Kristin Loeer

Kristin is a Somatic Practitioner with over 10 years experience of working with chronic pain and complex physical symptoms. She is also part of the education team for Polestar Pilates UK, where she is involved in Pilates Teacher training and development.

Soon after Kristin qualified as a Pilates teacher and personal trainer in 2010, she realised that people and their bodies are all uniquely different, and their symptoms are often intriguingly complex. This started a long journey of studying the human body and the nervous system in order to be able to help those who felt rejected or left behind by the standard therapies. 

Most recently Kristin qualified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Since then she has been specialising in offering somatic trauma work at her private practice in Leigh on Sea and online via zoom. 

Q&A with Kristin Loeer

What are your qualifications?

I am a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and I hold an internationally recognised Comprehensive Studio Polestar Pilates Practitioner Diploma, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner and Coaching Diploma, a BTEC Level 5 Diploma in Remedial & Clinical Sports Massage, a Diploma in Biomechanics Coaching and a REPS Level 3 Certificates in teaching Mat Pilates and Personal Training. I also have a PGDip in Arts & Cultural Management and a BA(Hons) in Visual Communication.

Why do people come to you?

Usually, people come to me for two main reasons. Most of them have already explored talking therapies and find that while they may have a better understanding now of their problems, their body simply seems to not agree with their mind. For example, they might understand that they are safe and do not have a reason to be anxious. They may even have ways to calm their minds. Yet they find their heart is still pounding and they are still tense and jumpy. They come to me because they want to connect with their body and seek to work with the trauma they hold in their physiology in order to reduce symptoms and gain a sense of wholeness.

Some people come to me because of my background in movement therapy. They often also hold trauma in their body or have had severe traumatic experiences. Or they live with a debilitating health condition that impacts their physical abilities. They come to me in order to engage with their body in a safe and positive way and to be supported by someone who can help them manage and regulate traumatic responses in the body.  

Do you have any specialisms?

I specialise in shock trauma and syndromes. 
Shock trauma is when we basically function okay in life until we had a fall, surgery, or car accident, after which we somehow did not recover from our injuries and begin to be hypervigilant or unable to sleep. I use Somatic Experiencing and sometimes movement work to help my clients stabilise their nervous system before we then begin to renegociate the traumatic event itself and support the body in healing and rehabilitating from the chronic injuries if there are any. Gentle manual therapy can also be part of this process.

Syndromes are complex physical symptoms (more about this further down the page). They often are a result of early childhood trauma and a continued difficult life. Somatic Experiencing can offer significant results for those suffering from syndromes, although this is a long term process.
As an ex-artist, I also specialise particularly in working with artists and performers who work with their bodies for a living. Performing is a tough profession, which comes with job insecurity, high-stress environments and requires a person to stay confident and at ease in front of crowds. Actors in particular are frequently asked to draw from their own traumatic pasts in order to play a role. Acting school does not teach how to do this safely. Performers come to me in order to access the instrument of their profession more deeply, grow resilience, access past traumas safely and to expand their talented authentic self beyond the doubts, insecurities and beliefs that hold them back. 

What complaints can you help with that many people find surprising?

I believe that it sometimes is surprising to people when they learn, just how much our emotional stresses and bad experiences can have an impact on our physiology. We all know that stress can give us a headache or an upset stomach. However, its impact on our physical health can be very far-reaching and may even play a role in a vast variety of complex health conditions. 

In Somatic Experiencing we call those conditions “Syndromes” or “syndromal” symptoms as they tend to have at least partially a root cause in nervous system imbalance, which means a direct link to trauma and stress. Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, IBS, Crohn's and Colitis, Migraines and Chronic Pain are all classed as syndromes and Somatic Experiencing specialises in working with these conditions or symptoms. Syndromes however are understood to be the cause of very complex multiple traumas, which means that the treatment is a subtle and long term process.

Can you tell us a surprising fact about Somatic Experiencing?

Somatic Experiencing was, to a great extend, inspired by learning from animals in the wild. Peter Levine asked the question of why animals in the wild do not display signs of PTSD, even though they live under a constant threat to their lifes. So he spent several years observing wild animals and their behaviours and physiological responses to potentially traumatic events before he began developing Somatic Experiencing. It was his conclusion that animals easily follow their instincts exercise their fight, flight and freeze responses without hesitation until they are completed. This is something humans do not do. We have become more detached from our bodies and learned to give far more meaning to our analytical thinking than our instincts. Furthermore, we live in a complex society which values are not in tune with our basic survival instincts. For example, if we are in a car crash we quickly need to pull ourselves together in order to give information to the police. We suppress the shaking and our desire to run away from the situation, hence we cannot complete and discharge the trauma in the way an animal would.