Change the Body, Grow the Self

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Why is bodywork an important contributor to psychological, emotional and relational trauma healing?

 

“Touch comes before sight, before speech, it is the first language

and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

Margaret Atwood

 

Helen Keller said “hands were more honest than faces: We may compose our faces, but our hands speak open and unconscious truths……. Hands were windows on the soul.”

Binya Appelbaum, NY Times, Sept. 6, 2020

 

Introduction

 

Bodywork plays a vital role in healing trauma. Here, I’ll explore some key reasons why. 

 

Let us begin with this concept:  healthy rhythms of life become dysregulated with trauma (aka, autonomic dysregulation).  If trauma begins pre or perinatally, then healthy rhythms may not get established from the outset.  Every organ, structure, tissue and fluid have its own innate movement pattern or rhythm called motility.  The relationships between organs are called mobility.  Of course, there other rhythms of life as well:  sleep/wake cycles, breathing, respiration, gut function, relational rupture and repair, and more.  Bodywork is an essential contributor to normalizing and healing these.

 

The Role of Bodywork in Trauma Healing 

 

Bodywork can interrupt the dysregulated autonomic nervous system and physiological processes by resetting rhythmic patterns.  This, in turn, balances sensory signals encoded in interoceptive and proprioceptive systems.  More direct touch work with the viscera, breathing structures, bones, brain, fascia and more helps restore motility and mobility relationships, and it promotes ease and fluidity of movement. This recalibrates the autonomic nervous system, leading to greater affect regulation and physiological coherence. 

 

Relational Bodywork and Somatic Education™ (BASE™) addresses trauma at its physiological level by integrating important aspects of life experience together.  These include stories/narratives (client history), the physiological conversation of attunement, affect, movement and changing motility/mobility.  Sensing the subtle and super subtle changes in physiology as they come back into coherence is key for a client to feel met and supported with respectful, deep, attuned connection. They feel ‘met’ and understood at a physiological, emotional, spiritual--the Somatic--level.  Infants and parents communicate this way—physiologically. The armor or “barrier to the true self” (Rosen) can soften when a client feels healthfully attuned with another person. Tolerance for intense affect (love, anger, yearning, for example) widens.

 

With greater coherence a dysregulated autonomic nervous system now has a new ‘template’ of sensory motor ‘data’ by which to understand the internal and external environments.  Simply stated, if a person is able to feel their physiological reaction change, then they can slow down and make choice with their behavioral responses to the environments.  This supports healthier relationship dynamics with self and others.

 

The cerebellum plays a central role in this process. This “master regulator” governs movement, coordination and affect regulation. By refining physiological processes, movement, and equilibrium, bodywork and somatic education facilitate not only physiological stability and coherence, but also emotional and relational resilience. 

 

A more regulated relationship with self can expand affect capacity. Greater affect regulation and capacity, in turn, provide feedback for improved signaling of physiological processes.  This biofeedback loop continues and, if interrupted, has a better neural template for returning to a regulated state with greater ease.  We will notice improvement in our ability to live ‘in the present and “in our body” more regularly, read the signaling from our body more accurately and pay attention to it (It should be noted that not all sensory information reaches conscious awareness). We know when we are attuned with and we know when we are not. We can choose how to react; we can choose to share feelings or we can choose not to. We can choose to have or not have an open heart at any given moment.  We are less at the mercy of our unconscious in relationships (in other words, we become more present and aware).

 

Bodywork will also help access more deeply armored affect and memories as they get lodged in the body, including the viscera.  Emotions are full body experiences.   Opening areas of the body can soften the armor when in a supportive, compassionate set of hands.  Emotion will provide additional sensory information which will either perpetuate the affect or change it. 

 

The most important aspect of bodywork is the relational.  In BASE we use this phrase:  Meet, Greet, Sense and Receive.  Hands say hello, sense for a client’s (and body ‘parts’) physiological readiness to be received, for presence and for change; Receive the client (or body part).  Always work with the human being whose body you are helping regulate. It was not uncommon, for example, that a physical therapist decades ago would hear a patient say, “I tell you more than I tell my psychotherapist.”  The trustworthy hands of the PT allowed a patient’s armor to soften and, as Marion Rosen used to say, “what is held inside can come up.”  BASE and other Somatics practices hold this same philosophy.

 

Sensation to Emotion

 

The body sends a constant stream of sensory signals to the brain through afferent nerves. These signals include:

 

Interoception—sensory information from visceral organs.

 

Proprioception—sensory information from muscles, tendons and joints giving awareness to movement, relationships between body parts and position of the body. 

 

Exteroception—the typically named ‘five senses’ of sight1, sound, taste, smell, touch (of which there are many kinds).

 

Other external sensory information include temperature, pressure, vestibular, kinesthetic (the sense of the body’s relationship to its environment and, while not directly proprioceptive, there is an overlap with it) and more. 

 

The sensory data is processed by the limbic system which interprets the information as either pleasurable or unpleasurable. The brain then compares these signals to past experiences, courtesy of the hippocampus, and determines the appropriate motor response. This motor output is emotion—the externalization of affect through movement2. 

 

As Lisa Feldman Barrett discusses in her book, How Emotions Are Made, this process is rapid, continuous and unconscious. This is all based on the predicted needs at the moment and is an ongoing moment to moment determination (think all autonomic nervous system functions such as facial expression, muscle tension, flight, fight, immobility, making love, digestion, breathing, circulatory needs, motility and more).

 

Emotion emerges well before the pre-frontal cortex can consciously label it as joy, anger, love, confusion, fear, shame, disgust, happiness, etc. Labeling is a prefrontal cortex function and is a slower process.  For trauma survivors, this feedback loop is often governed by once adaptive responses that are now outdated patterns from past experiences.  This leads to maladaptive responses in present circumstances and happens with all kinds of trauma experiences including pervasive (social/cultural, developmental, relational and emotional) and single event shock.

 

Somatic Education for people whose autonomic nervous system is dysregulated provides interventions and opportunities to re-experience (or experience for the first time) new relationships with body self through movement and movement exploration.  The entire structure of the body can be used to shift its posturetude3 from imbalanced toward ease, balance, flow and authentic power4. This also changes the ‘template’ of body image and self in relationship with others.  Interventions can change the way someone moves, inhabits their body, leaves their body, armors, constricts.  This allows for new proprioceptive feedback to the brain, “I am here now, not back there then.”  Living in the present supports greater ease, flow and healthier relational dynamics.

 

Somatic practices like Somatic Experiencing also help clients track physical sensations in real time, anchoring their cognitive and physical awareness in the present. This supports the process of reinterpreting sensory data offering new and updated relationships with prior experiences and more regulated relationships with real time threatening and activating situations.  It also allows for completion of physiological processes and survival responses.

 

The Path from Body Self to Sense of Self; a Bottom-up Developmental Process: 

 

The newborn-to-toddler period first supports the development of a body self as part of the bonding and attachment process.  The infant comes to non-cognitively understand that “I have a body I exist in”. This process begins with touch, movement, synchronistic mirroring, and other relational feedback loops with caretakers and others.  Interoceptive sensory input contributes as well. As simple primitive sensory-motor reflexes grow into more sophisticated sensory-motor reactions and responses, the infant becomes a toddler.  It is now physically stronger and more nuanced in its abilities.  The body self has morphed into a body image in which the brain internalizes a ‘map’ of the body (probably both the sensory cortex and insula).  With greater motor abilities and trust in others the now toddler is freer to explore its environment. The toddler can experience reproachment when it comes back to home base (loved/safe/secure ones). This period of greater object permanence requires and coincides with sensory-motor development and skills such as crawling/creeping, toddling or early walking and playing with food.  “My body is now different/separate from your body” 5--the development of a body ego. Greater varieties of burgeoning sophisticated movement patterns, balance and equilibrium, and relationship with gravity support the toddler to become a young child with all of its joy, vitality and life force.  Supported by healthy attachment and bonding, the toddler develops its sense of self with its unique relational skills and can explore limits within context of its social/cultural mores.  With further development that now includes greater language skills (verbal, visual and tactile) the body ego develops into a sense of self—the ability to self-witness.  With further development of the brain and more abstraction of body self to sense of self the young child develops greater confidence and autonomy.  As the body ego, movement sophistication and secure attachment develop, the child has the ability to be in healthy relationships and maintain a sense of self as separate from others.  The self and ego grow.  “I” have a sense of self upon which I can reflect and understand in a context with others, my environment and more.  Character Transformation, by Stephan Johnson is a good reference for further reading.

 

With greater body self, sense of self and ego the child has clearer self-awareness with which to move through the world and be in relationship with others.  Somatic education and bodywork support growth of body self and body image to sense of self and ego by changing the rhythms of motility, body usage and proprioceptive awareness.  This widens affect capacity and tolerance.

 

Summary

 

Bodywork and Somatic Education have a significant and vital role in healing from developmental, relational, emotional social/cultural and shock trauma.  They help change the sensory or afferent signaling informing the brain including interoception (visceral motility and mobility) and proprioception (structure of the body and body usage).  These changes can provide a greater sense of ease, flow, coherence, choice and safety in relational dynamics.

 

Notes

 

1-Eyes are external parts of the brain so it is more accurate to say “sent to other parts of the brain.”

 

2-To complete this sequence the, ‘data’ is also sent to the cognitive parts of the brain for labeling with words like joy, love, anger, shame, etc. but it is a slower process and awareness of this is after emotion.  The English word emotion is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex) means "without" and movere means "move. 

 

3-There is no one word in English that captures posture and attitude as expressed in emotion so I created a word, posturetude.

 

4-Authentic power is a state of spiritual, kinesiological and emotional balance with softness.  Sometimes it is called soft power.  The word power is frequently associated with nasty, aggressive intimidation but, in actually, it is weakness.  This is demonstratable with a posturetude exercise from BASE.

 

5-In collectivistic cultures this means physically separate but still as part of the whole; whereas sense of self in individualist cultures tends to mean a separate self from other.

 

References

 

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made.  Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2018.

 

Johnson, Stephan, Character Transformation; The Hard Work Miracle. W.W. Norton, 1985.

 

Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotion

 

Rosen, Marion, personal communication and in my Rosen Method Bodywork Training

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Dave Berger, MFT, PT, SEP is founder of BASE:  Relational Bodywork and Somatic Education for Trauma Practitioners.  AS a somatic psychotherapist, he is a senior international faculty with Somatic Experiencing International, and Somatic Experiencing master class faculty with Ergos Institute.  He has worked clinically for 45 years as a psychotherapist, physical therapist and bodyworker as well as served as a professor at the graduate level physical therapy and psychology.