Adding Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) to your toolkit can help make your trauma work more effective in all therapy modalities you use in your practice. Imagine taking your clients confidently deeper and quicker into their emotional processes to resolve their symptoms faster, at higher levels of safety and stability for both clients and therapists.
How is that possible?
Here are the six unique features of ISP that make it possible for you to become an even more effective trauma therapist:
1. Work with emotion in the body at the level of emotions, not sensations
Why?
Focusing on body sensations when emotions occur is a widely used suboptimal strategy born of a common misconception that the experience of emotion in the body is nothing more than physical body sensations.
Working with the body at the level of emotion has three advantages:
- You will be able to distinguish between sensations and emotions in body experience, and therefore be able to focus on emotions
- You will avoid the risk of neutralizing or eliminating important emotional experiences by tracking body sensations
- You will help your clients get in touch with their bodies faster.
You will improve your outcomes in working with developmental traumas, complex traumas, psychophysiological (psychosomatic) symptoms, and syndromes
2. Expand emotional experiences throughout the body
With the efficient techniques of ISP, you will be able to help your clients quickly access and expand the experience of their emotions throughout their brain and body so that they can tolerate them better.
Wait! Wouldn’t painful emotions become more intolerable when they are spread to more of the brain and the body?
Quite the opposite!
Emotions become more bearable when they are spread out in the body. You will quickly find that your clients will be able to stay with emotions longer, giving the brain more time to process them optimally.
Research shows that emotion determines cognition and behavior in every moment and in every experience, and that the presence of emotion in as much of the body is essential for the brain to effectively process all aspects of the situation—cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally.
This is how ISP can help you improve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes in all therapy modalities and in all clinical circumstances, whether you are working with trauma or other experiences in your clients.
3. Use a broad definition of emotions to access them quickly
Isn’t it conventional wisdom that it takes a long time to build a relationship with clients to get to their emotions?
It is a limiting belief based on a narrow definition of emotions and the common lack of attention to the body in therapy in most therapy modalities.
Think about this: Your clients primarily seek help when they cannot tolerate one emotional experience or another. Your client feels bad and therefore seeks your help. Feeling bad is an emotion. We call it a sensorimotor emotion.
ISP works with not only primary and secondary emotions but also with the always-present and often-overlooked sensorimotor emotions, such as simply feeling bad or good. This, in combination with ISP’s multi-body somatic techniques, will make it possible for you as a therapist to access and work with emotions in most of your clients from the very first session.
4. Rapidly build emotional capacity through the body
ISP focuses on building a greater capacity for emotions in your clients—especially difficult ones—as quickly as possible through the body.
Why is that important?
When you learn how to quickly build capacity for emotions in clients, especially for difficult experiences, and teach them simple self-help self-touch somatic tools, you can rapidly help your clients to:
- resolve their psychological and psychophysiological (psychosomatic) symptoms that often have unbearable emotional stress as their cause,
- self-soothe, self-regulate, and even do further work on their own between sessions, reducing their dependency on you,
- have more resilience from forming symptoms when they face similar situations or emotions again, and
- maintain greater physical, energetic, psychological, relational, and even spiritual well-being, each of which is known to depend on a person’s capacity to tolerate opposites in emotional experiences.
5. Work with emotion and physiological dysregulation in the body at the same time
How is that possible?
In traumatic experiences, more often than not, there is a coupling of high levels of physiological dysregulation and high levels of emotional stress in the brain and in the body.
When we focus more on downregulating physiological dysregulation, emotional experiences can be compromised because difficult emotions in the body are, by definition, generated from dysregulating the body physiology, giving the false impression that the emotions have been processed.
On the other hand, when we focus more on processing difficult emotions, the level of dysregulation in the body can increase because that is how difficult emotions are generated in the body.
Is there a way around this dilemma?
Yes, using ISP, you will be able to work more effectively with both physiological dysregulation and emotional experience simultaneously through its integrative body techniques.
Therefore, you will have more success working with emotions in traumatic experiences in general.
In particular, you will improve your outcomes in working with developmental traumas, complex traumas, psychophysiological (psychosomatic) symptoms, and syndromes, instances where high levels of physiological dysregulation and emotional stress typically occur together.
6. Work with all our bodies, not just the physical body
Using the ISP approach, you will learn to use a wide range of somatic self-touch techniques for working with not just our physical body, but also our subtle and collective bodies. With these highly effective somatic techniques, you can, on all levels of the body, quickly:
- undo body defenses to access trauma and other experiences,
- release inherent body resources,
- contain, regulate, and transform trauma and other experiences,
- and make the process safer and more stable for yourself and your clients.
Techniques from Western Osteopathy will help you to work with the physical body and techniques from Eastern Psychology will assist you in working with the subtle and the two collective bodies.
Even if you have no prior background in body psychotherapy, you can quickly learn these simple self-touch techniques and teach them to your clients for use during sessions and for self-help when they are on their own.
This is one of the reasons the complete ISP professional training is offered in just three 4-day modules: ISP is an easy-to-learn approach.
Who can benefit from integrating the ISP approach?
ISP is an ideal complementary post-graduate training for practitioners of all body psychotherapy modalities, including Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, etc.
ISP is also an ideal complementary somatic training for therapists in any modality looking for an easy-to-learn somatic approach to harness the power of the body in their work.
Still unconvinced?
Watch a live demonstration video and see for yourself how ISP can help you confidently guide your clients through deeper emotional work with more stability and safety, and resolve their symptoms faster.
And read my post The One-Body Error in Psychology and Somatics: How to Overcome It?
Become an even more effective trauma therapist in the ISP Professional Training
If you are interested in becoming a more effective trauma therapist, explore the ISP Professional Training, a 12-day capstone training in three 4-day modules.
About Raja Selvam, PhD
Dr. Raja Selvam, a licensed clinical psychologist from the United States, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™) and the author of the bestselling book The practice of embodying emotions: A method for improving cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes in 13 languages. Dr. Selvam teaches his approach in the ISP Professional Training.
Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) professional trauma training program. He has taught in over two dozen countries on six continents for nearly thirty years. His work is inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, Reichan and Neo-Reichian body psychotherapy approaches such as Bioenergetics, Bodynamic Somatic Developmental Psychology from Denmark, and Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India).
Read more about Dr. Raja Selvam