Welcome to SPT Magazine, Volume 16, Number 1
We are pleased to share articles and book reviews we’ve published over the past 6 months, now available in one place — one link, one PDF.
We are also offering new articles only published in this issue, so please check us out.
We have several in-depth book reviews in this issue, including Dirk Marivoet’s reflections on The Poetics of Unnamed Emotions, Steph McIsaac’s engagement with Living Toward Justice, Nancy Eichhorn’s immersion in Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens, and Tim Rodier’s experience with Embodied Play Therapy: Healing and Building Identity with Children.
Across the feature articles, a shared thread emerges: 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.
In The Biology of Trust and Beyond, Maria Strömberg offers a fresh understanding of safety as something not only biological, but also lived—an experience in which perception, the body, and conscious seeing come together in the emergence of trust.
Dr. Elya Steinberg contributes three articles to this issue: The Art of Hearing What Isn’t Said, Each Morning Anew, and Finding the Fourth Position. In The Art of Hearing What Isn’t Said, she highlights the power of pausing and asking a client, “What do you feel I didn’t hear?” when they seem to be repeating themselves. This simple question can open a gateway to a deeper connection and richer exploration. In Each Morning Anew, she reflects on pleasure, meaning, and what may be missing in psychotherapy and medicine, while Finding the Fourth Position explores ways of stepping beyond the trauma triangle.
We also want to welcome Dr. Steinberg as a new monthly blogger. Please check our website each month for her latest writings.
We are also running an experiment in this issue by including a longer, more journal-style article: Dirk Marivoet’s Relational Pulsation: Shape, Countershape and the Somatic Organization of Experience. In it, he suggests that relational pulsation emerges through interacting processes such as autonomic regulation, interoception, predictive processing, and tissue adaptation, and that repeated relational conditions may gradually shape bodily organization. His work seeks to bridge classical body psychotherapy, contemporary neuroscience, and fascia research.
We welcome your feedback on the inclusion of these longer, more academic-style papers in future issues. And we encourage you to submit your articles, too.
Sincerely,
Nancy Eichhorn, Ph.D.
Founding-Editor-in-Chief, Somatic Psychotherapy Today
To access our 75-page PDF, please click here
