, please don't feel, you know, compelled to do it. You're welcome to do it, and just to see what comes up for you each time we do this, we then focus on our here and now, body sensations, and just track them. So tingling, vibration changes, heat, coldness, all of the different things that are going on in the body. And each time we work and complete that which wasn't. Able to complete at the time, because we couldn't really complete this, because if we would let go, we could be struck again. And so we again, we keep this as a chronic protective mechanism and but it one that needs to be completed. And so in somatic experiencing, we work very much with the completion of that which occurred a long time ago but has been waiting to finally complete and resolve and in many cases, to transform.

Amie Penny Sayler:

When you're talking about how 80% of the information that's coming to us through the Vegas is sensory. A lot of people who experience trauma talk about feeling kind of disembodied, you know, floaty, or just unaware of their own body. Is that just the overwhelm of all of the information that's coming at them, and is the healing part going back into your body the way you were describing and kind of taking it step by step.

Dr. Peter Levine:

Yeah, actually, that's, it's called Association. And I'll give you a personal example. I mean, I've worked, you know, again, for decades, with people who dissociate as a regular defense mechanism. Again, it should never be thought of it in a negative way, in a pejorative way, it is a defense mechanism from being completely overwhelmed. So I describe in one of my books, in an unspoken voice how the body releases trauma and restores goodness. So I'm crossing the street near where I spend time in California, Encinitas, I'm in the walkway, and the teenager drives her car, and she doesn't see because another car is parked, okay, and she goes through the stop sign and then hits me in the in the crosswalk, I'm thrown into the windshield and then thrown up into the air, out onto the ground, and as a people start coming around and looking down at me, like cannabis ravens, really. It's like I dislocate from my body, and I literally experience myself as being above me and looking down at all of this, wow, and again, you know, I've worked, as I said, with hundreds, 1000s of people with dissociation, but to actually experience it in this raw form, really kind of a learning experience, you know, and at that time, thankfully, you know. Again, since I've developed this work, I know what I could do, should do and can do, but I couldn't do it, except that a woman, young woman, came and announced herself as a physician, actually a pediatrician, and wanted to know if there's anything she could do to help. And I said, please stay here with me. So she comes and sits down on the ground, and she takes my hand in her hand, and in that moment, I come back from being out of my body, into my body, and with gentle shaking and trembling release and discharge that's stored energy from the being hit, you know, by the, yeah, by the car. So again, it's, it's like, even though I've developed this method, it's something that I still need somebody to be there, because it's not just what happened to us, but it's really rather what we hold inside, in the absence of that present, connected, empathetic others. I'll give you another example. This is one that I talk about in my autobiography. So again, you know, I've developed this method, and I'm starting to get these strange physical sensations and then just momentary flashes. I can't really make that what the flashes are about. And so in ancient Greek, there was an archetype called Chiron. And the way I understand Chiron today, it's about the wounded healer, and all of us who work in the healing profession, we're motivated to a large degree, I think, from our own experiences of trauma over the over our life to expand, and I realized it was time for me to take a dose of my own medicine. So I asked one of my students to sit with me, to be my guide, and in somatic experiencing, we. We don't go right into a trauma that can actually be re traumatizing. Okay, so we're looking at counter forces, counter experiences. So when she started to guide me, I came to a memory when I was four years old, and it was my birthday, and my parents came into my bedroom late at night or early in the morning, and underneath the bed they lay a railroad track, model railroad track, down into the room and then back underneath the bed. I woke up, the trains were going around, and I literally jumped out of bed, ran over to the transformer so I could control the speed and toot the horn, and though I didn't have the words for it, even though many horrible things did happen to me, but very clearly, very traumatic things did happen to me in my life. In that moment, I knew that I was cared about, cared for, and thus to be loved. And so we worked on that as a bodily experience of being loved. And then that then took us to the opposite experience, because for many years, our family was experiencing life threat from the mafia guy who was the chief. He was like the Al Capone, Johnny deoguardo, Donnie Dio and he was probably the most ruthless of all of the the mafia. And he's featured in the movie The good fellows and the Irishman. He's mentioned both of those if you really wanted to put terror into another gang, that he's the person that you would hire to do that. And he basically, it's a long story, not my father's fault, but he was called to testify against Johnny deo, and Johnny deal basically told him that if he testifies, he will find his family face down in the East River. This was serious. So in order to, I think, to really convey to my family the ruthlessness of this, I was brutally assaulted and raped, I think that they wanted me to tell my parents about that, you know, so if I would come back crying and so forth, but I hid it from them, and I hid it from myself. And it was only with my student, with my guide, many, many, many years later, of course, that I was able to actually remember this piece by piece, but also to shift back and forth between the bodily that bodily experience and the body experience from being four years old of cared for and being loved. So again, I was able to really put that in the past, where it belong, take it from where it was in the present.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yeah, still living in you and still living

Dr. Peter Levine:

in me. And again, this is something that, even though, again, in both of these examples, that I know, of course, how to work with people around that it's not something that I could do without some guidance, some support. Yes, and so again, the autobiography of trauma, the healing journey. My healing journey is to really look at what it takes to heal and to tell our own stories. And I truly believe it's not even a belief. I know that anybody and everybody also has their own story to tell, right? And I really encourage people, because when I started with this book, I had no i no idea that I would publish it as a book. It was simply because I'm the age I am now that in the years that I have in the future to live compared to the years that I had from the moment of conception to where I am right now, I it was time for me again, just to write my story to myself. And so I started to do that, and this very close friend of mine, you know, asked me what I was doing, and I told her, and she said, Can I look at this? And I said, Yeah, but you know, this is very private, so to keep it private, looked at and she said, Peter. Like you really need to write this as a book? And I said, There's no way I would do that. It's too raw, it's too vulnerable person in the public eye to reveal those parts of myself seem like just too much. And she said, Well, I hope you think about it. And it was just talking to somebody else before. You know, a lot of times in my life when I don't know what my next step is, or when something is starting to emerge in me, My dreams are important allies in regard. And so during this time of in bill or indecision, whatever I had the following dream, and I'm standing in front of a field, and large field, and in my hands I have reams of paper, and they're typewritten, so it's some kind of a manuscript, yeah. And so I looked to my left, looked right, left and right, and then in this again, ambivalence, this strong breeze comes from behind me, this wind comes from behind me and takes all these pages and lifts them into the air, out into the meadow, into the field, to land where they might land. Wow, yeah, so when I awoke, I realized that my conscious mind couldn't make the decision, but my unconscious mind had already made the decision that I would write it as a book, to land where it might land, and to help people in their own healing and in story, and then telling their own stories, because, again, we all have important stories to tell, even If it's just to ourselves. I deeply encourage people to take on this task.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Well, Doctor, thank you for your vulnerability and your courage and putting your voice out there. I will tell you, you were actually part of the impetus for me and just like Nana, writing stories about my great grandma's, so all the way 10 generations back. So my middle name is Elizabeth. I'm writing a story for every Elizabeth Grandma I have, which is 45 of them, yeah, and part of it is so that their story gets told, you know. And I've been doing a little bit of research, a little bit of intuition. Well, you inspired that. So thank you, doctor,

Dr. Peter Levine:

at least the book has reached one person. Absolutely, yeah, but exactly again it's and I can see in your face and the joy in doing this, and the reconnection, and again, you're the first person who has asked me about one of my grandmothers, and I hadn't thought about that apple pie for centuries.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Well, Doctor, I could talk to you all day, but you have other things to do. I know. I would like you to let our listeners know, what are your suggestions for first steps? I mean, there is a lot of support that's needed through this process. What do you recommend? And all of your information will be linked in the show notes, you know, so everyone will be able to access all of that, but, but just in your words, what do you recommend for first steps?

Dr. Peter Levine:

Yeah, well, I mean first to be aware of behaviors that seem repetitive, or relationships that seem repetitive. So we have relationship a, and then it blows up, and then we go to relationship B, and then after a while, we realize, Oh my gosh, relationship is almost the same as relationship a so behavior, physical symptoms, all of these things like my physical symptoms in the autobiography, those what drew me to get some assistance. And I actually just discovered this because the person who's the new co director of my nonprofit Institute. He said that now somatic experiencing, the work that I developed, is taught now in 55 countries. I didn't know there were in that many countries to 200,000 practitioners. So it's available really many places throughout the world. And to get more information, you can go to our website, which is somatic experiencing. One word, somatic experiencing.com, and it also lists a lot of my lectures. And you know, things like that, but also connects with the nonprofit which is responsible entrusted to bringing this work into the world, and that's trauma healing.org and you can link from that, both from the somatic experiencing.com website, and also list books and, you know, and other resources. But you know, if you're having each kind of symptoms, I think that we can't give ourselves a greater gift and find somebody, as I did, to just sit with me, to be with me, to guide me. And because once we've been guided in that way, then we often can just continue the work on our own. But to get started, we really need that other you know, there's a Motown song that goes something like, it takes one to stand in the dark alone. It takes two to let the light shine through. So I think again, it's a gift that we can give to and it's a gift that we deserve. We all deserve to be supported in that way. And again, I really encourage people, as you did, to write their stories. Again, yours. It's beautiful the way you looked at the whole grandmother lineage, and I look forward to reading that as a book.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Thank you, doctor, that's the goal. So thank you. I am just so appreciative of your time and so honored to have spoken with you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with all of us.

Dr. Peter Levine:

Okay, all right, take care. All right. Thank you, doctor, bye, bye, Amy, bye.

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Dr. Peter Levine

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