Somatic Psychotherapy Today

Welcome to SPT Magazine, Volume 16, Number 1, 2026. A shared thread emerges in our articles and book reviews: an exploration of how we come to know ourselves and one another through embodied experience, relational presence, and deeper listening. Whether addressing trust, trauma, pleasure, meaning, or somatic organization, the pieces in this issue invite us to consider how healing and transformation unfold when body, perception, and relationship are brought more fully into awareness.

In her article entitled, “Finding the Fourth Position: Beyond the Trauma Triangle,” Dr. Elya Steinberg explores a well-known concept of the trauma triangle, where people oscillate between one of three positions: victim, persecutor, and bystander, and how they become internalized in our psyche, our body. She details its impact on our lives. And then she offers a way out, what she calls the Fourth Position. The triangle, she writes, is where we are stuck. The fourth position is where we are free. We are human beings capable of consciousness, capable of choice, capable of meeting one another beyond the triangle in a place where genuine transformation takes place.

Dr. Elya Steinberg suggests a shift in our perspective on health and well-being: focusing on what keeps us healthy rather than on what makes us ill. In this article, she focuses on resilience, pleasure, vitality, love, and meaning. Steinberg creates a solid foundation, citing colleagues’ work and theories (Reich, Frankl, Bandura, Maslow, Boyesen, Leamy, Camus, and more), and also offers her work with pleasure and her own journey into “fifty shades of pain” through her cancer diagnosis and treatment. She offers each morning anew as an invitation to awaken not only to the pain but to the meaning. Not only to the wound, but to the strength. Not only to what is broken, but what is, despite everything, still reaches out to life.

This article introduces the concept of relational pulsation as a developmental account of how relational experience becomes embodied. Building on Wilhelm Reich’s concept of biological pulsation, movements toward relationship (shape), responses from the relational environment (countershape), and defensive adaptations to relational disruption (contrashape) are proposed to influence breathing, autonomic regulation, and connective tissue organization over time. When relational movement is met with attuned response, the organism can complete a cycle of relational pulsation, supporting regulation, vitality, and engagement. When such completion repeatedly fails, defensive patterns may stabilize in breathing, tissue organization, and posture, contributing to enduring characterological adaptations.

Dr Steinberg discusses the art of hearing what clients are saying when they repeat themselves: they’re not being difficult. They’re signaling something crucial—something we haven’t yet heard, or something they haven’t yet managed to say. In the consulting room, repetition is rarely about the content being repeated. It’s a process communication, a meta-message that transcends the actual words: “I’m trying to reach you, and I haven’t quite gotten there yet.”