Authors Reflections

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.

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.

Part of me always anticipated motherhood with warmth, accompanied by an inner mantra: 'I'll have kids by the time I'm 30'. I guess this was my personalised version of what Melanie Holmes calls the 'motherhood catechism' in her book, The Female Assumption: The Schooling of Females to assume that they will someday become mothers (Holmes, 2014: 9). It's strange to recall that even by the late 1990s it wasn't obvious, to me, at least, that child-bearing was and is a choice - the first time that I had paid attention to the pronatalism of our societal messages.

As a somatic psychotherapist, I have always integrated several body and mind methods into my clinical work and personal self-care. This set the stage for my career and passion to understand the role of culture in food, nutrition and well-being, all of which I explore in-depth in my new book, Nutrition Essentials for Mental Health.