Somatic Praxis in Practice

By Jennifer Frank Tantia, PhD Back in 2011 when I began to recruit participants for my doctoral dissertation on therapists’ experience of intuition in the...

In my experience, although chronic shame resolution work involves slow, incremental shifts, when very deep early needs for external protection are finally met, it can shift the very foundation of someone’s experience in a profoundly curative way.

Have you ever noticed feeling unsettled when a perfectly safe person, be it a colleague, a recent acquaintance, perhaps even your mailman stands close to you? There’s nothing specific to connect the feelings with, just a sense of discomfort, tension, awkwardness. Maybe you feel queasy or shaky, maybe a strong urge to run away over takes you but there’s no logical reason why. Rest assured, you’re not alone.

In spite of the best intentions, parents tend to repeat the same injuries with their children that they themselves experienced in childhood. When conflicts arise, they are usually tender spots from childhood that resurface. These baffling interactions may happen over and over because their underlying themes are elusive. This workshop is reparative--we will address healing current emotional wounds within and between family members, supporting parents to raise children who have a better foundation for emotional health than they may have received.

I can’t stress a vital principle of AST Model of Holistic Shame Resolution work enough: wade into the waters of your client, co-create with them and allow them to guide your guidance.

Working with many cultures around the world, where verbalizing one’s thoughts is less important or even shameful than it is in the West, has taught me that naming shame is not always crucial to its resolution. In fact, it is not even one of the 10 Milestones of shame transformation according to AST Model®.

It is no surprise that a child prefers its mother’s voice to those of strangers. Beginning in the womb, a foetus’s developing auditory pathways sense the sounds and vibrations of its mother. Soon after birth, a child can identify its mother’s voice and will work to hear her voice better over unfamiliar female voices.