Mind/Body/Spirit

Michael Ostrolenk speaks with Dr. Dee Joy Coulter, a nationally recognized neuroscience educator known for her unique ability to present complex ideas in clear and humorous ways that are useful for her audiences. Dr. Coulter discusses COVID-19 and the cognitive complexity that would be necessary to adequately deal with the pandemic.

Just at a time when the wider world is waking up to a more compassionate and inclusive way of understanding trauma and addiction, a timely book that addresses these issues in personal, historical, embodied, and practical ways has arrived. In Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model: A Bottom-Up Approach (Routledge, 2021), author and psychotherapist Jan Winhall both demystifies and depathologizes addiction.

I was exploring the psychic dimension of mind as a channel for reducing stress, receiving intuitive information and promoting healing. While I’d forgotten most of what I learned about statistics, attunement to the intuitive power of the inner being remains my passionate interest and a core intention of my clinical work. My deep belief in the body/mind/spirit/heart connection as a source of knowledge, and the use of hypnosis for accessing its available wisdom, has led to some fascinating therapy sessions.

Gravity matters. Not simply to keep us physically grounded here on Earth, but, at a fundamental level, our relationship with gravity affects our lives from start to finish. We start life floating in amniotic fluids. It's easy to assume a sense of buoyancy, free from gravity's impact. Yet, gravity is necessary for our physiological development during the second half of our lives in the womb.

"There is a certain kind of suffering that our clients experience which seems to not be so responsive to the standard work we do in body psychotherapy. In an earlier staging in our profession, this suffering was associated with what was called Personality Disorders. No matter how much we were able to help our clients experience the discomfort that was associated with life experience, still these problems hang on. I would like to suggest that the reason for this is that these problems, called core fears, do not arise out of life experience, but instead are core lenses through which we see all life experience. Such fears as fundamental unlovability, badness, unworthiness, hopelessness, defectiveness, insufficiency, insecurity, unfulfillability, impotence are examples of such core fears about the self.

Have you experienced the pleasure of getting so close to your goal that you can almost taste success? Have you tasted the coppery flavor of fear or characterized an unpleasant experience as distasteful? Disappointment can be bitter; revenge can be sweet and babies’ feet are delicious. Getting something you want at the expense of something else can be bittersweet, and romance can add spice to your life. If capturing events and emotions in olfactory and gustatory terms heightens the felt sense of the feelings, why not make the yummiest emotions burst with metaphoric flavor? Take happiness for example. You most likely don’t need a formal definition of happiness since it can be argued that you know it when you feel it. But because happiness can occasionally slip by unrecognized, it’s worth knowing what the Dalai Llama says about this state of pleasure. "I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness." His Holiness explains.

My Mum recently asked my partner and I what we were doing for Christmas. I was slightly surprised to find myself announcing that I was cancelling Christmas this year. Here we were, together in late summer, celebrating my stepdad’s 70th birthday. I was more than happy to get together, to mark midwinter, to mark the passing year, maybe, but I had no desire to mark the 25th December.

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.

Spring. It’s been a delicious one here in this corner of south-west England I call home. We’ve had a lot of blue-sky days, stunning blossoms and fabulously noisy bird songs. As a lover of winter, I have sometimes found spring a little intimidating. I’ve been given funny looks and seen heads shaking when I’ve confessed that to the odd friend, met by: “How can you not love spring?” No, it’s not that I haven’t loved spring, I have just loved winter’s stark bareness more. But not this year – maybe I’m coming out of my shell. My body is unfurling as the days lengthen, and we live more in the light. I’ve loved the upsurging energy of the past fortnight. The sap rising and the energy of leaves and blossom springing into life feels tangible. I’ve noticed the upsurging in and through my being of a body as well as seeing it all around me. I’ve found myself reflecting anew on the nature of the upsurging movement of energy in the human body. I’ve been reminded of diagrams I poured over during the evenings of my body psychotherapy training, having spent the day doing the experiential bit. How energy moves, different energy models, character armouring – I drank it all in happily!

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.