psychology

“Healing Trauma” by Peter A. Levine, PhD.

January 5, 2017 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

Recommended to me by: a client

This is a practical, applied introduction to Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing work. After an introductory summary, he presents 12 exercises, starting with body awareness and grounding, continuing with awareness of felt senses in the body, and then moving into completion of fight, flight, and freeze responses. He includes orienting to a sense of normalcy and balance that may be new and unfamiliar. The approach is gentle, accepting, and warm.

A CD is included where he reads the exercises. It’s not really a guided meditation, because, for example, he says, “Tap your left hand … (notice, etc.), okay now move through the rest of the body.”

The exercises aren’t quite in the order I would present them, since starting with body awareness might be challenging for many people. I would start with grounding and resources first.

Recommended for people who want to tools to work with their own trauma, and/or who want to understand the nuts and bolts of Somatic Experiencing.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram

September 10, 2016 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Recommended to me by: David Mitchell

David Abram is both a sleight-of-hand magician, concerned with perception and connection, and a philosopher, concerned with insubstantial ideas. Traveling as a sleight-of-hand magician, he got to know indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. With them, he learned to pay attention to the immediate world of the senses.

This book is a mix of sumptuous sensuous tangible descriptions, and poorly supported abstract ideas. I loved the former, and grumpily argued with the latter as I read. He claims that the alphabet divided us from our immediate participation in the natural world. In the coda, he says that even he doesn’t really believe that; it was just a starting point for discussion.

Yes, we humans are part of the world, not divided from it. Attending to our senses, to the wide, breathing present, nourishes us. Everything is equally alive, equally valid and valuable. Indigenous ways integrate with the world in a sustainable way. Each community’s stories convey urgently useful information about how to thrive in their specific place and time.

This book bridges the abstract world of philosophy with the sensuous world that indigenous peoples have inhabited all along. It casually elides all mention of privilege based on gender, race, wealth, and power. Published in 1996, it changed the conversation about ecology and sustainability.

Recommended as food for thought about how you want to connect with the world around you.

Book excerpt.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Unintentional Music” by Lane Arye

August 23, 2016 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Releasing Your Deepest Creativity

Recommended to me by: a friend

This is a wonderful introduction to Process Work via making music.

There is the primary signal – the music we want to make – and the secondary signals – all the mistakes, hesitations, and imperfections that pop up despite our best efforts. Lane Arye recommends emphasizing a secondary signal and seeing what happens. Probably, another secondary signal will emerge.

Following the chain of secondary signals can lead directly to core issues and allow them to change. It can lead organically to more effective technique. It can connect us to what our spirit wants to express.

Highly recommended if you make music or art or want to learn about Process Work in a playful way.

The introduction and first chapter are available on Lane Arye’s website.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame” by Patricia A. DeYoung

May 23, 2016 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

Recommended to me by: Ani Rose Whaleswan

Patricia DeYoung says that although shame feels like a one-person problem, believing “There is something terribly wrong with me,” she defines it as a relational problem: Shame is an experience of our felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other. Expecting attunement or regulation, we experience fragmentation instead, and immediately push that intolerable experience out of consciousness.

Shame is healed by right-brain connection, not left-brain reasoning and affirmations.

The book is filled with both lively client stories and technical psychological theory. It’s validating to know that researchers are beginning to understand relational trauma at a neurological level. It’s even better to know that relational therapists are holding this information about shame compassionately in mind while creating a healing space for their clients.

When our clients are able to feel their shame, letting the light and air get at it, we must stay honestly present with them. We have to encourage them to feel this most difficult emotion when what we want to say is: No, you are not ugly or worthless. No, I have never experienced you as selfish or stupid. Of course we would like to convince them that they are worthy, lovable persons. Instead, we must help them push through the language of ugly, stupid and worthless to the even more painful feelings of deep shame, feelings of not mattering at all to anyone, feelings of needing someone and finding no one, and feelings of disintegration and annihilation.

(Italics in original)

There is procedural advice for therapists: how to create a non-shaming environment, how to co-create narratives that include right-brain processing, how to discuss shame directly. Oddly, for a book about right-brain healing, touch is not mentioned anywhere.

Unlike many books that skip over the disorganized attachment style, this book addresses it and its “fearful chaos” directly.

The book also discusses mutual enactment, when client and therapist trigger each other’s deep shame, and yet keep working together with underlying good intentions. The mutually stuck pattern shifts not with dramatic insights, but incrementally, yielding little by little to moments of seeing each other more as whole people rather than just threats.

Highly recommended for therapists and others willing to wade through sections of psychological theory.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Hold Me Tight” by Dr. Sue Johnson

April 8, 2016 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, applies attachment theory to adult relationships, and everything suddenly makes sense. Attachment relationships provide an anchor and sense of safety in the world. They feel just as essential to our survival as attachment relationships do to children, so it makes sense we fight or flee when they feel threatened.

The seven conversations are:

Recognize Demon Dialogues – look underneath for attachment fears, and see how both people contribute to patterns.
- Find the Bad Guy – casting blame for distress
- Protest Polka – one person withdraws, the other makes demands, in a cycle
- Freeze and Flee – both people withdraw, and the relationship is on its deathbed
Find the Raw Spots – identify triggers for attachment longings and fears.
Revisit a Rocky Moment – talk through a past conversation that didn’t go well, taking into account patterns, raw spots, and deeper emotions.
Hold Me Tight – emotional attunement, accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. Each person tunes into their own emotions and shares what they are most afraid of, and then the attachment longing that is live in that moment. Hopefully the partner turns toward them and fulfills the longing, creating a new bonding experience. The person who usually withdraws goes first.
Forgiving Attachment Injuries – relationship traumas, usually involving some kind of abandonment, need to be healed, not ignored.
1. The hurt partner speaks their pain as openly and simply as possible.
2. The injuring partner stays emotionally present and acknowledges the wounded partner’s pain and their part in it.
3. Emotionally connect around this, start rebuilding trust.
4. Injuring partner takes ownership and expresses regret and remorse.
5. Hold Me Tight conversation centered around the attachment injury – what is needed now to bring comfort and closure. Hopefully the injuring partner fulfills this.
6. Create a narrative that captures the injuring event and how it is being healed.
Bonding Through Sex and Touch – bring emotional connection, communication, and trust to touch and sex.
Keep Your Love Alive – name ways to reconnect when a Demon Dialogue crops up, celebrate the positive moments, discuss attachment needs and issues, make rituals for separation and reunion, create an ongoing story of the living relationship, create a vision for the relationship in the future.

There is more than one gay couple in this book! And one couple of Asian descent. Women and men are individuals, not stereotyped caricatures. The client stories are realistic, practical, and encouraging.

Despite the pop-psych title and Overuse of Capital Letters, this book is solidly researched and makes a lot of sense. Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

Also read Dr. Sue Johnson’s more recent Love Sense, which covers a lot of the same material, with more information about the neurochemistry of attachment. Oddly, she leaves out the disorganized attachment style entirely. There is an extended example of a couple repairing their relationship.

“Your Body Knows the Answer” by David I. Rome

March 13, 2016 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change & Liberate Creativity

This is a gentle, step by step introduction to Focusing, with exercises for each section and personal annotated examples of Focusing sessions. David Rome calls his approach Mindful Focusing. He explains how to be with ourselves in a Focusing way without a Companion to hold space for us.

It starts with GAP, Grounded Aware Presence. Settle into the support of your chair, or the ground if you’re standing. Notice the sights and sounds of your environment. Sense into your heart and breathing, right in this moment. I like the quick simplicity of that.

The second exercise is friendly attending, being with whatever comes the way we would be with a shy frightened creature, available, observant, warm, allowing it to approach when it’s ready.

The book continues with gateways to the felt sense (mind, body, emotions), and working with felt senses in the context of specific situations. The second half talks about finding actions steps, deep listening with others, and working with conflicts.

There are a lot of words about how to find a felt sense and how to interact with it. I’m still not sure when I’m in contact with one and when I’m in contact with something different (but what would that be). It seems to be part of Focusing for me to be uncertain if I’m doing it right.

Recommended for people interested in exploring Focusing, especially those already familiar with mindfulness practice.

Available at bookshop.org (half-price on remainder as of 12-Mar-2016).