Therapeutic Contact and Somatic Healing
By Samantha Nadia Terriss
Private sessions and classes offer an integrative perspective and engaged embodied learning and healing system. It offers a way to presence our being, allowing the interweaving of our personal and transpersonal compositions, through our embodied experience. Healing results from a full honoring of our human experience, integrating rather than transcending our intellects and spirituality. Our culture mostly polarizes our bodily experience from our emotional experience from our spiritual experience. However, emotions, physicality and spiritual presence all co-exist. Therefore our human-ness may be seen as a precious differentiation of the absolute, rather than less then or separate from vast existence. Notice the perfect inclusiveness of the name we give ourselves: human beings! We are beings who are human!
This learning process is in service to the preciousness of the human soul.
As humans on the path to healing, we are asked to look at and feel into many different layers of our experiences. This process is relationally based because our development is dependent on relationship. When just born, we relate to having a body and how our body parts connect and function. We relate to our bodies, our cellular experience, our spirit/soul, and our personal energetic presence. As we grow, we relate to our family, friends, culture, socio-political climate, and planet. Our relationship of living as a spiritual being in a human form offers us a rich embodied experience.
Relationship happens through contact. Contact offers a spectrum of closeness and distance (both of which can be experienced from close or far away). Contact, through touch and non-touch needs to be defined. Contact through touch has been relegated to sexuality or bodywork, and separated from the emotional healing fields of psychology. Infants would die without touch. Through physical contact we learn a foundational fabric of what it is to trust, ground, connect and exist as a human being. Neurologically, touch is essential for us to develop a literal sense of self. Integrating touch, a fundamental experience of our early developmental blueprint, is essential for full emotional body healing.
Non-touch involves the quality of presence and heart to heart contact necessary in all stages of emotional body healing. This heart contact within a psychological paradigm has often been constricted by formality and rigidness rather than offering genuine and natural affection required for true healing. The reasons for this are intelligent in defense of the incomplete healing of the facilitator. Unfortunately, this just recapitulates at subtle if not gross levels the dysfunction of both the therapist and client. Clearly, there are various degrees of this compensation. The important thing is that as facilitators, we work our own pieces so that there is room in us to hold our clients hearts. As well it may serve to remember that we can only take our clients where we have space in us from going ourselves.
An important principle - support before movement - offers that a person needs to feel in their body and in their emotional self enough support before new change can organically arise. If change is pushed without support, the organizational process often recapitulates earlier defense strategies and or creates new sources of old trauma patterns. At the same time, pushing against our defenses allows us to feel them, by activating their intelligence. Discerning between pushing and resting is essential for full integration of our whole beings. This is a slow, compassionate and creative process that requires the practitioner to have emotional body and energetic listening skills.
As infants we don’t witness our experience. We simply experience. As known from attachment theorists, self-connection and self-regulation occurs from the appropriate attunement, both through physical contact and heart presence from the caregiver. It is this direct relationship between self and primary caregiver that sets up capacity for maturity or dysfunction. So to heal early established wounds and patterns a person must be met by contact from the outside that is different from the wounded blueprint of experience. As facilitators, we are often giving the client an experience of contact they have not had in their history. Being seen and felt allows a person to land in themselves, feeling oriented and grounded.
It is just as important to make sure they have tools to both assimilate the contact and self-reference and contain the contact without the caregiver present. Therefore, the vulnerable place that has been contacted must eventually have enough internal strength and integration so that the person can hold themselves while the ‘other’ holds them. Then life becomes a practice ground to be able to discern and be with themselves when the ‘other’ is no longer present. This is the bridge between the therapeutic container and the client’s life. Then relationships with ‘others’ begin to be based on adult relatedness rather than wound based relating. Healthy relating comes from knowing our own essential authenticity and capacity for connectivity.
Early wounding is the foundation for all other experiences and is therefore present, consciously or unconsciously in any therapeutic process. However, re-working the early stages does not address the later defense strategies the self built upon in order to relate to his/her version of reality. Therefore, being contacted at various stages and patterns of development is essential for our deepest structures to organize around reality from a place of relatedness, true freedom and choice.
A mindful and healed relationship with oneself allows the mature adult to navigate, differentiating between our authentic adult human needs and our unhealed armoring and expressions. Mindfulness creates the room for self inquiry. With this spaciousness, a deep level of embodied presence can occur.
This emotional and physical healing is offered though inquiry, safe touch, and heart resonance. First let us define these terms. Inquiry involves tracking with awareness ones sensations, emotions, thoughts, impulses and energetic experience. Safe touch involves negotiating contact with another by respecting boundaries and following organic impulses. Heart resonance is a heart to heart exchange of genuine seeing and feeling.
Re-working this original blueprint of contact through a somatic approach moves past the limits of traditional talk therapy which leaves us wondering why our lives never change, even though our insights and skills mature.
Clinical therapists, body-workers and other health practitioners alike can greatly benefit from an embodied learning program that addresses the fundamentals of contact.
The following are some foundational stages of contact to be addressed:
* Facilitated awareness of the client’s experience of longing/neediness/wanting/a missing piece/a hole.
*A personal, conscious relationship to the experience, this is a pre-requisite for the capacity to take in and sustain contact. Otherwise the client will be in a cycle of constantly taking in without satisfaction.
*The experience of receiving the contact they did not get at the appropriate developmental stage. This will give the client a new imprint/memory for their soma (body) to organize around. This contact must occur with great sensitivity – a precise meeting from one being to another. It must be specific and personal, both neurologically as well as emotionally attuned. It must be felt.
*The client must be absorbing and embodying the contact, which takes time: as the client must learn to tolerate sensations, emotions and presence, track and express his/her experiences, ask for what he/she wants, and negotiate contact.
*The client must be given time and space to carefully regulate the discharge of old emotional and physical patterns. Discerning appropriate rest and stimulation time for the client’s whole system is essential to heal and reorganize internally.
*The capacity of the client to differentiate their new experience from the caregiver. Orienting inside oneself is somatic differentiation.
*The capacity of the client to be seen while containing and emanating this new experience. This leads to self-acceptance and allows the experience to continue while being seen by others in daily life.
*The capacity to generalize the experience into social interaction and life. The client’s particular life situations can be invitations for engaging somatic practices. This process includes a disarmoring of defense patterns that have been built in the somatic heart to protect the early strategies and are now later developmental ways of relating. Addressing the various unconscious ‘personalities’ of defense strategies that developed over time must be uncovered and healed individually as well as collectively for full capacity of new relationship potential.
*The somatic awareness to use the re-organization itself as a new matrix for other contacts and experiences. This goes beyond using the specific memory to a deeper more complex reorganization of contact itself through the soma. This begins the internal sense of basic trust in ones owns organism and possibly a larger framework of what it is to have ‘faith’ in life itself.
*The capacity of the client to initiate self-contact by him/herself, which involves self-awareness, embodiment, and self-love.
*An advanced set of boundary skills (setting limits internally as well as with others) and self-relating (self-care and self-bonding) to allow the client to fully ground this new way of being.
Some of the skills a therapist / body practitioner must know to facilitate such transformation are the following. Please note that any skill involves the facilitator’s own capacity internally as well as their tracking and navigating skills with another.
*Basic grounding and centering (includes orienting) tools.
*Boundary skills, both psychological and through the body’s sensory-motor system (sense internally and move externally) and body systems (muscles, bones, fluids, organs, etc…).
*The capacity for self-awareness, witnessing, self-contact (intimacy) and embodiment (fullness of presence).
*Regulation capacity and toleration for sensation, emotion and presence. This includes a functional understanding of how trauma works in the nervous system and emotional body at large.
*Somatic, energetic and emotional differentiation skills. The capacity to resonate, reflect (mirror) and re-orient. A de-armored somatic heart is essential for the other to be truly seen and felt. At an advanced level, using owns own somatic heart presence as a conscious form of contact.
*The capacity to know one’s own responses (counter-transference) and limitations (personal and professional skill capacity from moment to moment.)
*Somatic energetic listening skills: for tracking and assessment.
*A foundation in various forms of touch; an understanding of the nervous system and stimulus, presence and feedback.
*Tissue awareness and presencing, tracking and techniques for embodiment, unwinding and release.
*Capacity for embodied heart speech and clear dialogue skills.
*Tracking consciousness states (ranging from degrees and states of presence to dissociation).
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