Throughout my career as a psychotherapist I struggled to find the right balance between using specific techniques and the importance of establishing a safe therapeutic relationship. Toward the end I veered more to the latter as I realised, rather belatedly I admit, that people sought therapy not necessarily to get better but often just to be heard. A safe haven and a sensitive, empathic and caring individual can be enough; specific techniques can get in the way. Of course this is hard to square with the demand for evidence-based psychotherapy where therapy is defined as applying identifiable techniques and improvement seen in terms of symptom reduction. This quasi-medical model is rightly seen as simplistic, ignoring both individual meaning and the influence of socio-economic factors on mental health. Nevertheless, it has certain virtues. It enables those who know very little about psychotherapy to grasp what is supposed to be happening, something that both clients and commissioners of psychotherapy legitimately wish to know. Seeing a CBT therapist, for example, means that the approach is likely be collaborative, problem-focussed and address the client’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour in an open, adult and rational way. Seeing a psychodynamic therapist, on the other hand, means the therapist is likely to be passive, say relatively little, attend to underlying meanings and dynamics and use the therapeutic relationship as the main vehicle of gaining understanding from which change may or may not happen. Neither of these descriptions captures the subtlety and complexity of psychotherapy, nor the uncertainty that is part of all therapies. But they are not unimportant especially when it comes to making useful distinctions to those who know very little about what goes on behind the therapist’s closed doors.
In researching a book about peoples’ response to major traumas, I discovered some interesting and new (to me) therapies, ones that worked primarily through the body. I watched a DVD in which therapists trained in Emotional Freedom Techniques worked with highly disturbed combat veterans with strikingly positive results. I read up on the many and varied somatic therapies and began to understand how therapists who attend to the physical body gained much from not having to work verbally or at least not as the primary means of intervention.
Peter Levine is one of the best known exponents of “somato-sensory psychotherapy,” an approach that sees traumatic reactions as largely due to undischarged energy. Therapy is geared to enabling the person to discharge energy through more sensitive and balanced physical actions. Levine is adept at seeing the embodied person in a way that most psychotherapists are not. It is easy to equate the somatic therapies with their striking physical techniques. Tapping pre-defined meridian points in a particular sequence and in relation to a particular phrase or thought is clearly one such technique. But it also reflects a general therapeutic approach, one that conceptualises the psychological impact of trauma not in terms of trauma narratives or past history but in terms of physical experience. If, as seems to be the case, people can recover remarkably quickly, sometimes in a single session, then this different approach deserves to be taken seriously.
EMDR, essentially the precursor of the somatic therapies, was very critically received precisely because it seemed too good to be true. But it has proved its worth since. Similarly, it is easy to dismiss therapies as ‘wacky’ if they draw on traditional Chinese Medicine, focus on acupressor points, use an uncertain and vague term like “energy,” and involve rather simple physical actions like tapping. Beware of not seeing the wood for the trees. Energy psychology and somatic therapies offer something radical and different. Traditional (verbal) therapists would be well advised to keep an open mind. Seduced by our Freudian heritage, we plunged into the complexities of the mind and, with some notable exceptions, forgot the body. Isn’t it about time we brought the body back?
File under: The Art of Psychotherapy, Musings and Reflections
In researching a book about peoples’ response to major traumas, I discovered some interesting and new (to me) therapies, ones that worked primarily through the body. I watched a DVD in which therapists trained in Emotional Freedom Techniques worked with highly disturbed combat veterans with strikingly positive results. I read up on the many and varied somatic therapies and began to understand how therapists who attend to the physical body gained much from not having to work verbally or at least not as the primary means of intervention.
Peter Levine is one of the best known exponents of “somato-sensory psychotherapy,” an approach that sees traumatic reactions as largely due to undischarged energy. Therapy is geared to enabling the person to discharge energy through more sensitive and balanced physical actions. Levine is adept at seeing the embodied person in a way that most psychotherapists are not. It is easy to equate the somatic therapies with their striking physical techniques. Tapping pre-defined meridian points in a particular sequence and in relation to a particular phrase or thought is clearly one such technique. But it also reflects a general therapeutic approach, one that conceptualises the psychological impact of trauma not in terms of trauma narratives or past history but in terms of physical experience. If, as seems to be the case, people can recover remarkably quickly, sometimes in a single session, then this different approach deserves to be taken seriously.
EMDR, essentially the precursor of the somatic therapies, was very critically received precisely because it seemed too good to be true. But it has proved its worth since. Similarly, it is easy to dismiss therapies as ‘wacky’ if they draw on traditional Chinese Medicine, focus on acupressor points, use an uncertain and vague term like “energy,” and involve rather simple physical actions like tapping. Beware of not seeing the wood for the trees. Energy psychology and somatic therapies offer something radical and different. Traditional (verbal) therapists would be well advised to keep an open mind. Seduced by our Freudian heritage, we plunged into the complexities of the mind and, with some notable exceptions, forgot the body. Isn’t it about time we brought the body back?
File under: The Art of Psychotherapy, Musings and Reflections