Book Review: Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine

This book gives addresses the neurological and behavioral responses we have to traumatic events.  In comparing humans and animals and how each work through a traumatic event, animals work through trauma physically while humans tend to work through trauma more cognitively.  However, people, like animals, store the trauma physically and need to work through it physically as well as cognitively.  The book gives some specific physical exercises that can be used in a therapeutic setting to physically work through trauma.  This broadened our team’s perspective on the somatic lens through which we need to understand trauma.  We identified this as an area in our practice that we would like to further develop to address and treat trauma in a more wholistic way.