Start Where You Are:
SE Clinic Pilot Program Begins at Bay Area Homeless Shelter

Following their hearts has led San Francisco Bay Area Somatic Experiencing Practitioners Deborah Boyar, Patricia Meadows, and Lee Wylie to introduce SE at COTS, an agency serving homeless children and adults in Petaluma, California.

Since May 2006, Deborah, Patricia and Lee have been volunteering with COTS staff and participants. They’ve introduced SE principles and exercises, and have provided sessions to staff and homeless children and their parents.

The team began their work with COTS soon after Deborah met COTS’ Executive Director, John Records, through mutual friends. Deborah attended an orientation about COTS, and was deeply touched. When John learned about Deborah’s SE work, he invited her to consider offering it at COTS. He described COTS as “love in action, and the union of spiritual roots, idealism and pragmatism to develop and offer effective programs that help homeless people rebuild their shattered lives.” 

Deborah was intrigued, and knew she wanted other SE colleagues to co-create the project with her, to help deepen and ground it. She invited Patricia and Lee to join her, as they had assisted at several trainings together, and lived close to each other and to the shelter.

“Most homeless children and adults have been neglected and traumatized, often repeatedly,” said John. “We’ve been searching for a long time for more support in healing for our program participants, and were delighted to learn about SE.”

“We really didn’t know how this would unfold,” said Lee. “But we knew that we had a great opportunity because of the openness and collaborative leadership of COTS’ Executive Director. John immediately saw the benefits of SE, and opened up his agency to our work. His welcome created the pathway for us to begin.”

The team initiated their work with an orientation to SE, so the staff could experience the benefits of SE for themselves, as well as consider how it might be used with shelter participants. Lee commented, “This has been a fascinating process of discovery. We began our work at COTS inspired by our experience at the TFA training. Our intention was to provide the staff with sufficient SE skills to offer brief interventions with their activated clients, both adults and children.”

Over the course of several monthly meetings with the SEP team, the staff’s understanding and acceptance of SE became ever more palpable. Patricia described it this way: “It became clear from the feedback staff members were giving us that they were directly experiencing how SE could serve as a catalyst for the other work they were doing. They expressed the realization that their participants could not fully benefit from all the comprehensive programs and wonderfully enriching tools COTS was offering if unresolved trauma interfered with their ability to take in and apply new information and skills.”

The SEP team’s monthly three-hour sessions at the shelter provided a gradual, organic process for their relationships with COTS to build. Lee recalls: “We came to understand the staff’s existing responsibilities, and to appreciate how new their exposure was to the SE model. It became clear that we really needed to learn what their work world involved, and how SE as they understood it could be incorporated into it.”

“We did (and still do) a lot of listening. It takes time and patience to bond and build trust. And, we needed to steep ourselves in the COTS culture in order to learn how we could be most effective,” said Deborah. “We have all been humbled by the resiliency of the staff and participants, often in the face of extreme suffering.”

As Patricia said, “In working with the staff, we’ve emphasized the ‘ripple-effect’ of this practice. First and foremost, we’ve taught that this practice is for them—to help them learn new ways to manage their own activation and stress, and to prevent potential burnout. Also, we’ve reinforced that as they model resourcing and self-regulation, they are teaching and affecting each other as well as the participants in the center—both parents and children—through interactive attunement.”

One indication of the impact of this approach is that COTS program managers are now brainstorming with the SEP team to incorporate experiential somatic activities that promote self-regulation in the children’s program and 12-week parenting skills training. In noting this, Lee spoke of the “importance of self-regulation in an agency that works with this population and the challenges they face.”

Carrie Hess, COTS’ Kids First program manager, has become so enthusiastic that she registered for the Beginning SE training with Ariel Giarretto in April 2007. Carrie believes “SE can be a powerful tool to release the trauma that keeps the children and adults who come to us from reaching their true potential.” Deborah reports, “COTS authorized Carrie to take time off for the training, the FHE generously offered Carrie a scholarship, and Patricia, Lee, and I will all be assisting at Carrie’s training. So our SE-COTS connections will only continue to deepen and become enriched.”

In May and June 2007, the SEP team will implement a pilot program at COTS to provide direct services to homeless children and their parents in the emergency shelter and transitional housing program. “We’re considering it as a kind of open SE clinic that we’ll offer two times monthly. Our intention is to provide continuity through a series of sessions for participants who sign up,” said Patricia.

The team hopes to involve other SEPs from the Bay Area in staffing the clinic, and invites interested SEPs to join them after their pilot program, which begins mid-May 2007, and continues through the end of June. The team hopes that many of their local SEP colleagues will take advantage of this unique opportunity to volunteer their time in this unique setting once the clinic is up and running – probably mid-summer, they anticipate. They envision the program expanding and continuing to grow over time, as more and more SEPs become involved.

To help spread the news about the SE clinic, COTS Executive Director John Records and Deborah created a special web page (http://www.helpcots.org/page11/page11.html) so that SEPs who might want to volunteer in this setting can get a feeling for COTS, and for how the clinic is envisioned and will be structured.

The excitement that Deborah, Lee and Patricia feel for their work at COTS is infectious. Each of them has described what this work has given them, not only as SEPs, but also as human beings. Each of them has described how profoundly grateful they feel to be of service in their own communities. And they are very hopeful that many more SEPs will become involved and help develop the SE clinic.

When asked how she would advise other SEPs to become similarly involved in their communities, Deborah said, “Feel into what you’d like to do. Allow the unexpected to happen. You don’t necessarily need to wait for someone to show you the way – allow pathways to develop where you feel drawn. Discover little ways to introduce SE. Invite your friends to do it with you. You’ll be more creative, have more support, more credibility, and more accountability. With colleagues, you’ll be able to stay grounded and creative when faced with disappointments. And you’ll be able to share the joys, too. For example, we found that the staff now opens their weekly meetings with guided resourcing.”

Patricia adds: “Be willing to just begin where you are with what you have to offer, and to trust the unfolding process without knowing what the outcome will be! Also, be open to learning and receiving so much more than you could imagine. This truly has become a mutually enhancing and inspiring collaboration. We’ve all learned so much from each other.”

Please feel free to contact Deborah at raw@heartdeep.net or Patricia at pmeadowsca@aol.com to learn more about getting involved with COTS. For more information about COTS, see http://www.helpcots.org.