The following are two examples of improved cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes from emotional embodiment work conducted during clinical demonstration sessions of Integral Somatic Psychology.
Discovering that a problem in the present has roots in the past, an act of cognition, is often therapeutic. Almost all psychotherapy modalities emphasize the importance of such insights in healing. At those points of healing, clients often say something like: “I knew that A was connected to B, but I did not know it as convincingly as I do now.” This often happens more expediently during emotional embodiment work, two instances of which are presented below.
Kim: Betrayal and Depression
I met Kim, a mental health professional in her mid fifties who has never been married, at a training I taught in China. She asked for help to get over a depression she had suffered from for about six months, ever since a man had walked out on her. The man was her high school sweetheart, the love of her life. He had a pattern of coming back to her from time to time only to abandon her again, either to return to a former lover or to form a relationship with a new woman.
Kim could not let go of this man or engage another person in a relationship, so she never formed as deep an attachment to anyone else. In our session we worked with embodying the sensorimotor emotion of how bad the most recent betrayal felt in her body, and then the primary emotion of how sad it made her feel. The sadness was hard to contact, but it eventually surfaced when I had Kim imagine her boyfriend walking away from her into the horizon.
Expanding Fear in the Body
As we tried to stay with the sadness, Kim suddenly reported that she was beginning to feel fear. Interpreting the fear as possibly the fear of permanent loss, I encouraged Kim to stay with it and expand it in her body. She became terrified. Her body started to contort, and her arms and legs became twisted. The more she got into that state, the more terrified she became. She wanted to open her eyes and get out of the state her body was in. When I asked her whether her body has ever gotten into that state during a session before, she said, “Never.”
As a body psychotherapist herself, Kim has had years of training and treatment in a trauma-focused body psychotherapy approach. Because certain emotional states can only be reached in certain body states, and regulating the body state toward normalcy could eliminate the emotional experience altogether, I encouraged Kim to stay with the terror—which appeared to be an affect state from early childhood, given the way her body was contorting—and expand the emotion to as much of the body as possible, especially by expressing emotion through vocalization.
This technique can help expand the emotion in the body nonverbally, in addition to giving the client some relief. I told Kim it did not matter whether the terror was her terror of the contortions happening in the body or if it was an integral part of the emotional experience in the past situation.
Making Connections to Past Experiences
At some point during her experience of terror, Kim remarked that she was born prematurely and was incubated for about a month. She also said she had been separated from her parents from time to time and that for much of her childhood her grandparents had cared for her. I sensed that she was making deeper connections to her past as a result of embodying and tolerating her terror and other feelings in that unusual body state, which can often be seen in physically disabled children. I interpreted her terror as the terror of dying, which is common to experiences of premature birth, incubation, and separation from the mother at birth.
This terror is likely to have been reinforced every time she was separated from her parents and her grandparents in childhood, and by the repeated separations from her lover in adulthood.
The Outcome
When I thought she had been with the terror long enough, I stopped supporting that emotion and asked her to do the same. I then asked her to orient to the present, and I had her body slowly recover to a normal state. Toward the end of the session, Kim became quiet and reflective. She shared with us that she had had no idea until then that her long-standing difficulty of not letting go of her high school sweetheart might have anything to do with the threats to her existence around birth. In the days that followed, Kim continued to work with her fear, sadness, and anger on a deeper level in her practice sessions and in private sessions she received from the assistants during the training.
On the last day of the six-day training, Kim told the class she had never been able to remember a dream before, but that day she was surprised by having remembered a short dream from the night before. She had dreamed that her boyfriend appeared, and he wanted to say just one thing to her: “Congratulations!” Kim reported waking up feeling good, with a certain emotional conviction that she was finally over him. Now she felt she could move on and engage someone else in a relationship in a way she had not felt before.
A year later when I was back in Hong Kong, I talked with Kim, and she shared with me that she had indeed moved on. She no longer felt that her relationship with her ex-boyfriend was hanging around her neck like a millstone. It hardly crossed her mind, and it caused no anguish, she said.
Peter: Relationship Challenges
Another example of deepening insight resulting from emotional embodiment involved a man named Peter, who could not bear to live in the same house with his girlfriend and their two children. Peter volunteered to work with me in front of a class I was teaching in Switzerland. In addition to the house he shared with his girlfriend and children, Peter also had an apartment across the street, to which he retreated from time to time.
This was becoming a real problem, not only financially but also relationally between him and his partner. In the session, I had Peter close his eyes, imagine living in the same house with his girlfriend, and sense how unpleasant, bad, or uncomfortable it would feel if he did not have his apartment across the street. I had Peter continue to sense the close presence of his girlfriend as we explored and embodied the unpleasantness, lack of safety, and fear he felt.
After a while, Peter started to sense his body as extremely small and vulnerable in relation to the larger body of his girlfriend. As I encouraged and helped him to embody the vulnerability and stay with it, Peter arrived at a new and significant insight having to do with his twin brother. When the twins were born, Peter was very small compared to his brother because his brother had flourished in the womb, and Peter had not. Peter had always known this about himself, but he had not understood how this fact was playing such an important role in his current life and intimate relationship until he embodied and tolerated the difficulty affectively during the session.
I do not know whether Peter was able to change his living arrangement after the session, but his ability to tolerate the vulnerability of being close to his partner and what it brought up, and to make the significant connection between his past and present in that deeper state, is the kind of development I have often seen lead to real change in behavior in people.
Conclusion
Gaining an important and transformative insight is an act of cognition. How can emotional embodiment facilitate such an act? As we saw earlier, the new paradigm of embodied cognition in neuroscience has accumulated evidence showing that cognition is a function not only of the brain but also of the body and the environment. When a body is shut down, with its connection to the brain and the environment broken, that person’s cognition is therefore compromised. Also, as we saw earlier, research on emotion has shown that embodying emotion improves cognition, and the lack of it compromises cognition.
Cognition can be defined narrowly or broadly. When defined broadly, acts of cognition involve awareness, attention, focus, perception, abstraction, association, evaluation, memory, imagination, and even language. Findings in embodied cognition research show that emotion affects every one of these cognitive processes, starting with the aspect of the environment one’s awareness is directed to before perception begins.
Therefore, it makes scientific sense that Kim and Peter were able to arrive at important and potentially transformative “embodied” insights during their sessions of emotional embodiment work, when they had access to their emotions in a regulated manner and their body was more available for cognition because it was not shut down to avoid unbearable emotion.
In both cases, the increased ability they showed to process difficult emotional experiences and resolve them shows the efficiency of emotional embodiment work not only in resolving emotional problems but also in arriving at significant therapeutic cognitive insights. That Kim had moved on from being stuck in an on-and-off relationship of many years shows the effectiveness of this work in changing a long-term behavior.
From The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes by Raja Selvam, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2022 by Raja Selvam. Used by permission of North Atlantic Books.
About Raja Selvam, PhD
Raja Selvam, PhD, is the author of The Practice of Embodying Emotions and developer of Integral Somatic Psychology™, a new paradigm in body psychotherapy based on state-of-the-art research in neuroscience, affect theory, cognitive psychology, and emotion. He has helped over 1,500 therapists in 20 countries graduate from his ISP Professional Training.
His articles on trauma, embodiment, and spirituality have appeared in several scientific journals.
Raja is also Senior Faculty at Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® Trauma Institute and works as a licensed clinical psychologist with a PhD in Psychology. More about Dr. Raja Selvam
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