Building connection with inner-self...

There can be many ways on how we can better build connection with ourselves and others, but my focus today is on how we can use our body movement to re-connect to the wounded parts of ourselves and how expressing these wounds to the other will facilitate the process of deeper connection and well-being. I offer group and private sessions that use the principals of somatic bodywork, expressive arts and the theory of experiential and relational approach in the therapeutic work. Further I describe the work involved in the sessions and present some theoretical ground that supports it.

The body movement can be used as a means of creative expression, projection, communication and catharsis. Through kinesthetic empathy we can feel our own body and emotional sensations, as well as through mirroring the movement of our peer, we can sense and reflect his/her body language and emotional sensations. This work allows us to free stored emotions and sensations, process them, and integrate back fragmental parts of ourselves.

During the group sessions, the participants are grouped in pairs or, if it is a private session, the participant works with the instructor. Each pair engages in a partner work per the steps described further. In the partnership, each partner has a role: a protagonist – the one who tells the story, and a receiver – the one who watches, reflects and responds.

The steps of the process worked in partnership:
1)    The protagonist is asked to remember difficult life situations to which he/she has uneasy or undefined feelings.
2)    The protagonist is asked to express this situation and feelings using only their body language and gestures.
3)    The receiver is asked to reflect his/her feelings, emotions, reactions, body sensations and images that were arising when they were in contact with protagonist.
4)    The two (receiver and protagonist) are asked to engage in spontaneous dialogue, using only body language and gestures, to communicate with each other whatever will arise.
5)    At the end of the process, the protagonist is asked to note everything that was important during this process. The notes can be taken in writing in silence, can be spoken out to the group, or memorized and integrated with time.

The key to this work is that there is the other person to whom we express, and this other person responds... the response is what helps to integrate the process! For the healing process to happen, we need to have another human being in front of us who will empathically respond to our wounds.

Research in neuroscience (Gallese, 2007), as well as Stern's theory (2010), confirms that human relationships are driven by the perception of the intentional movement of another. Our brains are designed to develop empathy for the intentional movements of others, and our consciousness is created by forms of vitality (Francesetti, 2019). Thus the movement or the gesture that the receiver creates as a response to the protagonist's story will have the healing effect.

Have you ever experienced a situation in which you became speechless or numb, as if something blocked your throat and no words would ever come out? Or a situation in which you experience a lot of emotions but have difficulty to express them in words?

Bessel van der Kolk explains the complex physiological process by which trauma memories remain in the non-verbal, subconscious, subcortical regions of the brain, where they are not accessible to the frontal lobes: to the areas of the brain associated with understanding, thinking and reasoning.

When people remember traumatic events, the frontal lobe becomes dysfunctional, and they experience thinking and speaking limitations as a result, in contrast the right hemisphere areas associated with emotional states and autonomic arousal are activated (Hamel, 2021). For van der Kolk, it’s the body that controls our response to trauma, not our mind; once you can do what you could not do during the trauma, and once you are able to return to your center and refocus on a solid organismic basis, you will change.

An emotional memory is an implicit memory that can be reactivated with or without the input of the declarative memory. Peter Levine developed a model called SIBAM: sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning. This model explains how we create a complete experience, but also how dissociation happens.

Levine says that these elements are dissociated during traumatic experiences, while other elements are associated, which leads to different forms of re-experiencing. He thinks that when a person is unable to defend himself when a trauma occurs or to prevent it from happening, unfinished defensive actions become blocked and stored in the nervous system as non-discharged energy.

Levine explains somatic dissociation as trauma being trapped inside the body. Attention to one of the elements of the model gives access to others. A person with complex feelings is insensitive to the movement of another and does not make a movement toward another. Thus, we begin the process by renewing sensitivity to the boundary of contact with one another, when we allow the other to see us and acknowledge our existence.

Accessing and bringing up to the conscious level difficult life stories helps to process them and come to the resolution. Kalshed writes that understanding the inner world of trauma helps to explain two things: 1) the traumatized psyche continues to traumatize itself (the traumatic process continues in the inner world, and we can discover this through dreams and fantasies), 2) people who have experienced psychological trauma constantly find themselves in life situations in which they are traumatized again (Kalshed, 1996).

Trauma as an unfinished situation from the past and a fixed perception was first described by the founders of Gestalt psychotherapy (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1951). The unfinished situation from the past that holds unexpressed feelings gets never fully experienced or discharged. Such situations make it difficult for the person to be conscious, centered, present in the here and now moment and be authentic in contact with another. Unfinished situations seek completion and when they become strong enough, the individual becomes surrounded by previously captured compulsive behavior, caution, suppressed energy and self-harmful activities (Polster and Polster, 1973).

The building connection with inner-self sessions are good for people:
• who have been experiencing unresolved life situations toward which they hold strong emotions and memories,
• who have finished life situations, but negative thoughts and emotions continue to be present,
• who have difficulty in communicating emotions and empathy to others,
• who have difficulty in connecting to their own feelings and emotions.​

More information about session inquiries can be found on page Art Therapy "Happy You"
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