Mind/Body/Spirit

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.

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.

In the ever-evolving landscape of intimate relationships, couples frequently encounter emotional distance, communication breakdowns, and the pressures of modern life. These stressors can lead to frustration, disconnection, and stagnation in relationships. Body Psychotherapy for Couples (BP4C) offers a unique, integrative framework that addresses these challenges not only through conversation, but also through deep listening to the body, breath, movement, and energy between partners, and a process of melting the Couple Armour (Shiraz, 2020). At the core of this approach lies a powerful yet often underappreciated concept: somatic resonance.

Dirk Marivoet introduces a clinically derived fascial texture typology—a tactile language that captures the unseen but deeply felt states of the living body. Rooted in somatic psychotherapy and trauma-informed bodywork, the typology identifies distinct patterns in fascial tone, responsiveness, and energetic presence that reflect character defenses, developmental wounds, and healing potentials.

Most of us have learned that the autonomic nervous system has three states: safety (ventral vagus), stress (sympathetic nervous system), and shutdown (dorsal vagus). This model has helped many people understand how the body responds to trauma or threat. But what if that isn’t the whole truth? What if the nervous system doesn’t function like a switchboard between fixed modes, but instead acts like a dynamic spectrum, where everything depends on presence? I see ventral presence not merely as one branch in a neural blend, but as the modulating force that determines how any sympathetic or dorsal activity is experienced.

Genovino Ferri shares his interaction with ChatGPT motivated by his need to “ ‘grasp the Other to better understand them’ and to confirm that my Analysis of the (Characterial) Marks Incised in AI was correct.” Asking ChatGPT, “What do you think of yourself?”, Ferri notes that “Its reply confirmed my expectations, but being perfectly honest, it worried me a lot.” . . . “I accepted the conversation that ChatGPT offered and repeated it here in its entirety because when re-reading it I found it extraordinary and that it perhaps offered the possibility of a careful Relational Position for Man to assume with AI."

By Jeanne Denney This year, the conversation about AI has become almost deafening; it arrived on all my devices as a new authority about everything. ...

SPT Magazine is pleased to share our review of Somatic-Oriented Therapies., Edited by Herbert Grassmann, Maurizio Stupiggia, and Stephen W. Porges. The 32 chapters in Somatic-Oriented Therapies blend Polyvagal Theory principles into body psychotherapy as the contributors discuss research, the science of embodying, and embodied practice.

Fear can paralyze a nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited chaos when he was inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States: the banking system had collapsed, unemployment had soared, and the economy had hit rock bottom—it was the Great Depression. Facing a national crisis, Roosevelt sought to reassure a fearful nation by proclaiming, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." His message aimed to shift the national mindset from despair to hope, encouraging Americans to recognize the pervasive power of fear and its ability to stop forward growth and further darken an already bleak situation. The same psychological truths about fear apply today. Thanks to advances in neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences, we now have a deeper understanding of fear and its effects on the mind and body (Porges, 2011).

Genovino Ferri offers an in-depth consideration of the removal of the Father from his role as the symbol of the West’s patriarchal family. He notes that we are witnessing the erosion of the Family and the consequent removal of the Father. Per Dr Ferri, It is a body psycho-analytical description seeking to clearly articulate the container-contained interaction, placing greater emphasis on the container: ‘Being a Father figure is an organisational, evolutive state in the sense that this “paternal” role may be performed by men, women, individuals, and groups.’”