Trauma and the Body - Pat Ogden et al.
Here is a good overview article that I just found by two of the authors of Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy -- Pat Ogden and Kekuni Minton:
Thanks for sharing this information!!
Peter Levine's somatic work is some of the finest therapy I have experienced. (And at Esalen and at JFKU and in SF, I expereinced some powerful work and healers!)
If I ever won the Lotto, I would go train with Peter, and then would go train with the Feldenkrais folk.
Happy trails, D.
...whether to buy the book. Foreword by Dan Seigel and Bessel van der Kolk...
Looks good. I like the comment "Asserting that the body has been left out of the "talking cure" , as that is too too true.
Happy trails, D.
...Still a bit incomplete, I'm afraid.
http://www.lifespanlearn.org/documents/P.Ogden_ClinArticle.pdf
Wish there was a button on Google that said, "Only show me the stuff worth reading."
How about it, Monika?
That's the trouble with computer "minds," they don't have the discriminating judgment of humans. But luckily for us, you are busily filtering through these writings ( and videos) and giving us the good stuff.
Thanks!!!!!
I am passing these on to traumatized friends. Isn't it remarkable, and sad, that so many people have gone through serious trauma. I know for myself that my life would have been completely different if I had not been raised by a recently traumatized disabled WWII vet suffering from massive and untreated PTSD with suicidal threats and instantly triggered and unanticipatable angry breakdowns.
Most of us are walking wounded, in one way or another. I just hope to find and hold the exquisite wisdom and inner dance inside myself of someone like Weems.
Happy trails, D.
Happy trails, D.
Chronic anxiety and emotional numbing also get in the way of learning to identify and articulate internal states and wishes. People traumatized as children frequently suffer from alexithymia - an inability to translate somatic sensations into basic feelings, such as anger, happiness or fear. This failure to translate somatic states into words and symbols causes them to experience emotions simply as physical problems. This naturally plays havoc with intimate and trusting interpersonal communications. These people have somatization disorders and relate to the world through their bodies. They experience distress in terms of physical organs, rather than as psychological states. (van der Kolk)
We live in the "richest" country in the world, in which 20% of the people are excluded from any medical services, 50% are excluded from adequate medical services (by legal tricks like "pre-existing conditions"), and 80% are excluded from adequate pyschological health services. And we see the results on the evening news.
After the brief exploration of contemporary body oriented therapy posted in these blogs, I have to express a couple of reservations. There have been creditable challenges to attachment theory. And there have also been creditable attacks on the whole notion of recovered memory. There is reason to believe, as does Jerome Kagan, that the trajectory of adult personality depends more upon genetics and childhood temperament, rather than parental interactions. A few years ago Judith Rich Harris wrote a book titled The Nurture Assumption that argued against the primacy of parental influence on adult behavior. And Elizabeth Loftus has made a strong case that recovered memories are untrustworthy.
My own view is that these ideas must be compartmentalized. The results of an Adult Attachment Interview and reports of memories recovered in therapy are not “proof” that parents were abusive. (Of course, if such proof exists I strongly support legal action.) On the other hand, attachment theory and recovered memory can be valuable tools within psychotherapy. In that context the only relevant question is, “What techniques will relieve suffering and lead to a positive outcome?”
In this regard I value the following quotation from Peter Levine:
In an attempt to rationalize their highly activated (incomplete) survival responses, traumatized people will often create explicit stories that energetically match their internal experience. These “memories” may be accurate only in the sense that they are metaphors for what is stored implicitly. Many survivors of trauma need an “explanation” for their disturbing internal states. For example, I have worked with numerous people who came to me fairly certain that they had been molested or raped as children. In many cases the people were correct, but not in all of them. Several clients had created interpretations that seemed to explain their symptoms, but, in fact, they had been traumatized by early childhood surgical procedures. To a child, a frightening surgical procedure can be experienced very much like a rape.
Whether you can remember a traumatic event explicitly is not highly significant for healing to take place. Trauma is implicit. What is significant in the resolution of trauma is the completion of incomplete responses to threat and the ensuing discharge of the energy that was mobilized for survival. When the implicit (procedural) memory is activated and completed somatically, an explicit narrative can be constructed; not the other way around. In this way, survivors can begin to re-member, i.e., to associate the dissociated aspects of their body experience and thaw the frozen energy that is at the core of their trauma. In doing this, they begin to integrate implicit experience into coherent conscious narratives. These stories are neither true nor false. They contain a balance of elements, some of which are historically accurate, some are symbolic of feeling states, while the primary function of others is to promote the healing process.
Excellent