First Posted on July 31, 2010 by alisonball
My initial psychotherapy training was in a neo- Reichian approach. This encouraged trainees in the work as well as would be clients, to be highly emotionally expressive and led to a lot of catharsis. It should be said however, that the particular form of the neo-Reichian therapy that our particular teachers gave us in Australia, also included much time for recovery, relaxation and forms of therapeutic massage and talk in the relationship with the therapist, that allowed for integration of the emotional material. The very best thing about such an approach was that, most students gradually developed a wonderful capacity to tolerate highly emotional states in themselves and in future clients. In today’s language, their “window of tolerance” was greatly widened.
The danger was however, for those who were too fragile to tolerate the relatively rapid breaking down of so-called “defences”. Other ways had to be found for those people and, as early as the late 1980′s our approach to psychotherapy gradually changed. We learned that a much safer route for most people required us to know much more about “boundaries” and “containment”. Some of us turned to the psychoanalytic traditions which were very strong in that knowledge. Others turned to self-psychology and later intersubjectivity. With these influences our focus turned much more to the therapeutic relationship in the room- with client and therapist together making sense of what was happening. We learned about transference and countertransference, how to work with our own responses to the presence of the client and how to recognize and repair empathic failures. And more recently we have learned a great deal more about regulation, self regulation and that “window of tolerance”.
But the other good thing about our initial training was that, within a very strong ethical framework, it allowed for the use of actual physical touch if it seemed appropriate. No longer the false separation of mind and body. As well as the forms of therapeutic massage we had learned ways of working with the breath and breathing but most of all how to foster an awareness of bodily responses, and an “allowing” of those responses. These “techniques”, together with the verbal integration within the relationship, helped to foster change, where mind, brain, feeling , emotion, personal history and self reflection was fully embodied in the person as a whole being.
To me therefore, it is not surprising that, when the burgeoning of knowledge came in the 1990′s, of the neurological basis of attachment and emotional development, it seemed to us that, at long last, science was catching up on what we already knew. And when “trauma” and “relational trauma” suddenly became popularised as the word to describe the experience of many of the clients with whom we already worked, small wonder that we knew that, our members of the Australian Association of Somatic Psychotherapists, were uniquely fitted to give those who need it, the long term, safe and reliable therapeutic relationship that is required.
