Spring Issue Articles
Greetings SPT Community,
It’s been quite a journey the past eight years for both Somatic Psychotherapy Today and me, as its Founding Editor-in-Chief. With our Spring issue’s arrival, I feel like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon—entering our ninth year of publication it’s time for SPT Magazine to spread its wings and fly. There’s joyous freedom as I watch our publication emerge from my womb to expand and express itself in relationship with you, our readers. And there’s sacred appreciation for the time I spent curled in a fetal position, contained, safe, growing this magazine from conception to birth to thrive.
SPT Magazine has evolved from its earliest beginnings as a shy quiet publication, shrouded behind the shirt tails of our main body psychotherapy associations to become a well- respected, ‘differentiated’ magazine offering articles that readers cannot find elsewhere.
My goal was to create a safe space to share our thoughts and ideas, our curiosities and questions. I wanted our articles to be both beautiful and meaningful, entertaining and informative, relational and interactive, and accurate, valid, true (thus my adherence to the American Psychological Association’s standards for in-text and reference list citations, and my doggedness to fact check). I wanted to offer a magazine filled with words and images written by colleagues that stimulate conversations, further what we think we know and how we apply it, and explore what we question and what we believe.
Our March issue brings many changes. For starters, I want to introduce my first ever managing partner, Linda Heck. She brings her talents in website design, marketing, and advertising and her faith in our magazine. We’ve redesigned our website, created a new logo and retooled our subscribers’ portal with exciting new offerings (webinars, video series, folio fellowship, and more). Our goal is to share articles regardless of school, theory, methodology or name-recognition that are sharp, dynamic, alive.
Today, we’re pleased to be in-print, in your home. It’s been quite a journey reconsidering our layout design and our cover format. So much so, we created an Editorial team responsible to give their input on our cover artwork. We offer our thanks to Rae Johnson, Diane Doheny, Diana Houghton-Whiting and Deanna Peters for their time. We are sincerely grateful to Philippe Put, Mechelen, Belgium, for his generous permission to use his photo entitled ‘Maternity in New York’ for our front cover.
Our Spring issue focuses on prenatal and perinatal psychology and health. We’re thrilled to have Genovino Ferri and Mary Jane A. Paiva writing from their viewpoint on the Primary Object Relationship and offering a new reading for clinical intervention. Cherionna Menzam- Sills shares her thoughts about shadow—psychic wounds resulting from prenatal and birth experiences— and the potentials they hold for health and healing. Kate White discusses ways to transform our ‘trauma tree’ by recognizing and reaching out to heal our earliest traumas. Michael J Shea offers a new paradigm in Biodynamic practice that employs neonatal cardiometabolic palpation and Mia Kalef offers her reflections on writing It’s Never Too Late: Healing Prebirth and Birth at Any Age. Emma Palmer and Matthew Appleton share their conversation (in print and audio) regarding an exciting workshop Matthew is sponsoring in Bristol, UK, this June. It’s entitled Human Baby, Human Being and many well-known clinicians will be there including: Cherionna Menzam-Sills, Kate White, Thomas R. Verny, Thomas Harms, Klaus Käppeli-Valaulta, Anna Verwaal, Dr med. Ludwig Janes, and more. It’s a must attend for people interested in prenatal and perinatal psychology and health. We also are pleased to welcome a new writer to our pages, Holly Holt. She facilitates writing classes in Sacramento, CA. She is a local gem.
We hope there’s plenty here to capture your interest and that you enjoy our first print issue. And we invite you to reach out, let us know what you think; email our contributors, email Linda and I, share your responses to our articles. And please let us know topics you want us to focus on in the future. SPT Magazine is here because of you; we can only survive with your engagement and support. Together we can learn together how SPT magazine can best support our community.
With gratitude, Nancy
