This fall I’ve been thinking a lot about the capacity to witness. I have been thinking about what supports it, what threatens it, what builds it, and for therapists, how we are called to witness the unbearable, the unspeakable, and at times, that which has not, and perhaps cannot, or cannot, at this time, be metabolized through the body and psyche of the people we sit with. This is the work we do in the clinical space. As therapists, we serve as witness, and in doing so, material that has been rendered unbearable, becomes tolerable enough to metabolize. Mucci (2018) speaks to this, “by taking in the pain of the other, and bearing witness to it, the other is enabled to retrieve those parts of his or her existence that seemed erased, dissociated, split and disconnected. This retrieval enables a transformation in the social connection, a sign of renewal, reconstitution, collective reparation, and rebirth” (Mucci, 2013 cited in Mucci, 2018, p. 176 – 177). Mucci speaks of this as rebirth as there is a return of vitality as the psyche integrates and the autonomic nervous system processes the life-threatening states held in the body, moving from hypo arousal or dorsal vagal into a stronger, dominant ventral vagal state.
But what happens when we as therapists are also called to witness horror and terror in the larger world, the one outside of our clinical space, and in response to it, we feel fear, despair or helplessness? How do we continue to do the work that we do, and what is called for, when we are taken to our knees by world events, when our clinical spaces are infiltrated with the happenings of the larger world? As an educator in Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy, I’m always thinking about, how do we become more and more robust, where do we lean, what do we lean into, what holds us, how do we maintain our witness when we stumble, and as we stand as witness for and with others, what do we need?
In this time and place in history, where we are inundated by geo-political chaos and disconcerting movements, both in our own small communities and around the world, I am aware of the toll it takes. I know that it taxes each of us as clinicians, even if we are able to shut out some of the bombardment of difficult news, it comes in through our practices, and of course impacts us energetically. I’ve been thinking about that in my own life, and in a broader way, the lives of the therapists I know.
I think about the work that we do. I am awash with memories, scraps of competing truths vying for primary remembering, primary knowing:
I remember that the body is “our primary text and starting point for knowledge” (Rountree, 2006, p. 98). This quiets me. I land.
I remember, “When we remain connected to our body knowledge, it will make it more difficult for the powers that be to control our minds” (Crawford, 1998, p. 57). I nod.
I remember, “A brain disconnected from the stomach, intestines, throat, heart, and other parts of our body isn’t only seriously impaired, it can be as deadly as the proverbial loose cannon” (Todd, 2001, p. 28). I nod.
I remember, “People who can’t trust their own body knowledge feel out of touch, have less tolerance for ambiguity, seek clearcut simple rules to determine their actions, tend to consider complex situations in simplistic terms, and are thus more likely to be swayed by “experts” and by naïve either/or arguments” (Todd, 2001, p. 24). I feel worry.
I remember, “reading the body as one would read a text, we used our lived experience as another valid and valued source of information and knowledge…” (Gustafson 1998, 52). I nod.
I return to remembering that the body is “our primary text and starting point for knowledge” (Rountree, 2006, p. 98). This quiets me. I land.
I come back to the truth that nothing remains static. Embodiment is an ever-shifting evolution. Paired with the body is the capacity to witness, to be present, to hear the testimony of the people we sit with, and to use my body and my regulation in the process, for the process. For me, this has been an ever evolving and expanding quest, and I hope that is for you too.
This past week has called me to dig deeper and steady myself as my perception of reality shifted, as did many peoples’, with the outcome of the US election. By happenstance, my weekly supervision group was the first clinical space I entered into after the US election. I am one of the two Canadians in the group, the others are American. We put aside our cases and we sat, we processed, we made sense, and most importantly we connected and stood as witness for one another.
Since then, I have needed to take time, to be with myself, and come back to what I know beyond this moment. I had to take a bird’s eye view of history, of humanity, and lean into the vastness of time, to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor did it fall in a day, and I had to find commonality of values with those that understand a way forward that is different from my own perspective. Remembering the goodness of people beyond their political leanings helped me remember how to connect across differences, even when the chasm feels vast. This was imperative, not finding it as a philosophical endeavor, but for myself, so I could find my ground again and stand, until the next time I stumble.
References:
Crawford, L. 1998. “Including the Body in Learning Processes.” In Proceedings of the 17thAnnual Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education, edited by Maurice Taylor, 57-60. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.
Gustafson, D. L. 1998. “Embodied Learning about Health and Healing. Canadian Women Studies 17 (4): 52-55.
Rountree, K. 2006. “Performing the Divine: Neo-pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites. Body & Society 12 (4): 95-114.
Mucci, C. (2018). Psychoanalysis for a new humanism; Embodied testimony, connectedness, memory and forgiveness for a “persistence of the human”. International Forum of Psychoanalysis. 27:3, 176 – 187.
Todd, J. 2001. “Body Knowledge, Empathy and the Body Politic.” The Humanist (March/April): 23-28.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about early experiences with caregivers that lead to insecure attachment and the formation of chronic shame. We know experiences of overt shaming, neglect, chronic misattunement, or a lack of relational repair, are reflections of the caregivers own relational injuries and likely reflect their own early experiences with their caregivers, and their own insecure attachment and chronic shame. Another, possibly less obvious avenue of chronic shame creation, than say, overt shaming or neglect in early life, is through objectification. Hooten (2019) writes, “A child that is objectified, whether adored or criticized, who is evaluated instead of being joined in their energetic and emotional state, produces a state of disconnection and shame” (p. 33). I see the evidence of this clearly in the many folks I sit with in my clinical practice which focuses on the healing of trauma, specifically relational trauma.
As I consider the effect of these early experiences, I am reminded of a quote from O.B. Epstein (2022) that for the child, these interactions form “…micro-moments of accumulated grief which never seem to go away, quite the opposite; they will continue to generate a sense of insecurity and shame in the growing child and be present during adulthood” (p. 48-49). This linking of shame and grief has real clinical relevance in the healing of chronic shame, because at some point in the treatment, as the client comes to see and better understand the multitude of ways that the unseen hand of chronic shame has formed, guided, and limited their life, both past and present, a real grief and sadness will emerge. In this expanding understanding of their life and the ongoing impact of chronic shame in it, there will be a grieving and reconciling of missed opportunities, possibilities, relationships, and how compromised their sense of feeling free and creative and solid in what Bromberg (2017) calls the “…unique pleasure of oneness…” (p. 19) has been due to chronic shame. Although this part of the healing can feel overwhelming and unending for clients, clinically, I see it as an indicator of their increased capacity, and progress in their healing, which brings the promise of not just decreased chronic shame symptoms, but an increased stability and comfort in themselves, which has been largely elusive.
References:
Epstein, O. B. (Ed.). (2022). Shame Matters: Attachment and Relational Perspectives for Psychotherapists. Routledge.
Hooten, J. (2019). Shame: An Existential Wound. The Knowing Field. (10), p.29-44.
Solomon, M. F., & Siegel, D. J. (2017). How People Change: Relationships and Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.
I posed this quote for a free writing exercise one morning at a BBP writing group. What came back was potent, powerful, illuminating, expansive, opening, affirming—you get the drift. We decided to share it…here it goes, you’ll see responses from four different therapists and writers ~ enjoy!
“Practicing therapists are all confronting the same phenomenon, the troubled animal, and striving to find ways to relieve emotional misery, often in defiance of the pressures and demands of the surrounding culture” (McWilliams, 2005, p. 140). McWilliams, N. (2005). Preserving Our Humanity as Therapists. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 42(2), 139.
How is it that we work within the bounds of the culture which provides a frame and yet identify and go beyond the limitations of the cultural framework that oppresses, denies, injures? The framework that I hold is one of recognizing the duality of the cultural framework – holding both the good and bad so as to see the complexity of life, the complexity that we are embedded in. It reminds me of the necessity to develop the capacity to hold both, that developmental achievement in human maturation and psychological sophistication, a necessary part of reflective functioning, mentalization, both which are necessary for understanding self and other, and in that way decreases or has the opportunity to decrease misery and suffering. To be able to see oneself in context and understand the other in context opens people to the ‘depressive stance’ (in object relations parlance) which takes us out of rigid boundaries of black and white, us and them, victim or perpetrator, and moves us into an orientation toward both and. This movement allows one to recognize how they are implicated in the dynamics – for better and for worse – and how the context of cultural dynamics can create isolation, blame, othering, and competition, rather than collaboration, connection, consciousness, and understanding. Lisa Mortimore, PhD, RCC
It is important to remember, that at the most fundamental level, we are animals, and we also have a spiritual nature. As humans, we all experience emotional pain. The demands of the culture often keep us disconnected from our spiritual nature and the potential wisdom that comes from listening to what the emotional/animal body is saying. If we can allow our animal body to be alive within the truth of our spiritual nature, perhaps the emotional pain doesn’t have to become suffering. As therapists, we have the honour of being with our clients in a way that makes it possible for them to experience us feeling them, animal to animal and soul to soul, with an empathic presence so the emotional pain, which may have been felt as misery, can now become a felt communication of what wasn’t previously understood. Being felt, attuned to and understood by another, it becomes possible for the pain to be transformed into the beauty of pure sensation and true embodied wisdom. Lana Marie Willow, MA, RCC
Two things come up for me here. The first is that I am immediately taken to a line from Mary Oliver’s Poem, Wild Geese: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” I am also drawn to McWilliams’ use of the word striving. It takes on so much meaning for me here, there is so much magic in the striving . . .
Some things are too big and too hard to hold alone.
There is nothing that can replace the felt sense of deep, empathic witnessing.
Relief can offer regulation but may also bring waves of grief as we realize how fleeting this is in certain seasons of life.
Inviting another into your world takes immense courage.
Valuing deep connection begins with conception.
If we remain disconnected from each other, and from community, power continues to reside elsewhere.
Now, more than ever, relational reciprocity is the only currency our souls need.
Genuine, authentic connection is a form of resistance.
Amandy Murphy, MC, RCC
Dominant over-culture. The tide that seeps in. Porous we are to this sea, when truly all we are is trying to be seen.
No human is an island.
Yet in this wake of emotional uncertainty, we often feel adrift-
Isolated, impenetrable to the soft sand castle of our soul’s teachings; just out of reach of the relational life raft.
Let me be your lifeline, your buoy, your floating kelp of help moving lovingly towards you in the watery expanse between us.
If I were an animal, an otter, a dolphin, I’d extend my fin in a feature of friendship to your distress.
I hear your SOS.
I see the peril in pathology and the way in which the pressures & demands of this surrounding culture have swept you out to sea”.
‘It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.” D. W. Winnicott
Reflecting on the quote by psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald W. Winnicott (2005), one could imagine you are a child playing a game of hide and seek. How quickly your delight and joy of hiding is lost when no one comes to find you. The game continues to be played, while you remain unfound.
We are social beings and as such, relationships are primary. Since the day we were born, we experience moments of union and separation with those we love. There is complexity in these oscillating rhythms in insecure and even in secure relationships. At times, when we are in union with the other, we can feel intruded upon and engulfed; and other times in separation we can feel neglected, rejected, and forgotten. Too little and too much contact can have us feeling equally alone and unfound. As therapists, how might we use this metaphor to disrupt a disaster in the therapy room?
The Bringing the Body into Practice (BBP) psychotherapy approach leans into theoretical and conceptual understandings of relational psychodynamic principles and practices. A BBP foundational pillar is the relational framework, often referred to as a two-person psychology. There is a principal acknowledgement that there are two full subjectivities who come together to creatively co-construct the intersubjective field. In the psychotherapy process, both the client and the therapist have an experience of themselves as individuals and as individuals together.
It is not so much what we know or what we do in therapy but how we are when we are with our clients. This does not mean we should dismiss the knowledges we have garnered from our professional development training. It is imperative that we continue to grow and develop, as theories inform our practice. What it does mean is once our training has been fully integrated and internalized, the knowledges become a bedrock to how we are. In a relational framework, our central focus is on being with so clients feel heard, seen, held, and ultimately found. In the space between, there is a continual co-constructive experience uncovering the ever-evolving, unfolding of Self in the present moment. Our intention is to offer our presence, as a holding container, to welcome those hidden parts of self to be known. Winnicott (2005) author of Playing and Reality writes,
Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is where playing is not possible, then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. p. 51
As therapists, we attune our embodied self and our internal state of mind, which includes our nervous system, sensation, thoughts, affects, and intuitions to create a holding space. Thoughts that may split our attention, or interfere with our ability to be fully present are bracketed off. We orient to the client’s history and hold memory traces in the forefront of our mind, to be called upon by our clinical intuition to facilitate a client experience of themselves. Our intent is to track the oscillations, the embodied push and pull of the field, while co-regulating injured and fragmented self-states. We aim create a relational holding space so the client may experience an embodied felt sense of themselves.
In order to cultivate presence in the holding environment, it is essential to have a certain degree of self-awareness. Are we aware of our self-knowledges, beliefs, values, abilities, aspirations and identity? Are we aware of our emotions, thoughts, attachments, conflicts, injuries, and dilemmas? Do we have a solid framework that defines our practice? Self awareness is not static but expands creatively throughout the lifespan. There are countless practices to deepen self-awareness. Centering, grounding, meditation, contemplation, reflection, and orienting to the inner and outer parts of ourselves may be a place to begin. There are times when we may struggle because our own material shows up in the therapy room unexpectedly. This is when we may need to seek additional support from a peer, a supervisor, or our own psychotherapist. We can only take people, as far as we have gone ourselves.
Fundamental to cultivating presence is deep listening. What are our clients showing us rather than telling us? In stillness, we listen with our eyes to their non-verbal communication, such as: eye contact, facial expression, posture, tension, and gesture not only in the other but also listening to what happens in us. We remain curious and open to the mystery of being with the other in a state of receptivity.
We listen with our ears to the client’s expression of language, sound, tone, vocalization, affect, content, and context. Simultaneously, we bare witness to the way the client communicates. Specifically, their linguistic output – prosody, timing, intensity, rhythm, lapses, themes, patterns, and coherence – which provides a window into their intrapsychic organization. What remains unconsciously hidden? Silences, pauses, and quiet moments are patiently held while listening with and attuning to our own inner experience. Grossmark (2018) writes, the field affords the emergence of unformulated non-represented meanings that cannot be articulated in language, but are lived through together (Joseph, 1985) and find form in this companioned experience. p. 98
We listen to and with our bodily sensations and our nervous system. Feeling into our tensions, strains, impulses, releases, temperature fluctuations that tells us something about what is happening in the intersubjective field. Our embodied self tracks the rhythm, timing, and pacing of the session while seeking opportunities of genuine connection through empathy, inquiry, disruption, and punctuation. Our focus is on being fully present to a shared experience of deep companioning engagement.
Let us return, full circle and imagine delighting in playing hide and seek. We use our creativity to find the best possible hiding spot, challenging the seeker to uncover where we are. The game plays on, and we remain hidden. Anticipation builds, and in our waiting, we harbour an unspoken wish, a hope that we will be found. How quickly our delight and joy return when we are. We need the Other to help us find our Self.
References:
Grossmark, R. (2018). The unobtrusive relational analysis: explorations in psychoanalytic companioning. New York, NY: Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (2005). Playing and reality (2nd Edition). Routledge Classics. London & New New York: Routledge. Originally published in 1971, Tavistock Publications.
Dawn Sather, RSW, RCC, RCC-S is a private practice therapist in Victoria, BC. She currently works with Adults using a Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Approach. Dawn has studied extensively, and continues to do so, in the field of: trauma, attachment/disrupted attachment, relational, and somatic attachment psychotherapy. All her trainings weave together to provide an integrative, attachment, relational, trauma-based approach to her practice. Dawn can be found athttps://SatherCounselling.com
As a play therapist, Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy (SAP) has expanded my practice and become the framework I use to conceptualize my clinical practice. I understand the children, their families, and their life experiences through a lens of early attachment connections, injuries and repairs. Play therapy is an imaginal, right brained modality and therefore often ambiguous, difficult to measure or interpret, which makes it challenging to communicate progress to caregivers. Having a breadth of understanding of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), attachment theory and relational practice, internal working models (IWM), shame and chronic shame, embodiment, the intersubjective field, and working with the right hemisphere, makes the work more easily articulated and understood within a variety of theoretical and conceptual frameworks.
As a clinician, I favour a non-directive style of play therapy, meaning I follow the child’s lead, and we spend our time engaged in the activities chosen by the child. My work is a combination of Expressive Play Therapy, Synergetic Play Therapy, and Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy. I offer child clients an intentionally curated play space that includes puppets, sand tray therapy, a doll house, crafts, board games, art supplies and items to play house or dress up. The activity options are nearly endless as the child begins to follow their inner knowing about what needs to come next. We create what they require and sometimes find ourselves crawling through fabric tunnels into a fort made of bedsheets to enjoy a picnic lunch with our community of plush rabbits.
My role in sessions can look simple to an untrained observer; like I am sitting with a child while they play in a lovely room; however, the work is actually clinically sophisticated and nuanced. My focus is on creating a safe-enough environment and therapeutic relationship where the child can relax into themselves, freely express their inner world, explore challenges, and share what it feels like to be them. My therapeutic stance is to offer co-regulation and opportunities for relational repair, and meet their expressions with acceptance and permission. At times, we work with symbols and metaphors that need to be witnessed and held in order to be transformed and integrated. At other times, we are attending to developmental needs and stages that have not been met, and that need support to progress.
Many children have easy access to the right hemisphere and its symbolic, metaphoric, and intuitively creative expressions. As a result, I seldom have to work past a “defended left hemisphere” (Quillman, 2012, p. 5), as often therapists must do in therapy with adults, and we frequently spend the therapeutic hour in the imaginal, both embodied and in the upper right hemisphere. I work with the imaginal as taught in SAP with the addition of three-dimensional play objects such as figurines, puppets, or a family of cats in the doll house.
When a child has experienced trauma, the play can be rigid, restricted, and repetitive. Bringing healing images into the trauma narrative at the right time, in the right way, can encourage the expression needed to transform and integrate. This integration expands the child’s window of tolerance, increasing their capacity for stress and emotions, resulting in a decrease in challenging behaviours. I may offer a tiny blanket to a baby that is repeatedly stuck in the trunk of a car. I might set up a hospital, if the child can tolerate that level of care, for the soldiers that are being annihilated. This aspect of my practice uses the language of symbols and metaphors to move difficult, unconscious, or disavowed material.
Much of my play therapy practice, as in SAP with adults, is a focus on the ANS. I observe the child’s physical body for cues, notice what sensations I am experiencing in my own body, as well as the themes in play that reflect the state of the child’s nervous system state. Hyperaroused play is bigger, louder, faster, often intense, frantic or disorganized. It can include violence and aggression. Hypoaroused play tends to be slow, easily distracted, floaty, hard for the therapist to stay focused on, and could include items buried underneath the sand or dying. Co-regulating the ANS happens in a variety of ways, and remaining regulated and connected to myself to ensure I am the strongest, dominant nervous system state is often enough to help the child shift into regulation. I might use more overt body movements like rocking back and forth or getting up to walk. When appropriate, I name my body sensations or emotions and then regulate myself in a way that the child can see or sense, activating the mirror neuron system. Through these times of co-regulation, the child’s nervous system can learn regulation from mine. Additionally, I might invite the child into an activity intended to shift the ANS either down or up regulating into the window of optimal arousal. To this end, we will march the room, or go outside into the garden, or I could offer a cue to feel the soft carpet under our feet.
Relational healing and repair, much of the focus of SAP, is also much of the work in my practice. Coming alongside a child with ANS dysregulation to support them to modulate the intensity and co-regulate is relational work that tends to early attachment disruptions, whereby the therapist is the “psychobiological regulator” (Carroll and Schore, 2001, cited in Gill, 2009, p. 362). Children experience co-regulation in my play room, and I work with their family system when it is available, intending that over time the child client is able to access co-regulation outside of therapy, and eventually an increase in their capacity for self-regulation. In working towards relational repair of attachment injuries, there is opportunity to use verbal and physical reflections to mirror the child back to themselves, disrupting their IWM and over time shifting their concept of self.
Bringing SAP into the playroom also brings an awareness to my own nervous system so I can be intentional about taking care of myself in the midst of the complicated experiences of my clients. In the intensity of hyperaroused play, where we are acting out traumatic material, the child’s projections often land on the therapist. Being killed in an intense sword fight repeatedly can leave a residue of dysregulation as there are real emotions in the play- real fear, helplessness, or terror. Having a strong capacity to regulate my ANS and understand the impact of working with trauma, and how to care for one’s self are key to longevity in this career.
Integrating SAP into my play therapy practice has resulted in deeper and more rewarding work for me and the children and families I meet with. By bringing in a comprehensive focus that weaves the body, attachment and relational repair, and applying it in developmentally appropriate ways, in concert with my play therapy, I have an increased therapeutic canvas to understand and relate to my clients and their families. This comprehensive understanding of early trauma and the reparative responses needed, allows me to access the core of the child’s wounding which is often at the foundation of the behavioural symptoms that brought them to my play room initially.
References:
Gill, S. (2009). The therapist as psychobiological regulator: Dissociation, affect attunement and clinical process. Clinical Social Work Journal, 38(3), 260 – 268.
Quillman, T. (2012). Neuroscience and therapist self-disclosure: Deepening right brain to right brain communication between therapist and patient. Clinical Social Work Journal. 40, 1 – 9
Rachael Pasemko, RSW, RCC, RPT-S is a play therapist and group practice owner in Kamloops, BC. She loves working with the language of symbols and metaphors, integrating the body into the therapeutic process, and supporting children and families to find more ease. Rachael co-facilitates a neuroscience based parenting group that teaches parents what play therapists do, offers consultation to other play therapists, and can be reached at rachaelpasemko@gmail.com
We are living in a traumatised world. Wars, natural disasters, climate change, pandemics, epidemics, starvation, extinctions, create complex situations that interfere with healthy functioning and relational dynamics which then continue to perpetuate trauma. Further, our world is currently run by the machine of economics and the idea that we need to keep producing more and more and grow bigger and bigger. Technology is valued over human connection. Art is becoming more mechanised. There is a notion that perfection is required in order to be of value. Value is placed on appearance, accumulating and consuming, growth and money above sharing, giving, the natural cycles of growth and decay, and connectedness to each other on the human level.
When experiences are too overwhelming to feel, comprehend and process through the psyche and nervous system, we create ways to manage. One way the western world has collectively learned to manage is by orienting to the left brain experience of the world, where things are separate and narrowly focused, and there is a drive towards an idealised and unrealistic perfection. Although this allows us to go on with our day to day lives, what we need in order to actually heal and potentially reverse the current course of destruction on this planet, is to shift our orientation towards the right brain experience of connection and embodied knowing, attending to the larger picture where everything is seen as a whole and considered as connected.
Iain McGilchrist (2009), author of The Master and his Emissary researched hemispheric differences for three decades before writing his monumental book on brain bilateralization. He explains that although both sides of the brain are active and involved in all mental processes, “each hemisphere has its own way of understanding the world” (p. 10). He makes the important distinction that,
the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself p. 93
Although we need both hemispheres working together to properly function in the world, McGilchrist’s research has profound implications for understanding and potentially shifting the way humanity is stuck in a toxic cycle of disembodied individualistic values and actions.
In order to be truly alive and aware of the miracle of being in a living body on the earth. what is kept inside, hidden and protected, held safely in its quivering vulnerability, needs to be known, seen and welcomed. Otherwise, how will we ever be able to fully and deeply know our own precious nature and fulfil our unique purpose in this world? Perhaps even more importantly, when we can truly feel what is alive and real inside us, then we can also become aware that we are not separate and isolated on an island of self. Our essential nature is to be loving and connected. When the blocks created through trauma have been healed, we naturally know the importance of reaching out to each other and considering the Other.
What is known through the body and intuition gets buried along with the undigested material of traumatic experience, including relational abuse and neglect. Blocks are created to protect us from perceived danger, even when the danger is long over, and we learn to rely on mechanisms that are not based in present truth to provide a sense of safety. The left brain needs things to be predicable and known, and yet to see anything that way is simply illusion. The universe is not predictable, and as much as science tries to quantify and understand the nature of life, those understandings keep getting more elusive and out of reach.
We need to learn to sit in the unpredictability of the magic of existence, to marvel at the miracle of simply breathing and being alive, heart pumping blood and moving oxygen through our bones and cells. Then we can remember that we are alive and, on the earth, and surrounded by and part of Otherness. We are more than a number or a configuration of mechanical parts.
I suggest that coming back into the intuitive realms of the imaginal, while maintaining awareness of our physical bodies and our interdependence on everything around us, is a way we can start to reverse the current devastating trajectory, opening us to embodiment, relational connection and healing. Greene (2005) states,
Although it begins with a physical sensation, it often transforms that sensation into a feeling or image so that the border between imaginal and embodied modes of experience is blurred, at which point their reciprocal relationship becomes apparent. Both are symbolic ways of working. Each mode compliments the other. The imaginal approach to psyche needs the grounding effect of the embodied awareness to bring the intuitive insight into the present moment of actual experience. The embodied approach to psyche needs the expansive effect of imaginal awareness to allow the sensate insight to take flight into the mythopoetic dimension of experience. p. 202
Greene is essentially describing the right brain function: awareness of the present embodied knowing, along with the ability to use the expansive thinking that goes with the imagination.
As therapists we must hold the container of wholeness and stay grounded in our own imperfect earthiness and connectedness to each other as we offer our clients a relational holding that facilitates reconnection to the ways of the right brain functioning. Schore highlights the role of the therapist when he states, “we must depend on someone holding us in being while we ourselves knit together our broken parts” (Schore, 2019, p. 93 citing Ulanov, p. 60). We can further this process by remembering to include metaphor, image, sounds, smells, all the things that make us truly human, not just a machine. As we gradually bring back the ability to feel alive and to know love, we will naturally start to be able to orient to the right brain awareness of connectedness, to what is perceived as Other, and then perhaps the world will be a more livable, more loveable, and safer place for all.
References
Greene, A. (2005). Listening to the body for the sake of the soul. Spring 72, p. 189 – 204.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world. London: Yale.
Schore, A. N. (2019). Right brain psychotherapy. New York: WW Norton.
Lana Marie Willow, MA, RCC is a therapist, artist and writer. Lana weaves creative expression, transpersonal psychology and somatic psychotherapy into her online therapy practice. www.yourtruenature.ca
therapy, a doll house, crafts, board games, art supplies and items to play house or dress up. The activity options are nearly endless as the child begins to follow their inner knowing about what needs to come next. We create what they require and sometimes find ourselves crawling through fabric tunnels into a fort made of bedsheets to enjoy a picnic lunch with our community of plush rabbits.
nervous system state. Hyperaroused play is bigger, louder, faster, often intense, frantic or disorganized. It can include violence and aggression. Hypoaroused play tends to be slow, easily distracted, floaty, hard for the therapist to stay focused on, and could include items buried underneath the sand or dying. Co-regulating the ANS happens in a variety of ways, and remaining regulated and connected to myself to ensure I am the strongest, dominant nervous system state is often enough to help the child shift into regulation. I might use more overt body movements like rocking back and forth or getting up to walk. When appropriate, I name my body sensations or emotions and then regulate myself in a way that the child can see or sense, activating the mirror neuron system. Through these times of co-regulation, the child’s nervous system can learn regulation from mine. Additionally, I might invite the child into an activity intended to shift the ANS either down or up regulating into the window of optimal arousal. To this end, we will march the room, or go outside into the garden, or I could offer a cue to feel the soft carpet under our feet.