Authors Reflections

When I began speaking with Sounds True about a written book following my audiobook, Healing Your Attachment Wounds: How to Create Deep and Intimate Relationships, I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I have always considered myself more proficient with the spoken than the written word. Nevertheless, we started the journey to The Power of Attachment, which I actually started over 12 years ago, but somehow, it never felt finished to me. I found that progress often stalled with new research and trying to contain everything about attachment theory between the covers of a single book.

From an expanded sense of creativity, I suggest that all psychotherapists, whether engaged in somatic work or in traditional talk therapy, are simultaneously artists, and that all effective psychotherapy is co-creative by its very nature. The art of psychotherapy is in the precise timing and subtle choices of what gets said or how touch is delivered. From the perceptual side, psychotherapists pick up on tiny cues that allow synchronous rhythms of body, mind, heart and soul. Likewise, it is a creative act to encourage, inspire, and welcome in emergent products from the relational unconscious, such as images, symbols, metaphors, or dreams that guide, light, or unblock the path forward.

I read, I review. I rarely comment. The difference? I offer glimpses into a book, noting the content, the writing style, the potential impact on a reader, often sharing my personal reactions to the material with a familiar first person writing style. An academic commentary proposes both a different tone and approach. One that offered a challenge until I realized that a commentary is just that, a personal reaction pinpointing part of the material that potentially impacts either me personally or my field of study and interest, in this instance psychotherapeutic interventions that offer clients and ourselves a way forward. I read Ryan Niemiec’s newest publication, Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners, with no background experience in positive psychology, no concept of what character strengths are or how to integrate them into my life or my professional work. I quickly learned that character strengths are positive traits that are core to our being—our identity—and our doing, aka our behavior (pg. 2).

In her new book, The Body Remembers Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment, Babette Rothschild includes what she calls a new ‘tool’, which is, in effect, a table and chart that identify the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the effects of ANS arousal in the therapeutic setting. It is designed to help therapists better monitor, evaluate, and regulate client ANS arousal states thus making trauma treatment safer through observation and modulation. The information as graphically depicted in this book represents what I call a ‘map’. Babette and I have been colleagues for many years in the same professional field, and we share a common passion—we like making maps. Furthermore, we like to keep working with them until they have reached a level of precision that is helpful not only to ourselves but also to other trained trauma therapists – and to clients.

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.

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.

The germ of the idea for the book arose from an article on the topic of Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Body Psychotherapy, which was published in the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. One of the blind peer reviewers commented that the article was very intense and passionate with a lot of material, and that the paragraphs were more like chapter summaries for a book. I am grateful to this anonymous person. It made me realise how much I was trying to convey in a short article. I duly reworked the article; it was published and it has consistently been in the top 10 most read articles in the journal for the last 6 years. I felt that I was on to something and that non-verbal communication had a wider appeal than the body psychotherapy community.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have provided inspiration, comfort, and counsel to intrepid readers for approximately two millennia. Having read through it yet again (for at least the twentieth time), I found myself puzzled by the fact that I had never undertaken a similar exercise. Keeping a journal of my thoughts about the vicissitudes of the human condition, and my struggle to understand its challenges, had not become a habit. Marcus, as far as we know, never intended to have his ruminations published. Those thoughts were not meant for the world at large. He simply kept a journal for his own use, for his own efforts at self-rectification and self-governance. The original title was To Himself, and the book in which he recorded his thoughts was not, to our knowledge, shared with family, friends, or staff. The last great Roman Emperor thought a great deal about the nature of the good life, the nature of virtue, the temptations to vice and weakness, and his own insignificance by comparison to the vast Cosmos and the power of the all-pervading, governing Logos (the organizing principle of the natural world).

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’.

Scanning the book list for a doctoral class several years ago, I noted the title, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, by Louis Cozolino, PhD. I felt intimated—it sounded intense, dense. Then I opened the book. Lou’s ability to impart scientific data within a user-friendly framework wooed me. As a reader, I have a tendency to develop a vision of the author responsible for the text. From Lou’s voice—his presence on the page— I sensed he was serious, focused, and highly intelligent with a technical vocabulary easily accessed but not necessarily his first choice. I read with a sincere interest in the content, a desire to learn and understand the concepts, and to get a feel for their application in a therapeutic setting.