The Body Remembers: Working with the Body in Therapy

The body is the blueprint for all of our experiences.  Whatever has happened to us in our lifetime can be re-accessed through the body-the body remembers.  Any traumatic or wounding even will negatively impact the functioning of our body, emotions, thoughts and behaviours.  If we need to either tighten or collapse to restrict our energy and movement, and if this strategy is used frequently, it becomes chronic and fixed in the body.  Body psychotherapists will diagnose the body by observing areas of stillness or blocked movement in the body. 

Treatment consists of a client having direct physical experiences that promote healing.  Simply talking about an issue is not seen to address the root causes of trauma.  Breath is the primary intervention used in body psychotherapy.  Clients do breath work by lying down and deepening their breathing until it stirs up energy and feeling or they are asked to breathe more deeply as they feel and report memories, emotions and beliefs.

A second intervention used in body psychotherapy is expressive movement.  Since a primary goal is to re-establish movement, body psychotherapists encourage their clients to allow their bodies to move with what they feel.  Movement enters into healing all the way from subtle shifts inside the body to expressive gestures such as hitting and kicking.  Sound is also regarded as movement and clients may be asked to make various sounds or be encouraged to vocalize their experience as a way to re-establish movement processes that have been blocked. 

Most body psychotherapists see in the future a deep reclaiming of and regard for our bodies and that all transformational work will involve an emphasis on the body.  It is my hope that by returning home to the body, we will find power, joy and aliveness which has always been our birthright.

How are Trauma and the Body Connected?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a psychophysical experience which disrupts the functioning of individuals afflicted by it.  A traumatic event continues to intrude with visual, auditory or body symptoms such as accelerated heart rate, cold sweats, rapid breathing, heart palpitations, and jumpiness.  Victims relive the life-threatening experience, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring.  Symptoms of PTSD can be brought about again by external and internal reminders of the traumatic event.  Internal reminders of the event can be as simple as increased heart rate and respiration or body posture reminiscent of the event and external triggers can be things such as color, sight, taste, touch, and smell. 

It is thought that what causes PTSD is the storage of traumatic memories in implicit memory that are not linked to explicit memory.  What this means is that the traumatic memory gets stored in our automatic and unconscious memory system and bypasses language and our ability to express the traumatic memory.  Implicit memory is at the core of body memory.  One of the goals of trauma therapy is to help individuals understand their bodily sensations.  If we can identify and name our emotions associated with internal body states using awareness, we can reconnect the bypass that took place.

Some people can be predisposed to PTSD from stressful events during early development: neglect, physical and sexual abuse, failure of the attachment bond, and individual traumatic incidents.  It is thought that individuals who suffered early trauma and/or did not have the benefit of a healthy attachment may have limited capacity for regulating stress.  With assistance from a loving caregiver, an infant learns to regulate their emotional responses with touch, sound, and eye contact. Without this early learning to regulate stress by an attuned caregiver, later traumatic experiences might be remembered as highly charged emotions and body sensations or it may be that survival mechanisms such as freezing and dissociation have become so habituated that more adaptive strategies never had a chance develop.

However, infancy is not the only chance an individual has for developing healthy attachment.  Many children make up for it later in life with a best friend or special teacher.  And many adults find a healing bond with a mature love relationship.  Others find the bond in the psychotherapeutic relationship where developing attachment, body awareness, and learning boundaries assist in creating resilience and building resources.      

 

How Do I Listen To My Body's Internal Guidance?

In our culture, the body is seen as tainted, sinful, our weakness, and our lower animal self.  Ignoring our physical needs and the body is built right into the fabric of our lives.  In order to heal ourselves, we need to care for the body, live within it and in accordance to its needs.  When we listen to the small, still, wise, intuitive voice within us, the voice of our own body, healing can occur.  We reclaim body wisdom first by understanding the influence society has on how we think about and care for our bodies.  Our culture gives us messages that our body is our adversary.  We are taught to ignore fatigue, hunger, discomfort and the need for care and nurturing.  We learn to look outside ourselves for answers and we become afraid of our natural body processes and emotions, learning to suppress our emotions early on.   

Our emotions and thoughts are physically linked to our bodies via the immune, endocrine, and the central nervous system.  All parts of us think and feel and the mind exists in every cell of our bodies.  Our inner guidance comes to us through feelings and body wisdom first.  Our beliefs, heavily influenced by our culture, are unconscious and do not come from the intellect.  They come from the part that became lodged and buried in cell tissue in the past.  In order to heal, we have to re-enter our bodies and experience them.  Understanding comes after you have allowed yourself to experience what you are feeling. We need to learn to trust our emotions.  In our culture, we are taught that there is something wrong with pain.  We are brought up to fear, deny, and judge our negative emotions and feelings as bad.  Sadness and pain are natural parts of life and great teachers.  We have an innate ability to deal with pain and the body knows how to do this.  When we allow a full emotional release, we feel cleansed and free and insight comes after we feel our emotions.  If we are encouraged to stay with what we are feeling, to go into it, make the sounds we need to make, yell and cry as long as necessary, the body will innately heal.  Only our connection with our inner guidance and emotions are reliable in the end.  Recovery from our culture requires living fully from the inside out.

What is Body Psychotherapy?

Body Psychotherapy is a wholistic system of counselling that integrates the mind, body, and spirit.  Body Psychotherapy draws upon: yoga; Jungian, Reichian, and Gestalt therapies; movement and dance therapy; acupuncture; meditation; and developmental psychology.   

There are a few basic premises in Body Psychotherapy.  Those being:

1.    Any event that occurs impacts our whole being-physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual. 

2.    Humans are unique energy systems and Body Psychotherapy pays detailed attention to human energy.

3.    Feeling and expression are seen as prime components of healthy functioning.  Breath and movement re-establish the healthy flow of energy in the body. 

4.    The body can be divided into energetic segments which store different memories, emotions, issues, and traumas.  Body Psychotherapy can re-access any event that happened to our body-the body remembers.

If something happens to our energy early in life, then we develop a poor sense of self which becomes buried under defensive blocks.  If we have had to block our feelings, we block the healthy flow of energy in our bodies. 

Blocks appear as muscular tension in the body.  Contacting blocks in the body, relaxing the tensions that produced them, and releasing the energy to flow freely, allows the emergence of the stunted Core Energetic Self buried within each of us.  With energy flowing unimpeded, a person can have the sense of well-being in their body that should have been their birthright. 

Dysfunctional patterns cannot be changed by talk alone, it is only by going back home to the site of where the injury happened-the body-where real change can occur.  When aliveness in the body is reawakened, one experiences an intensified sense of self-authenticity that can be expressed through relationships with others, leading to higher levels of personal fulfillment and intimacy.