Patricia Haman

The body centered therapeutic perspective

First let me bring you into a body centered view based on my understanding.  When a child is conceived and develops, they are not separate from chemistry, tissue and body formation. From my view, these different aspects influence each other and continually form and reform based on genetic influence and environmental impact.

A neophyte is born into a context that transmits information.  There is much argument about whether a new born is impacted by and altered by their initial experiences.  Having done much altered state process work as well as body work, I am convinced this is so.

That impact is often stored in what I would call cellular knowledge.  I want to invite you to allow yourself to let down into an imaginary process aimed at gathering an understanding of this type of perspective. 

I want to invite you to let go of your intellect.  Sit comfortably in your chair, breathe deeply and tighten and relax your muscles several times.  This is an imaginary process where you must allow yourself to slide under your ego, your thinking self, and allow a different kind of exploration to take place.  You may gain sudden information n concerning your own early experience, that of your own children, loved ones, or clients. 

So again, breathe deeply and relax.  Imagine your are in a womb, and what this might be like.  Imagine the possibility that your have some sensory experience like hot or cold, pressure, and even the possibility of some type of awareness of your host and her emotional experiences. 

over time, the container that surrounds you is getting tighter.  There is more and more pressure.  The birth process once begun, begins to introduce chemicals that are quickly changing your environment and making exit imperative.  This process may involve for you a tremendous increase in pressure and may even cause an experience of the possibility of threat to survival. 

Since the cognitive systems are not in place, this can only be registered at the most primal levels.

You are born to a room, where the warmth and contact you receive may or may not be adequate.  Are you spanked, are you held, can you breathe immediately or do you experience a battle for your first breathe.  Is your mother there?  Is she aware of you, happy to see you or is she angry, frightened, or drugged??

Are you suddenly alone with the sounds of screaming?  Does the time seem endless and are your cold?  Maybe your with your family, they are warm and happy.  You are offered a breast and the milk is warm to the taste and makes you full and sleepy.

So this is the beginning.  Lets just imagine the possibility that these experiences have formed a basic somatic position.  One of movement toward life, or movement away from life.  A basic positive or negative, and approach or avoidance on a deep intrinsic level. 

Now you are home.  You are experiencing a climate nor energy which permeates the people your sensitive to.  Is it excited or calm.  Is is abrubt or soft.  Are you wet, cold or hungry.  or is it warm, and secure.  Are you held close to a warm body.  As you experience these elements, you are forming biochemically and physically.  If you are startled a lot, hungry and crying, etc... this influences your physical self.

Babies gaze at their significant caregiver.  When you gaze in the eyes of the other, open and seeking, do you find joy, warmth and welcome or does the other look away, look angry or hostile, or just bored?  Are you received, are you welcome, are you even seen?

If not how do you form around the resulting experience.  Do you pull in energetically toward your center?  Do you seek return to the womb or elsewhere?  Do you begin to pull out of contact seeking an inner world that feels more like home? 

As these experiences are repeated over and over, they become reality.  As the next stage begins, you will bring this template with you into the stage of seeking sustenance.  Of learning to cry, and demand food, warmth and contact.  Your body will begin to reflect your understanding.  Are you always hungry, always seeking contact, never able to feel satiated?  Or, are you gaining weight, laughing, accepting contacting and sitting in your Buddha like joyful nature.  If you are in this type of experience you will not be tense, your body will develop a flexible open stance as you begin to crawl and walk.

Body Centered Therapy

Body Centered Psychotherapy and Analysis is a psychodynamic psychotherapy which combines work with the body and the mind to help reduce psychological problems. It is a form of psychotherapy that has a psycho-developmental basis. Things that happened to one as a child greatly affect one's adult self-perception and one's behavior towards others. That is, traumas that happen in childhood affect one's way of interacting in their current life and relationships. This type of  analysis sees these traumas as affecting one's thought processes as well as one's body.

Body Centered psychotherapists believe that there is a correlation between the mind and the body. The individual is viewed as a psychosomatic unity. What affects the body affects the mind; and what affects the mind affects the body. The psychological defenses one uses to handle pain and the stress of life - rationalizations, denials, and suppressions, are also anchored in the body. They appear in the body as unique muscular patterns that inhibit self-expression. These patterns can be identified and understood by a bioenergetic psychotherapist who knows how to look at the structure, movement and breathing patterns in a person's body.

Body Oriented Therapists unlike other psychotherapists, focus special attention on the muscular patterns in a person's body. They are interested in these patterns and their relationship to movement, breath, posture and emotional expression. Every physical expression of the body has meaning; the quality of a handshake, the posture, the look in the eyes, the tone of the voice, the way of moving, the amount of energy, etc. If these expressions are fixed and habitual, they tell a story of past experience.

The Body Centered psychotherapist studies these muscular patterns and introduces the client to physical expressions or exercises to help them experience in present time these patterns of constriction in their body. The therapist explores with the client what it would feel like to begin to release these patterns and recover some of the feelings they have repressed during childhood and continue to repress in their adult life. The bioenergetic psychotherapist also helps their clients come to understand how and why their patterns of constriction developed; how these very defenses that are hindering their life today, allowed them to survive in an early environment that was not supportive of their being.

As these repressed emotions emerge, clients begin to realize that these patterns inhibit their capacity for spontaneity and creativity in self-expression. They begin to understand that as these defenses became chronic, so have the muscular patterns in their body. These somatic defenses affect their emotional well-being by decreasing energy level and restricting the capacity for genuine self-expression in relationships; they are not free enough in their body to feel joy, happiness, love, sadness, fear, sensuality and anger. As clients progress in the psychotherapy, old, ineffective patterns which block connection, pleasure, spontaneity and joy slowly dissolve. Through the physical and emotional release of body work and the experience of a safe, healthy, supportive connection with a therapist, the  client relates to his/her self and others in new, more satisfying ways.

Through identifying patterns of blocked self-expression in the body, the psychotherapist develops a clearer understanding of the various personality types and their corresponding psychological problems. Understanding a person's specific patterns of blocked self-expression suggests the basic defensive structure of the individual which developed as a result of their personal psychological history. In the context of bioenergetic theory, discovering patterns of blocked self-expression and their corresponding connection to personality type, allows the emergence of a potential framework for the course of therapy.

A Therapist's Understanding of Bioenergetic Analysis
Bioenergetic Psychotherapy