How the completion process works

Take a moment and imagine you’re holding half of a lemon in your hand.

Feel the texture of the skin. Slightly bumpy, firm, cool. Notice how bright it is, how the peel almost shines. Now look at the cut side. The inside is glossy, juicy, made up of tiny translucent pods filled with liquid.

Bring it closer and inhale. The smell is sharp, fresh, unmistakably lemon.

You may already notice your mouth responding, a subtle shift in salivation.

Now imagine biting into it.

The juice floods your mouth. The sourness hits your tongue. Your jaw tightens slightly, your facial muscles react, your body responds before you think about it.

Nothing actually happened. And yet, something did.

This is the basis of the Completion Process. The brain and nervous system do not clearly distinguish between what is physically happening and what is vividly imagined. When an experience is felt in the body with enough sensory detail, the system responds as if it were real, activating corresponding neural and physiological pathways.

What mattered in this simple experiment wasn’t the image of the lemon. It was the interaction. You weren’t just thinking about a lemon, you were engaging with it through sensation, smell, taste, and bodily response. Because your body already knows what it’s like to bite into a lemon, it created a feedback loop. Muscles responded and saliva formed. The nervous system participated. This is what makes an experience somatic.

A somatic experience is not something you imagine from the neck up. It’s something the body recognizes and responds to in real time. And that distinction is crucial, especially when working with trauma. Insight alone could never bring me out of the state I was in during my "dark night of the soul" in 2015. What my system needed was not more understanding, but experiences that allowed it to complete what had been interrupted and finally return to present time.