“A knowledgeable and skilled exploration of emotion and the body—and how to process and heal emotional wounds efficiently through the body.”
Jack Kornfield, PhDAuthor of fourteen books including A Path with Heart
“A grand accomplishment.”
Peter A. Levine, PhDFounder of Somatic Experiencing® and author of In an Unspoken Voice and Waking the Tiger
The Practice of Embodying Emotions:
A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes
A new science-based somatic psychology that effectively relieves emotional difficulties, regulates thinking and behavior, and improves well-being
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Looking for translations? Click here for international editions
10 Things This Book Will Teach You
- Work with a wider range of emotions from the very first session
- Help your clients undo body defenses and embody their emotions
- Build tolerance for all feelings—especially the uncomfortable ones
- Improve cognitive and behavioral outcomes in your work through embodying emotions
- Improve your results in working with psychophysiological or psychosomatic symptoms
- Help clients heal from traumas efficiently
- Improve your capacity for embodied emotional attunement
- Help clients heal their attachment wounds effectively
- Shorten treatment times in your practice
- Improve mindfulness and spiritual practices by embodying emotions
You Will Learn Concrete Skills
Developed by author and psychologist Dr. Raja Selvam, Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™) is an effective somatic therapy that helps clients achieve optimal mental health by fully embodying their emotions. Drawing from research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and body psychotherapy, Selvam describes how the body can be used as a vehicle for affective processing to alleviate suffering, regulate behavior, and enhance memory, language, and thinking.
You will learn concrete skills to help clients build tolerance for all feelings—especially uncomfortable ones—skills that can also be used for self-help to navigate life’s inevitable challenges. Selvam describes four steps of emotional embodiment work:
- Situation, which links context to affective response
- Emotion, which fosters discovery and acceptance of feelings
- Expansion/Regulation, expanding emotions in brain and body to improve affect tolerance
- Integration, tending to physical, energetic, cognitive, and behavioral benefits of embodiment
ISP can be used as a complementary approach by therapists in all modalities who may be looking for innovative research-backed ways to help patients self-regulate and enjoy a wider range of emotional experiences.
Praise
“A grand accomplishment.”
Founder of Somatic Experiencing® and author of In an Unspoken Voice and Waking the Tiger
“Ripe for our times, this brilliant book sheds light on the vital importance of fully embodying emotions, whether painful, pleasurable, or in-between. As a couples’ therapist and a child advocate for mental health, I experienced this book as a joyous godsend.”
Somatic Experiencing faculty, author of Brain-Changing Strategies to Trauma-Proof Our Schools
“I like it that this book is not only about changing emotional reactions but also about changing cognition and behavior (for the better) through regulating emotions—and that it shows scientifically how cognition, emotion, and behavior are intimately related to each other in the brain as well as the body. I also like it that it provides evidence that our cognition, emotion, and behavior are dependent on others as well as the broader environment.”
Founder of the Bodynamic Somatic Developmental Psychology System, coauthor of The Body Encyclopedia
“This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in understanding and working with the embodiment of emotions. It is the perfect combination of science, historical and cultural context, client case examples, and presentation of a well-articulated, innovative model.”
Coauthor of Nurturing Resilience and The Tao of Trauma
“The Practice of Embodying Emotions is a timely and necessary refinement to the practice of somatic psychology.”
Licensed clinical psychologist, certified psychoanalyst, Somatic Experiencing faculty
“Selvam’s extraordinary book offers an in-depth explanation of how the human body is involved in generating, defending against, and later triggering traumatic emotional experiences—especially prelinguistic ones—and is therefore a vital source of understanding of the physiology of implicit trauma memories that dominate the work of those engaged in pre and perinatal psychology. The Practice of Embodying Emotions is brilliant and humble, research-based, and intuitive. It is a ‘game changer’ in the field of trauma therapy, and I personally rate it five out of five.”
Psychologist, winner of US National Science Foundation Award for Significant Contributions to Psychology
“This book . . . is a must for all therapists who work with attachment and for those looking for a self-help approach to improve their relationships.”
Author of The Power of Attachment and creator of DARe Training
“A knowledgeable and skilled exploration of emotion and the body—and how to process and heal emotional wounds efficiently through the body.”
Author of fourteen books including A Path with Heart
“Raja Selvam’s extensive work with traumatized individuals and groups has put this approach to the test, and the resulting techniques make an invaluable addition to all forms of psychotherapy. Every page of this book conveys depth, clarity, and substance.”
Cochair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute
“Don’t miss this book! A valuable guide for therapists and interested folks alike. Introducing new concepts, solid theory, and grounded practice for working to embody emotions in gentle and innovative ways. The concept of sensorimotor emotions is a unique and much-needed contribution to the field of human consciousness.”
Psychotherapist and author of Body, Breath & Consciousness
“The Practice of Embodying Emotions—a wise and soulful book—offers an effective method for developing greater affect tolerance and transformation through the body. Rooted in science and the author’s depth of experience and capacity for integrating multiple disciplines, it contains practical, comprehensive information and illuminating case examples. Highly recommended.”
Jungian psychoanalyst, dance/movement therapist, somatics educator
“This book makes a substantial contribution to psychoanalysis, offering a safe, hands-off somatic approach for treating trauma. Ought to become a required reading for all psychoanalysts.”
Psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and specialist in pre and perinatal psychological trauma treatment
A Little More About The Book…
People seek help when they are feeling sufficiently bad about something that they cannot deal with by themselves. There is an emotional difficulty in the core of almost every problem that clients present to their therapists.
There are many effective ways to resolve an emotional difficulty: through changing how we think about a situation (cognition), changing how we deal with a situation through expression or action (behavior), changing the state of the brain and body physiology through medication, or numerous other means such as exercise, nutrition, meditation, essential oils, bodywork, and even electric shock. Or we can stay with the emotional experience in whatever form it appears, for as long as is necessary, until it transforms—a common practice on many spiritual paths.
People come to us, their therapists, for help with their suffering. Why not reduce or simply take away their suffering through one of the above methods, without taking people deeper into their suffering to build a greater capacity for tolerating it by expanding the emotional experience to as much of the body as possible?
The answer lies in the latest findings in neuroscience, which establish that all of our three important psychological functions—cognition, emotion, and behavior—depend not only on the brain but also on the body and its connection to the environment; and that inhibiting the involvement of the body in emotion compromises our cognition as well as our behavior relative to the situation that has to do with the emotion.
These findings, in combination with the central thesis of this book—that involving more of the body in emotional experience can create a greater capacity to tolerate the emotion and stay with it for a longer period of time—offer the possibility of improved outcomes in cognition and behavior, even in therapies that focus primarily on cognitive or behavioral methods.
Emotion is a summary assessment of a situation’s impact on a person’s well-being. The brain that has a longer time to process an emotion—because it is more regulated from being more expanded through the body—has a greater chance of generating more functional cognitions and behaviors in relation to the situation. If I can tolerate my rage in a relationship setting, what I think and do in the situation is likely to be more regulated and relational. So, even therapies that focus on facilitating cognitive and behavioral change to bring about symptom relief can improve their outcomes by incorporating the practice of embodying emotion.
All of the usual methods for working with emotion—especially the strategy of staying with the awareness of the emotional experience until transformation occurs—do enable people to develop some capacity for tolerating emotion. However, the extent to which these methods can develop a capacity for tolerating emotions is limited because they either do not work with the body or, if they do work with the body, their focus is not on expanding the emotional experience to as much of the body as possible. Of all the methods, the strategy of staying with an emotional experience until transformation occurs is most likely to increase affect tolerance.
However, the transformation a person is working toward might take longer or not happen at all if they do not know that an emotional experience, especially a difficult one, potentially involves the entirety of the brain and body physiology. In addition, people need to know that one needs to work with physiological defenses against emotions to expand the emotional experience to as much of the body as possible. This will increase the capacity to tolerate it for a longer period and to fully grasp the impact that a situation is having on our well-being. There is also the risk of retraumatization in passively staying with an emotion wherever it appears, as opposed to actively working with the body to regulate the emotional experience by expanding it, thus reducing the likelihood of retraumatization.
For all of the above reasons, embodying emotion—expanding the emotional experience to as much of the body as possible, to acquire a greater capacity to tolerate it—offers the potential for improving various outcomes in combination with all therapies and all of the usual methods for working with emotions, including medication.
For those who are not working in the helping professions, the book has also been written to serve as a self-help guide for understanding and working with emotional difficulties, large and small. For those who intend to use the book for self-help, even if you are a therapist, please make sure to seek professional help in case you find yourself in a difficult place. Please remember that as far as emotions are concerned, sooner or later we always need the support of others to resolve things, no matter who we are.
About Raja Selvam, PhD
Raja Selvam, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology, a therapeutic approach based on emerging scientific paradigms of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience as well as on multiple Western and Eastern psychological, somatic, energetic, and spiritual approaches.
Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Trauma Professional Training Program. He has taught for twenty-five years in twenty-one countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. His work is informed by the older body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, the newer body psychotherapy systems of Bodynamic Analysis and Somatic Experiencing, and the bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.
His work is also inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, the Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India).
In addition, his work draws upon his clinical psychology PhD dissertation work on Advaita Vedanta and Jungian psychology. Dr. Selvam wrote an article based on his dissertation, titled “Jung and Consciousness,” which was published in the international analytical psychology journal Spring in 2013. He did outreach work in India in 2005–2006 with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and an article detailing an outcome study based on this work, titled “Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors,” was published in the journal Traumatology in 2008.
Dr. Selvam’s current work is also inspired by work he did in Sri Lanka in 2012–2014 with survivors of war, violence, loss, and displacement, and the work he did with mental health professionals working with these survivors, after that country’s thirty-year civil war ended in 2009.
International Editions
The Practice of Embodying Emotions is being translated into 10 other languages, due for release in 2023 or 2024. Put yourself on the mailing list and you’ll be the first to know when a translation is published.
German: Verkörperte Gefühle
Jetzt bestellen: Kösel, Amazon.de, Bücher.de, eBook.de, Genialokal.de, Hugendubel.de
Romanian: Corporalizarea Emotiilor
Livrarea incepand cu data de 10.06.2023: Editura Herald
Upcoming Translations
Due for release in 2023 or 2024:
-
- Korean
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Japanese
- Russian
- Polish
- Turkish
- Dutch
- Spanish
There is strong interest from publishers for the following 3 languages:
- French
- Portuguese
- Italian
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