Authors Reflections

When Dennis first approached me to write a chapter on ‘Deep Play’, I experienced a gamut of emotions from my initial feelings of delight and I must admit some pride, which very quickly gave way to apprehension and concern that my writing style may give me away as being neither an academic, nor a story-teller. Once I managed to recognise these feelings as my own childhood scripts I was able to harness them and regulate my growing unease, which allowed the feelings to abate; this was old-stuff. Relieved of these constraints I set about the task for which I had been assigned; to consider the notion of ‘Deep Play’.

Jeffrey Smith reflects on writing How We Heal and Grow: why this powerful self-help book came into being and where he has evolved since its publication last year. We offer his deeply personal reflection on his writing process and his continued evolution as a psychiatrist as he introduces the neuroscience of reconsolidation: the neurophysiological basis of catharsis.

Somatics is both a science and a philosophy but it also includes holistic manual therapy as a practical application of its principles. Because it is a new inquiry into the nature of the body, it demands new eyes and bold forward thinking investigators who have freed themselves from the artificial divisions of the past.

If Stephen Porges asked you to co-edit a book with him, what would you say? With my passion for Polyvagal Theory, my love of writing, and my friendship with Steve, my answer was an unhesitating “yes.” The process of bringing this co-edited book to publication has been a shared ventral vagal inspired adventure. In Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory, Steve’s intention was to gather a group of clinicians whose work was informed by Polyvagal Theory. Although the beginning chapters are written by recognized leaders in the field of trauma, this book came out of Steve’s commitment to ask people who were emerging as leaders to write chapters. Steve wanted this edited collection to feature clinicians who were in the trenches creatively bringing Polyvagal Theory into their work every day with complicated clients. As he traveled and gave presentations, Steve would talk with people who were incorporating a foundation of Polyvagal Theory in innovative ways and invite them to be a part of our book project. We began calling our chapter contributors our “Polyvagal family”, and each time Steve emailed me to introduce a new potential author, he said, “Here’s another member of our family.” I came to know our chapter contributors through emails, phone calls, and Skype conversations. It was a sweet experience of autonomic attunement and the ease of connection that brings, in these beginning Polyvagal partnerships. This edited collection was a labor of love and a delicate process of helping our contributors incorporate the language of Polyvagal Theory.

Early in the writing of the first draft of It’s Never Too Late: Healing Prebirth and Birth At Any Age, I discovered there were steps, especially in the embryo’s story, that even after studying, I had difficulty envisioning. At the time I wondered, could I leave these hard to reach, yet essential steps out of my written examination? Would anyone besides experienced embryologists and biodynamic craniosacral therapy teachers notice? It didn’t take long to come clean with myself, that if I skipped intricate steps in my understanding, I would only further reinforce what was at the root of my amnesia, and that in order to be whole myself, I had to find out what was going on.

“I set out wanting to compile and edit a book called, "Deep Sand – Exploring a Body Centered Approach to Psychotherapy with Children”, with chapters by various therapists who used a deep sandbox as part of their work with children and that embraced some version of a somatic oriented approach, not necessarily mine. This immediately became a problem as there were very few therapists I could find who used a deep box. (Why this is so could be the subject of another book.) So I modified the book’s theme to that of considering the idea of depth in general, i.e. the idea of embracing body, mind, psyche, instincts, all in the context of play.

For much of my professional life, I have been fortunate to do work that I love; work that is profoundly meaningful to me, and that I consider to be “who I am” as much as it is “what I do”. Early in my career, that professional identity centered on being a somatic psychotherapy practitioner. Like many of the readers of Somatic Psychotherapy Today, my life has been enriched and forever transformed by my own experiences as a somatic psychotherapy client. As a therapist, I understood my clinical work as not just potentially “life-changing” for my clients, but “culture-changing” as well. I lived and breathed the work, and brought a somatic perspective to my whole life – how I moved, how I interacted with others, and how I understood the world. Later in my professional life, I had the opportunity to broaden my focus to include teaching somatic psychotherapy graduate students and conducting research into the various ways a somatic perspective might inform a range of topics – for example, working with trauma survivors, integrating somatics and the expressive arts, and transforming the process of teaching and learning. So now when people ask me what I do for a living, I am much more likely to describe myself as a somatic scholar/activist than a somatic psychotherapist. This shift in professional identity is important in understanding how and why I came to write Embodied Social Justice, because like my previous books (Elemental Movement, 2000; Knowing in our Bones, 2011), this book is based on original research. Although I have tried to write it in a way that engages and inspires readers, at its heart it is research document.

Honestly, I never set out to become an author. In fact, as I sit here eighteen years after my first book was published, I’m still not sure how it all happened. One thing led to another and the rest, as they say, is history.

“It is hard to believe for me, but I started the project in 2005, 10 years ago!” Weiss shared. “Finding the right team was very difficult for me in the beginning, and it took years until I finally found my team. But it is really my fault that it took so long to realize that Gregory Johanson and Lorena Monda were the ones that I should have asked from the beginning. Once we got working as a team it was fantastic.

Writing on the Moon is fifteen years in the making and it is about imagination and originality—two crucial elements in our creative life—and the ability to magically rearrange memories and emotions that have been stored away in some deep and ‘unworded’ place. Young children have direct access to their creative unconscious and touch of wonderment. But many of us lose some of that ability as we get older and become more constrained and concrete— and perhaps frightened of that playful part of ourselves. When I was a young girl I would spend hours in my large walk-in closet, playing with my imagination. I would put on my glasses and my wooly cape, and I would make up stories of traveling across the desert to live in a small Bedouin town, selling exotic perfumes. Or turning jewels into meteor showers. I would consult elders about secret watering holes, which led to narrow trails and berry patches. The elders scratched a map in the dirt and showed me where quicksand hid and monsters lurked.