Mind/Body/Spirit

We are so pleased to be able to share a recorded version of a conversation Deb Dana had recently with Liam O Mahony, Accredited Psychotherapist and Addiction Counsellor and Co-Founder of PCPSI* on a Polyvagal Approach to COVID-19.

Can you remember a time when someone said, “Can I tell you a secret?” Were you intrigued? Did you feel a slight stirring inside? What sort of revelation did you prepare yourself to receive? Isn’t it funny how images and connotations, interpretations and expectations can make the body respond in certain ways? What do you experience in your own nervous system when you expect a client is about to reveal some secret traumatic event? How does your body physically react? With impulses, shivers, goose bumps? Perhaps a sense of dread and queasiness in the belly, a catch of your breath . . .? While such disclosures are often necessary and vital to treatment, there are also other secrets that can bring healing to soma and soul. Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, simply and profoundly captures the point when he writes, “The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” This wise truth was delightfully demonstrated recently in a session with Neko, a twenty-two-year-old client with mild developmental delays, whose strength and soul wisdom had been hidden in the unlikely location of a traumatic past.

When I’m entrained with my clients in mutual readiness, I become aware of my own inner sensations and how they allow me to “listen” with my ears, my eyes, and my intuition, with my fullest self. Working from a state of readiness enables me to catch fertile moments of therapeutic potential

The goal of Flow of Leadership is to make more choices available for ourselves in those situations where implicit memories bypass our conscious mind, causing us to act or respond in ways that produce havoc and disconnect. Situations where when we look back, we feel like our survival was threatened, and if we have enough objectivity we are left wondering “What the heck happened? Why did I do that?”

Increasing awareness and understanding of epigenetics and neuroplasticity in current research has resulted in a new perspective of psychotherapy that is integrated with neurobiological information. This information is at the root of an emerging paradigm shift in body psychotherapy that I call Evolutive Stage Neuromediator Vegetotherapy.

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.

Our ideas of how the holidays should go can be a sticky combination of tradition, experience, marketing, and . . . fiction. Year after year I see my clients reflect the stresses of the season as old issues surface and old patterns take hold. Just around the corner from Halloween, the body starts to brace for the inevitable and resiliency disappears. Conflicting feelings of anticipation and anxiety show up in the body as a tangle of shoulder-neck-jaw tension, low back pain, random injuries, and general uptightness. In order to extend the good work beyond our ninety- minute session, I’ve developed a simple somatic strategy to change the holiday dynamic.

Why, I wonder, is it so important for all of us to immerse ourselves in imagination? To understand our dreams and to see what is reflected back to us for application in the here and now? Whatever the reasons, I do know this: As insights elicited within the unconscious mind are utilized by the conscious mind, and absorbed into the body, a powerful collaboration takes place. When we immerse ourselves in the wise, creative artistry of soma and soul, we can find meaning.

The Traumatic Stress Research Consortium, founded by Dr. Stephen W. Porges, is seeking therapists to join in their research projects.

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.’”