Recommendation
To the readers of this book
Prologue | How Body and Mind Work

PART 1 The Healing Body

ㆍWhy do humans fall into trauma so easily?
Why the Baby Impala Didn't Suffer Trauma | Frozen Energy

ㆍRecognizing trauma
The Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping and the 26 Children | The Child Who Ran Away After 20 Years

ㆍWounds can heal, as long as the body is not disturbed.
All the answers we need are within our bodies.

6 Reasons Why You Can't Escape Trauma
Once you give in, you will continue to lose. The banality of trauma. Ignorance makes us suffer more. Diary of a trauma patient. Who is vulnerable to trauma?: 6 conditions for its occurrence. Common events that cause trauma.

The power of a community that empathizes
Primitive healers who cared for lost souls together | The difference between somatic experiential therapy | The power of empathic others | A warm-up for those whose senses have become dulled

ㆍIlluminating Trauma with FeltSense
A Mirror Reflecting Medusa | Fight Back with the Shield of Felt Sense | Let Your Body Speak | How to Hear Your Instincts with Felt Sense | How Organisms Communicate | Sense and Awareness | Slow Down to Your Biorhythm

How animals survive in nature without weapons or strategies
What Makes Animals Different? Listen to Your Reptilian Brain | Tuning and Adaptation | Instincts and Orientation Responses for Survival | Fight, Flight, and Freeze | Learn from Animals

How Mental Wounds Become Illness
The Stage of Trauma | The Neocortex's Missteps | The Trap of Fear and the Freeze Reaction | Why Revenge Begins Decades Later | The Correlation Between Freeze Reactions and Trauma | The Cumulative Effects of Trauma | The Safety Valve of Symptoms

Reprocessing Trauma: Somatic Experiential Therapy
Nancy's Awakening the Tiger | How to Handle the Impulse of Energy | How to Heal Trauma with Felt Sense: The Story of Marius | The Ending of Trauma Can Change in the Theater of the Body | Write Your Own Hero Myth, Slowly | Key Elements for Trauma Reprocessing

PART 2: Trauma Your Body Tells You

ㆍFour core responses to trauma
The Awakening Cycle | Identifying Trauma | The Four Core Trauma Reactions | Hyperarousal | Contraction | Dissociation | Helplessness | The Most Reliable Criteria for Recognizing Trauma

Symptoms of trauma that are all too common
Common Symptoms That First Appear | Why Trauma Symptoms Recur | How to Break Free from the Cycle of Fear and Arousal

ㆍThe reality of people experiencing trauma
Seeking a Nonexistent Threat | The Case of Mrs. Sayer | The Inability to Learn New Information | Chronic Helplessness | Traumatic Bonding: Every Stimulus Feared | Fear of Exceeding Limits, Traumatic Anxiety | Psychosomatic Symptoms of Unexplained Origin | The Vicious Cycle of Trauma Survivors

PART 3 How to Heal Trauma

Trauma that seems like a coincidence but inevitably reoccurs
Trauma Reenactment and the Triggers of Violence | Armed Robberies Occurring Every 6:30 PM on July 5th | Unconscious Repetition: Jack's Case | The Roots of Reenactment | The Theater of the Body | The Mystery Created by Trauma

The healing effect of trauma readjustment
The Two Faces of Trauma | Healing as the Midpoint Between Heaven and Hell | Healing Principles of Trauma Readjustment | Margaret's Readjustment | Swing Between Memories of Happiness and Pain Like a Pendulum | The Organism's Recovery Energy | Misconceptions About Memory | The Brain Doesn't Remember | But It's So Real! | The Pride of Survival and the Vortex of Healing | It's Not Memories, It's Feelings That Matter | Just Like an Animal Doing Its Job

ㆍChanging social trauma
Animals Don't Hunt Their Own | Why Humans Fight to Kill Each Other | Transforming Trauma into History | The Price of Ignoring Social Trauma

PART 4: First Aid for Trauma Prevention

ㆍEmotional first aid after an accident that guardians should know
Step 1: Immediate actions at the scene of the accident | Step 2: After being transferred home or to the hospital | Step 3: Approaching the trauma and beginning to readjust | Step 4: Experiencing the moment of shock | Step 5: Closing | Post-accident healing process scenario

First aid for children
Common Delayed Trauma Reactions | 8 Steps to First Aid After an Accident or Fall | Unraveling Your Child's Trauma Reactions | Trauma Signals Your Child Sends You | Effective Play Therapy: Sammy's Case | Play vs.
Reenactment vs.
Remediation | 5 Core Principles of Child Trauma Remediation

Epilogue | Three Brains, One Mind
Acknowledgements

“Why do humans get trapped in trauma so easily?”
It was discovered by encompassing physiology, neuroscience, animal behavior, and psychology.
How to Heal Mental Pain Through Bodily Sensations

When faced with an overwhelming threat, mammals, including humans, react in the same way.
However, humans are the only species that routinely suffers long-term traumatic effects.
Peter Levin says the difference lies in the animals' last survival strategy, the "freeze response."

For example, an impala can generate enough energy to run at 100 kilometers per hour when being chased by a cheetah.
If the escape fails and a freeze reaction occurs, the energy remains trapped within the body.
What happens in the Impala's body then is similar to what happens in a car when you press the accelerator and brake pedals at the same time.
The gap between the internal survival energy (engine) and the external immobility (brake) causes an overload, creating a powerful vortex inside the body.
It is this very energy vortex that, when acting on a human being, becomes the focal point for causing trauma symptoms.
The powerful survival energy generated by the nervous system for fight or flight freezes the body along with it in a freeze response, causing trauma symptoms.


So why can't humans naturally escape from immobility like animals? The biggest reason is our highly evolved cerebral neocortex, the rational brain.
The immobility response is an instinctive choice in the reptilian brain and limbic system.
But humans don't leave the process of getting out of a frozen state to the reptilian brain.
Instead, the rational brain perceives the intense survival energy trapped in the body as trauma and suppresses it.
This causes the survival energy that would otherwise allow you to run 100 kilometers to circulate like a tyrant in your body, causing trauma symptoms such as hypervigilance, anxiety, self-loathing, and helplessness.
Therefore, to heal trauma, we must guide the suppressed survival energy to achieve its intended purpose and be naturally released.

“You can save yourself from trauma.”
Break free from the frozen reaction of fear
Body-based psychotherapy that restores control of body and mind

The clue to the solution lies within our bodies.
Peter Levin says that breaking out of a fixed immobility response requires a new physical imprint that successfully completes the failed fight or flight response.
By becoming the subject who saves oneself from trauma, one can weaken the influence of trauma and strengthen one's inner healing power.
This is the core process of body-based psychotherapy: ‘trauma restructuring.’


In order to rebalance trauma, you must first develop a ‘felt sense.’
Felt sense is the experience of staying within one's own living body, and noticing a situation, event, or one's own state as it is through one's bodily senses.
The most damaging aspect of trauma is the separation between body and mind.
People who have experienced trauma do not want to experience the pain and fear again, so they block out new experiences, emotions, and sensations and live as victims.
To break this vicious cycle, we must stay within our own bodies, be sensitive to bodily sensations, and find internal resources that can protect us.
Because you need to realize that you have two strong legs to complete the escape process.
FeltSense acts as a guide to awaken dulled bodily sensations, reconstruct traumatic events, and regain control of body and mind.


Second, we must let go of the preconceived notion that the incident must be 'remembered' in some way.
Constant exploration of 'traumatic memories' can re-experiencing the pain and stress caused by the trauma, which may actually harden the immobility response.
Peter Levin emphasizes that in order to recover a body and mind shattered by trauma, one must not simply recall past memories as they were, but rather experience the physical processes that must have occurred at the time by moving back and forth like a pendulum between painful and happy memories through felt sense.


Anxiety, lethargy, avoidance of social relationships, excessive fear…
Free yourself from life-ruining trauma symptoms
A guide for those who want to live freely and peacefully.

People often think of trauma as a 'special accident', but that's not true.
Among the many types of trauma, the most common are car accidents and routine surgeries (including dental procedures), but simply witnessing assault and violence, natural disasters, and social catastrophes can also trigger trauma symptoms.
In young children, a fall, a seemingly innocuous surgery, or even a circumcision or common medical procedure can trigger a belated traumatic response, depending on how the child experiences the event.


First aid to avoid trauma symptoms that every parent should know

The time it takes for symptoms to appear after a traumatic event is usually known to be between 6 weeks and 18 months.
But Peter Levin discovered that more than half of his patients had been living with latent trauma for years, sometimes decades.
Peter Levin says that to prevent immobility reactions from developing into chronic symptoms, it is important to be able to detect physical abnormalities quickly.
In this book, he describes the four core symptoms of trauma—hyperarousal, contraction, dissociation, and helplessness—and vividly shows how they develop into long-term and bizarre trauma symptoms.
Especially for young children who have difficulty explaining their circumstances, the importance of careful care from guardians after an accident is emphasized, as the symptoms of trauma can affect their entire lives if left untreated.
To this end, this book includes examples of common trauma symptoms that children may exhibit, eight-step first aid, and a trauma readjustment process through play between guardians and children.


"Awakening the Tiger" meticulously examines the onset and development of trauma symptoms based on physiological evidence, offering fundamental solutions for overcoming trauma.
Drawing on thousands of clinical cases and interdisciplinary research in physiology, neuroscience, animal behavior, and psychology, "8 Steps to Developing Felt Sense" will help readers understand themselves and enhance their inner healing power to protect themselves.
Trauma multiplies itself.
Trauma, especially from events that have a global impact, affects all citizens regardless of nationality or ethnicity.
If left unchecked, trauma will breed trauma, ultimately perpetuating itself across generations in families, communities, and nations.