China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Stress From a Different Perspective
Published in William Steele, Reducing Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress and Burnout, 2019
Dr. Peter Levine is the founder of The Somatic Experiencing method, which is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders. It has been his life’s work, resulting from his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application.
The Role of Early Life Trauma in Somatization
Published in Kyle Brauer Boone, Neuropsychological Evaluation of Somatoform and Other Functional Somatic Conditions, 2017
Tara L. Victor, Kathleen M. Van Dyk
Sensorimotor therapies (Ogden et al., 2006), including Somatic Experiencing (Levine, 1997, 2010; Levine & Kline, 2006, 2008) also offer promise. As van der Kolk (2006) reminds us, the brain is hierarchically organized from the bottom up. Sensory Integration Theory, on which these types of body-oriented therapies are based, concerns this notion of the triune brain (i.e., neocortex, limbic, and reptilian brain; MacClean, 1990). The Reptilian Brain is instinctual and concerned with basic survival. Practitioners working from the aforementioned perspectives believe individuals may be able to cognitively understand that symptoms began after their life trauma, but that survivors of trauma learn that they cannot “talk away” their symptoms. In order to bring a person’s mind and body back to homeostasis from this perspective, the individual needs to learn through body sensation and action how to regulate their body’s responses to external and internal triggers. van der Kolk (2006) reviews the work of LeDoux and colleagues, which has demonstrated that rats who have experienced learned helplessness in the context of inescapable shock can learn to lose their prior conditioned neuroendocrine and behavioral immobility if given the opportunity to escape, but only if they actually engage in the behavior of fleeing or escape. This neurobehavioral deconditioning does not occur if the rat remains passive (LeDoux & Gorman, 2001). Further, research in affective neuroscience has clarified that (at least in animal models), when the fight/flight response is possible (i.e., when the first-line defense mechanisms are not thwarted), maladaptive conditioned neurobehavioral responses are not formed (Amorapanth, LeDoux, & Nadar, 2000). Thus, there is evidence suggesting that therapeutic models which incorporate actual physical activity are more like to be effective than those relying solely on verbal expression.
Cultivating Aliveness after Pregnancy Loss
Published in Nora Swan-Foster, Art Therapy and Childbearing Issues, 2020
While the case studies below will provide the reader with a deeper understanding of somatic art therapy, I will outline its fundamental aspects here. Integrating aspects of Hakomi psychotherapy, I begin with orienting a client into mindfulness (Kurtz, 1990) in order to access the terrain of her soma. In this exploratory state, we often discover the presence of mental imagery (Morgan, 2006). Attention to the body is also necessary in the case of helping to regulate a dysregulated nervous system through using tools from Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing therapy (2012). Within the process of “assisted self-discovery” (Kurtz, 1990), we continue to mine and explore the images located in the body, and they are encouraged to be felt and experienced somatically in as much detail as possible. With the imagery and corresponding body awareness established, she moves into articulating the somatic imagery using art media while maintaining connection with her body throughout. I become a background voice and encourage her to the sensations in her body as well as her movements as she creates, offering considerations to augment the somatic art therapy process. What does she notice? Where and how does she feel it in her body? What feels satisfying? How? When a repetitive body movement occurs while making art, I encourage her to pay attention to her body’s inclination for that movement as well as the somatic and emotional result. Often, a repetitive movement is the body’s intuitive wisdom; orienting toward a need for self-soothing, pleasure or the release and sequencing of a difficult or traumatic experience. After the image is complete, it is viewed from a distance. If comfortable with closing her eyes, she is invited to “take-in” the image—embody it, feel it in her body from where it arose, and study its details, presence, and wisdom within. Opening her eyes to the now embodied image, she somatically relates to it outwardly with expressing it and/or studying it further. What follows is a practice of this back and forth oscillation. Somatic art therapy invites attention and practice to both an active and receptive exchange—a doing and a reflecting, an initiative and a surrender with the image and the entire creative practice (Cane, 1951; McNiff, 1998; Rothaus, 2014; Rubin, 2011).
Potential Applications of Somatic Experiencing® in Applied Sport Psychology
Published in Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 2023
In recent years, applied sport psychology (ASP) consultants have become more open-minded to third-wave therapies (e.g., acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness) that focus on the holistic promotion of psychological and behavioral processes associated with human well-being over the reduction of psychological and emotional symptoms. This approach often uses psychoeducation to teach athletes how the human brain works and why people experience certain thoughts and emotions (Birrer & Röthlin, 2017). In this article, a relatively new type of body psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), is discussed. We begin by explaining the basic tenets of SE™ and presenting research that supported its effectiveness. Then, we discuss context and ethical considerations of SE™-based intervention and provide an example of this process. We conclude by discussing guidelines for how practitioners can adapt the intervention to their circumstances and evaluate its effectiveness.
Black Flesh Matters! The Human Stakes of BLM and Rethinking the Psychoanalytic Subject
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Recently, psychoanalyst David Levit (2018) has described the utility of interweaving and enfolding clinical work in “somatic experiencing” (SE) into psychoanalytic work, precisely in those instances when talk therapy, “what we do, is really not good enough” (p. 586). Levit discusses the usefulness of nonpsychoanalytic clinical methods for working with patients with a history of severe trauma. In his notion of “enfolding the body back into the treatment” (p. 588), Levit (2018) points to the therapeutic benefits of recovering what Anzieu (1989) also calls the skin’s echotactilism, the human capacity for generating and exchanging meaning nonverbally, through skin-to-skin contact. Developed for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder, SE strives to mobilize for therapeutic purposes “the body and levels of the nervous system beneath words” (Levit, 2018, p. 588). Encouraging the analysand’s awareness of their inadvertent bodily activity—wiggling toes—and self-soothing touches—a hand on the chest—the therapist clears psychic and emotional space for psychoanalytic exploration. As clinical methods, psychanalytic exploration and somatic experiencing have different objects of approach: “narratives, fantasies, and associated emotions and meanings” in contrast to “primary attention on body sensations, urges, emotions, motions, and images”—in other words, “interoception (sensing into the body)” as opposed to “introspection” (Levit, 2018, p. 596). Levit (2018) argues that when used together, they can help patients manage the emergence of previously dissociated “bits and pieces” of the self, held apart in “dissociative seclusion” (p. 596).
The Generative Presence of Relatedness
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2019
Eric B. Spiegel, Elgan L. Baker
David Alter, co-author of the book Staying sharp: 9 keys for a youthful brain through modern science and ancient wisdom, is an expert in the neuropsychological and psychotherapeutic integration of brain neuroscience with clinical hypnosis. In his article for this issue, entitled “In the intersubjective space: Hypnosis through a neuropsychological lens,” Alter addresses the intersubjective interaction between patient and hypnotherapist, as seen through a neuropsychological prism. This article explores the intersections between attachment, neuroscience, and hypnosis. His metaphoric use of a matryoshka doll in this article is an apt one, because Alter analyzes the neuropsychological and neurophysiological aspects of multiple dimensions of relatedness: intrapersonal somatic relatedness, interpersonal relatedness, sociocultural relatedness, and evolutionary relatedness. A core aspect of Alter’s article is his description of how narratives become stagnant and potentially harmful in their embodiment and lived experience; and, conversely, how hypnosis and the therapeutic relationship can be utilized to foster new, adaptive embodied narratives that facilitate neuroplasticity. He demonstrates how careful attunement to and utilization of patient somatic experiencing can lead to profound experiential shifts in the therapeutic process and outcomes. Alter delineates how subtle non-verbal somatic presentations contain seeds that hypnotic suggestion can cause to positively bloom in the flowering of neuroplasticity. In addition to examining larger biological, existential, and sociocultural themes in relational neuroscience and hypnosis, Alter also provides cogent clinical applications and case examples from which the reader can discern distinct takeaways about how to utilize hypnosis in psychotherapy from a relational neuropsychological perspective.