Somatic Praxis in Practice

A call for papers on Eros, Gender and Sexuality in Body Psychotherapy and Dance Movement Psychotherapy, due December 1, 2017.

SPT Magazine offers our sincerest thanks to Neal Brodsky and Katelynn Bartleson for their creative and collaborative contributions to SPT Magazine readers! Neal's chapter, entitled,...

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.

Shame is often experienced as a massive, tornado-like swirl of helplessness and hopelessness that keeps tearing through our hearts and minds, through the very core of our being. Its redundant looping can become stuck on any number of thoughts of inadequacy: I am such a terrible failure; there is no way anyone could ever love me; I shouldn’t even bother trying, there’s no way I’m gonna measure; I don’t want anyone to see me; No one could ever understand what I am going through. It’s as if these voices trap people inside the black hole of shame’s universe, with seemingly no way out.

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.

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®.