By Aylee Welch, LICSW, Body Psychotherapy Topic Expert Contributor

Click here to contact Aylee and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

Human beings are fascinating bio-psycho-social organisms. What makes up a person? Traditional psychotherapy works toward congruence in a person’s thinking, emotions, and actions/reactions. There are many therapeutic techniques that have been developed over time to explore and improve these aspects of our life. We do exist on several levels simultaneously, but are we limited to thoughts, emotions and actions? If we look at life and the human experience we see that there are five basic levels on which we function. There is the Intellect/Thought, and the Emotions and Actions as mentioned above, and we also exist in the physical realm, the level of the Body. For many people there is also an acknowledgment of something larger and beyond ourselves and the “seen” world that contributes to our life force. Many people have experiences in the Spiritual realm that is considered an additional level of existence. Therefore a person is a psychosomatic unity (psyche plus soma, meaning physical) that exists on all five levels. Body-oriented therapy (Somatic approaches, Core Energetics, Core Evolution, Bio-Energetics, Bio-dynamics) understands that the body is profoundly affected by our life experiences and the body, in turn, affects our future.

A person is a psychosomatic unity on five levels of existence.

These five levels are inter-related, they are separate and function independently, but they also work together. They are informed by one another and together they make up the whole person. They are formed by and affected by many forces such as genetics, culture, family history and personal experience, especially early life experiences that occur when we are the most vulnerable. Additionally, our experience on these 5 levels are being co-created all of the time. They can be influenced and changed. This is what gives therapy the potential to be fruitful. Body-Psychotherapy works on all of these levels in order have a strong chance for long-term benefits. Many body-oriented therapies also understand and take into consideration the developmental stage at which a person is impacted in order to discover how one’s experiences lead to their present request for help. The same experience would affect a 2 year and a 15 year quite differently. Future articles will demonstrate how this developmental aspect of problems can be traced in the system and healed.

Our awareness, the skill we have to make sense of and use the information that comes to us, is a large part of what is impacted in therapy. Because the five levels of existence are intrinsically related, each one is a gateway to the others. Let’s look at the level of emotion and see how it relates to the other levels. Emotions are experienced in our body, we perceive our emotion through the movement of energy in the body resulting in physical sensations. Emotions actually have a physiological component to them. Think of the language we use to depict emotion. We state we have “butterflies in our stomach” or that someone is a “pain in the neck”. We really actually feel the sensation of pain in our heart muscle over love gone astray when we are “heartbroken”. These physical cues can help us to become aware of our emotional life if we are out of touch.

E-motions are exactly this: energy in motion. The function of energy is to accomplish work. Think about a young child’s capacity to allow emotion. One minute they are playing happily and when something frustrating or hurtful happens they express their frustration or tears (if the child is in a safe environment). In just a short while, after the energy has moved, they go right on playing. Given the opportunity, we are constantly learning and using the information from the e-motion. Emotions are generated from a stimulus. The work of emotions expressed is to move the energy that is created by the reaction to the stimulus out of the body, and to inform the other levels of our being of the experience. From this learning a belief will develop that leads to action. For example if the child became frustrated or hurt by a particular game, she is more likely to choose a different game the next time. Thus: pain in her body (say the cat scratched her) affects her emotion (WaHHH!), which affects her thoughts (Bad Toy!) and affects her will/ actions (avoid that game). Here we can see the interconnectedness of all of the levels of existence.

All of our experiences are recorded in the body as images. When an experience is not fully processed on all five of the levels blocks may occur and lead to distortions of perception on one level or each of the levels, leading to incongruence in our lives either between the levels or between the person’s perception and what is really occurring in the present moment. Body-Psychotherapy is a fluid way of working between the levels to identify and release old images, attitudes and experiences held in our system that affect our life choices and patterns. Body-Psychotherapy opens and energizes the system and allows people to have new experiences and to make substantial changes in their lives. As a GoodTherapy.org Body-Psychotherapy topic expert contributor I look forward to writing more articles and facilitating discussions that will describe how this works.

©Copyright 2009 by Aylee Welch, LICSW. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Aylee and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile