IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Somatic Psychotherapy Today Volume 16, Number 1 2026
Welcome to SPT Magazine, Volume 16, Number 1, 2026. A shared thread emerges in our articles and book reviews: an exploration of how we come to know ourselves and one another through embodied experience, relational presence, and deeper listening. Whether addressing trust, trauma, pleasure, meaning, or somatic organization, the pieces in this issue invite us to consider how healing and transformation unfold when body, perception, and relationship are brought more fully into awareness.
THOUGHTS IN MOTION WITH ELYA STEINBERG, M.D.
When The Past Floods The Present: Regression, Flashbacks, and the Art of Coming Home
When the Past Floods the Present: Regression, Flashbacks, and the Art of Coming Home
The Moment the Room Changes
You are sitting with a couple. The...
YOUTUBE VIDEOS OF INTEREST
YOUTUBE VIDEOS
YouTube offers informative videos covering a wide range in the fields of Somatic Psychology and Body Psychotherapy. SPT Magazine offers videos our editorial team feels are aligned with our mission.
Banyen Book event and podcast producer, Jacob Steele, talks with Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., about her new book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens (see our review on the SPT Bookshelf).
Aron coined the term highly sensitive person and is the world-renowned author of the groundbreaking, internationally bestselling classic The Highly Sensitive Person. “Drawing on more than five decades of meditation practice and research, she offers a grounded, compassionate perspective on spiritual paths that support inner peace, clarity, and emotional regulation in an overwhelming world. In her most personal book to date, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens, Dr. Aron examines what she describes as a quiet spiritual revolution that began in the seeker culture of the 1960s and is only now becoming fully visible.”
“While traditional paths to enlightenment worked profoundly for some, many others were left wondering why those approaches did not bring the same calm or clarity. With scientific rigor and deep empathy, Dr. Aron provides the first objective overview of meditation methods and spiritual paths, helping readers discern which forms of practice truly suit their nervous systems, temperaments, and lives. She also explores emerging brain research on the transformative inner shifts that can occur through spiritual practice, offering insight into how peace and equanimity arise and why they matter so deeply for highly sensitive people. Though especially resonant for HSPs, this conversation speaks to anyone seeking a spirituality that honors depth, discernment, and genuine inner balance.”
Visit for books, products, and upcoming events. https://banyen.com
Finding the Fourth Position: Beyond the Trauma Triangle
In her article entitled, “Finding the Fourth Position: Beyond the Trauma Triangle,” Dr. Elya Steinberg explores a well-known concept of the trauma triangle, where people oscillate between one of three positions: victim, persecutor, and bystander, and how they become internalized in our psyche, our body. She details its impact on our lives. And then she offers a way out, what she calls the Fourth Position. The triangle, she writes, is where we are stuck. The fourth position is where we are free. We are human beings capable of consciousness, capable of choice, capable of meeting one another beyond the triangle in a place where genuine transformation takes place.
Each Morning Anew
Dr. Elya Steinberg suggests a shift in our perspective on health and well-being: focusing on what keeps us healthy rather than on what makes us ill. In this article, she focuses on resilience, pleasure, vitality, love, and meaning. Steinberg creates a solid foundation, citing colleagues’ work and theories (Reich, Frankl, Bandura, Maslow, Boyesen, Leamy, Camus, and more), and also offers her work with pleasure and her own journey into “fifty shades of pain” through her cancer diagnosis and treatment. She offers each morning anew as an invitation to awaken not only to the pain but to the meaning. Not only to the wound, but to the strength. Not only to what is broken, but what is, despite everything, still reaches out to life.
Relational Pulsation: Shape, Countershape and Somatic Organization of Experience
This article introduces the concept of relational pulsation as a developmental account of how relational experience becomes embodied. Building on Wilhelm Reich’s concept of biological pulsation, movements toward relationship (shape), responses from the relational environment (countershape), and defensive adaptations to relational disruption (contrashape) are proposed to influence breathing, autonomic regulation, and connective tissue organization over time. When relational movement is met with attuned response, the organism can complete a cycle of relational pulsation, supporting regulation, vitality, and engagement. When such completion repeatedly fails, defensive patterns may stabilize in breathing, tissue organization, and posture, contributing to enduring characterological adaptations.
When Our Clients Repeat Themselves: The Art of Hearing What Wasn’t Said
Dr Steinberg discusses the art of hearing what clients are saying when they repeat themselves: they're not being difficult. They're signaling something crucial—something we haven't yet heard, or something they haven't yet managed to say. In the consulting room, repetition is rarely about the content being repeated. It's a process communication, a meta-message that transcends the actual words: "I'm trying to reach you, and I haven't quite gotten there yet."
The Biology of Trust and Beyond: A deepened perspective on presence, perception, and safety
We live in a time when “safety” is talked about a lot – but most often in terms of external conditions. Few people talk about what safety actually feels like. What makes us sometimes feel safe even in uncertainty, and at other times anxious, even when everything on paper looks fine? Here I want to offer a different perspective – or perhaps more accurately, a return. An understanding of safety that is not only biological, but lived: where perception, the body and conscious seeing come together in the experience of trust.
The Poetics of Unnamed Emotion: From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to Core...
In this “lyrical essay”, Dirk Marivoet explores the kinship between John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and the somatic language of Core Strokes®. Through the meeting of word and fascia, he reveals how both poetic naming and therapeutic touch give voice to unspoken emotion. A meditation on breath, empathy, and embodiment, it invites readers to feel language as a living tissue where sorrow transforms into resonance.
SPT BOOKSHELF
Book Reviews
Embodied Play Therapy: Healing and Building Identity with Children
Brodsky’s Embodied Play Therapy emerges as a body-oriented, relational, sensory, and movement approach to working with children. As with any effective theoretical orientation, Brodsky provides a framework for his model, calling it the Four Pillars: Movement, Breathing, Feeling, and Playing.The book's theme underscores the need for children to have space and embodied movement for healthy psychic development. Brodsky highlights the reality of our culture of isolation, which he refers to as an “epidemic of emptiness,” as our children face increasing expectations for behavior and performance. The nervous system adapts and develops strategies to shut down and override the demands of our disembodied culture. As a Dynamic Play therapist, I found this book valuable for its illustrative, detailed approach to working with children in play.
Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens: An Objective Look at Meditation Methods and Enlightenment
In Elaine N Aron’s new book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens, readers will gain objective insight into meditation models, with a historical foundation, and enlightenment, looking at both Eastern and Western perspectives. While Aron doesn’t focus specifically on HSPs, she does spend time addressing their needs directly within each chapter.
Living Toward Justice: A Time Capsule
Living Toward Justice emerged from the Living Justice Project, a global ethnographic initiative carried out in 2022 and coordinated by Sonya Pritzker, an anthropologist and somatic practitioner. The collaborative project brought together more than fifty practitioners working at the intersections of embodiment, healing, and social justice (all of whom are named as co-authors). Pritzker and the collective worked collaboratively to produce an archive of collective memory: a curated collection of reflections, observations, images, practices, dreams, poetry, and inquiries. Rather than writing a how-to guide offering new solutions or a study demonstrating the outcomes of embodied social justice approaches, Pritzker frames the book as a shared time capsule of individual practitioner entries on the embodied ways they were living toward justice at a specific historical juncture.