My journey with the Somatic Experiencing Institute

I am going to share about my 16 year journey and experience with the Somatic Experiencing Institute (SEI).

I am healing arts practitioner and have devoted much of my professional life to exploring how together we can create intentional and caring conditions for healing trauma, particularly in our bodies.

I’ve spent 16 years a part of the SE community. My experience is a both/and. I have loved being a part of the SE community for all these years — the people, places and learning. I have chosen to stay in the SEI community with my eyes wide open about organizational challenges.

I hold a deep belief that cultivating inclusion and belonging are part of how we build robust somatic community and support trauma healing, individually and collectively. During my many years of service with SE, I have witnessed countless SE colleagues endure excruciating harm linked to their race, gender, class and sexual orientation. I decided early on that if I was going to continue to participate professionally in the SE community that I would do everything I could to work within our community towards a more inclusive and accessible training process for SE students and assistants.

Applying for a faculty position was a continuation of my devotion to the vision of SE, assisting for over a dozen faculty members and serving in various leadership roles including lead assistant at advanced trainings, SE introduction provider, a MC and presenter at the 2018 European SE conference, co-founder of the SE Working Group for Racial Justice and more. Being such an active community member I was deeply disappointed and detrimentally impacted by how I was treated during my faculty application process.

I am sharing my experience about it for two reasons. One is for my own dignity and self-respect. I believe my experience matters.

The second is because of continued harm impacting trans / queer SE and BIPOC students in trainings; my hope is that they won’t feel alone or that their experiences are not valued when they experience similar treatment. I hear stories from SE students around the world every week of how trans, queer and BIPOC students continue to be detrimentally impacted by faculty and assistants who have little to no training in gender and racial diversity. In addition, there are currently multiple grievances filed by trans students with the SE Institute about massively egregious transphobia at recent advanced trainings.

I am going to share about my experience in hopes it will help me move on and also for other SE students who might be validated in their own experience.

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Part 1.

I have been part of the SE community for 16 years. I have been assisting, mostly unpaid on my own dime for 12 of those years. It took me 12 years to fulfill all the requirements to apply for the SE faculty position.

I applied for a faculty position with the Somatic Experiencing Institute in December of 2020. There was no interview process. I received a short and impersonal email letting me know I did not get the position. It appears that all other applicants were offered a position, a total of six.

Afterwards 265 of my SE colleagues signed a petition requesting reconsideration of my application. The SEI executive director then decided to reopen my application for consideration. It was requested that I meet with the SEI education director as part of this reconsideration process.

It was also requested that I attend a meeting with the faculty who voted down my application in the spirit of dialogue and the possibility of moving forward in a new way.

I went into these meetings with an open mind and heart. I even recorded it because I was nervous and wanted to make sure I was able to take in the feedback folks who voted down my application shared with me.

While any faculty who voted no on my application were encouraged to join this meeting, only one faculty who voted no on my application showed up for the meeting.

The following is just some of the feedback I was given by this senior faculty about why I was not hired as SE faculty

“There are some faculty that would not show up to a faculty meeting if you were there. They can’t stomach the idea of being in a room with you.”
“When I have a young person in my training whose panties get in a twist because they’re misgendered and they make this huge stink, I want to repair, I want to hear and I also want to tell them to grow the fuck up.”
“I look at it as as there’s the ISIS orientation to social justice [referring to the SE Working Group for Racial Justice], we and I don’t want to buy the extremist view.”
“I don’t even think you can make reparation with the faculty with how much harm many of them feel that happened on social justice.

There was more that was said in addition to that that was troubling. I am planning to share the recording publicly because I know there are some who simply will not believe this happened. The meeting facilitator simply froze. It felt that if I spoke up for myself I would again be accused of more harm.

There were four faculty in total who attended the meeting (two who fully supported my application and one who showed up to be a witness) plus the executive director and education director. I asked them if they had even read my application (which took me a week to write the many parts). Not even one faculty member had read it. Only the executive director had, who ironically does not get a vote in the process.

After this meeting a follow up email from SEI stated that “it was the executive director’s observation with another faculty member that North American Faculty Application Committee refusal of my moving onto faculty track was not a fair or equitable process.”

A month after this meeting I received a follow up email stating that SEI was closing my application because many SEI faculty expressed a loss of trust and safety with me.

The irony which I will continue to be unpacking is how the very way I was treated in this meeting is the exact behavior I, with other SE colleagues, have consistently spoken up about over the past many years in the SE community. That students at the margins — trans, queer, BIPOC students continue to be harmed by these perspectives and behaviors by some faculty.

Labeling me ‘unsafe and untrustworthy’ is a distortion by the institution of SEI. I have simply and strongly spoken up and organized with others for more institutional accountability in addressing issues of economic access to SE training, representation, curriculum change and anti-bias training for our community. An important piece of information here that SE faculty had no institutional or classroom supervision whatsoever until August of 2021. There was a lot of harm happening in classrooms, especially to historically marginalized students. My SE colleagues and I were simply asking SEI to address it. I believe it is because I spoke up about the unsafe conditions in the SE classrooms that I have been labeled as unsafe and untrustworthy as a strategy to deflect from the actual issues of harm happening.

In the coming of weeks I will be sharing more of my experience and what unfolded, not just about my application process and the recordings, but more importantly my reflections on what it means to have a trauma healing institute have absolutely no handle whatsoever on how to create safe learning conditions for SE students with marginalized identities.

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If faculty or administration at SEI are reading this and would like have a different generative and transparent process, I am open to an exchange of authentic repair and restorative gestures with faculty and administration of the Somatic Experiencing Institute. I believe repair and finding a transformational way forward is always possible.