IN THE SPOTLIGHT
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.
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.
Continuum Movement, Somatics & Consciousness w/ Dr. Ian Macnaughton and Dr. Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz
It is an honor to share with you a recent conversation I had with somatic psychotherapist Dr. Ian Macnaughton, MBA, PhD on Continuum Movement, Somatics & Consciousness. To learn more about Continuum Movement please visit: https://continuummovement.com/
Ian Macnaughton has a background as a CEO, entrepreneur, business consultant, and as a trained and experienced psychotherapist. Since the 1970 s, he has been teaching somatic psychotherapy process to the clinical population as well as to business leaders. For the past fifty years, he has worked as an executive coach for CEOs and business leaders. https://www.ianmacnaughton.com/about
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 Magazine Volume 15, number 1, 2025
In SPT Magazine Volume 15, Number 1, 2025, we delve into breath work in psychotherapy, the living language of fascia, AI on the couch, deepening couples’ therapy, and a new perspective on our nervous system. We feature insightful articles and book reviews from clinicians and researchers that explore how the body holds stories and how we can facilitate their release and transformation.
The Energetic Breath Cycle™: Phenomenological Layers of Respiratory Experience
Breath is both a biological rhythm and a clinical language. Wilhelm Reich first identified its central role in the energetic cycle of tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation, while Jack Painter expanded this into a nine-phase Natural Cycle of Energy. The Energetic Breath Cycle™ builds on this foundation, retaining Painter’s nine phases while extending them across five phenomenological layers: physiological, fascial, energetic, relational, and soul. Each layer highlights how respiration conveys adaptation, coherence, or defensive interruption.
SPT BOOKSHELF
Book Reviews
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.
Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation
Breathing, something everyone does who's alive, is coming to the forefront in psychotherapeutic settings. Colleagues are offering workshops and presentations on breathwork, and Norton Publications sent me Jessica Dibbs’ new book, Breathwork and Psychotherapy. She’s written a comprehensive compendium that’s part textbook, part training guide, part personal memoir, and part invitation to experience the life-altering existence we can achieve when we incorporate breathwork into our daily lives.
The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Trauma Experienced Before and At Birth
Cherionna Menzam-Sills’ latest book, The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Trauma Experienced Before and at Birth, offers an in-depth exploration of birth shadows, providing insights on how to address and heal these aspects to fully realize our inherent potential. The Prenatal Shadow is accessible to the lay reader and satisfying for the experienced practitioner in prenatal and perinatal somatics. For the lay reader just discovering the paradigm, Menzam-Sills has a friendly, gentle, and encouraging voice born out of decades of study and experience. Her authority is evident as she weaves a narrative of early development, autonomic nervous system states, trauma-informed care, embryonic development, prenatal and perinatal dynamics, and therapeutic interventions. Her ability to access research and quote pioneers who have influenced her work lends the narrative depth, while narratives from clinical studies provide the work with breadth. Her voice also illustrates the command of someone who has deeply explored the experiences of the “little one,” or the sentient baby. This is someone everyone can learn from.