Body Psychotherapy. Vassilis Christodoulou
she did not know. There was no assistance from her conscious mind. I knew, however, that our connection in the eternal present, which is beyond all normal time, would help us overcome this obstacle… A slight sensation at a particular point in the sole of my foot led me to exert pressure at the same point on the sole of her foot. At first her body convulsed, then shook, then she began to cry loudly…
In front of everybody, in front of the little kiddies… in front of my friend… why, oh why?
There was anger, there was resentment, yet when the time came for her to claim and defend her personal space, she was initially overcome with paralysing feelings of guilt. She could feel her father’s belt lashing her body. She felt so ashamed that her mental anguish eclipsed her physical pain:
In front of my friend, in front of the little kiddies… Oh my God, I want to murder them and get out of here! I don’t want to hear their voices ever again!
She was afraid of her anger; it was lethal. At first she did not want to tackle or release this anger and she was suffocating with guilt.
But they’re so good to me now…
When, with my support, she allowed her system to release the anger that had built up, she was able to relax:
I’m alright now, I feel as if a weight I never knew I was carrying has been lifted from me… I’m okay…
Psychotherapy: a journey of ‘return’ and unification
Human beings never exist in a cultural vacuum, neither do they grow in isolated independence like trees. The people that come for treatment are, without realising it, seeking the unity they have lost. They invite us to join them on a journey of unification. I prefer to call it a journey of ‘unification’ rather than a journey of ‘return’ because the latter suggests a backward movement and, as I shall show later, this journey only appears to be in a backward direction. The body, the material we work with, dwells in the present. Man’s mind travels in time; the body and the spirit, the unified whole that we call ‘man’, lives in the eternal present of God, where he or she encounters the Spirit that lives in the timeless yet dynamic and never static present.
Our patients, then, invite us to join them on a journey we are familiar with. A journey we made when we held the hand of our own therapist. We entered the maze and from the light of the chest and the upper world we descended into the dark underworld, to the realm of the belly and the emotions. There, in the depths of the unconscious, we encountered the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops and the wild Poseidon and we emerged safely, much wiser for the encounter. And, like the poet, we now know who it is that sets up the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops and the wild Poseidon in front of us, together with all the other things that rule us from the realm of our fears. We are not afraid: we have made the journey, we have seen the fossils of our fears, we have affectionately witnessed the way in which our childishness stacked these fossils up before us like obstacles. We have also learnt, however, to have an infinite respect for our patients when they resist… anything less might cause a new trauma. Like a bright light, the corrective experience will illuminate the shadows and, like a fresh breeze, will blow away all the phantoms that keep people from being their true selves and whole, unified human beings. When each of us went our own way, following his or her own path as a therapist, perhaps at first we only had a faint idea of what we later came to understand very well: the road to maturity is an unending one. Ithaca has not fooled us… however much one discovers one’s own unity as an individual, the achievement of unity with the Whole Man and the circumstances in which he lives constitutes an unending journey through life. The layers in which pain is wrapped conceal real treasures… Many will be content with making just a little progress and many others will refuse to embark on the journey; such reactions are simply natural consequences of the inner fragmentation that has taken place. A direct encounter with trauma is no easy matter… Neither is a direct encounter with trauma enough for us to bring healing to it. Yet such an encounter is necessary, though it may not always take place on a conscious level, in order to introduce the corrective experience which is the only real way to unification.
In some cases the traumas spring up in front of us, like targets created long ago that cannot be ignored. In many cases, however, we will have to do some groundwork, we will have to clear the way, to dismantle obstacles blocking our path, or to build, to create supports and bridges to open up the way to the trauma and to healing. A balanced person is a healthy person and a state of dynamic equilibrium is a healthy state to be in. Whatever upsets the balance, however deep down in the darkness of the unconscious it may be, will show signs of life. The longer we turn down the invitation to confront the trauma, the more formidable the challenge of taking a fresh look at a case we thought had closed will seem. Once, our tendency to flee as quickly as we could from the pain of the trauma was the right response, and indeed may even have saved us. Now, however, we have different capabilities and more choices. We hang on like survivors of a shipwreck to the old, rickety raft battered by the stormy ‘seas’ of our childhood and fail to see the calm waters we are now heading towards. The tried-and-tested formula that once saved us is no longer essential or the right method to use when both we and the world around us have changed. When we refuse to recognise a simple feeling of malaise as a harbinger of something else, we can expect other less persistent but clearly more effective states to follow: panic attacks with sudden bolts from the blue, the depression that deprives us of the joy of living, the phobias that restrict our living space, and other physical illnesses that desperately try, before the final embrace of death, to let us know what is happening in the depths of our being… These are the things that restrict us and inspire fear in us, yet these are also the things that speak to us of new pathways and possibilities. Will we remain in the familiar ‘security’ that the child clings to or will we, as adults, take the frightened child by the hand and, with the therapy we offer, lead it out into the light of day?
We strive to achieve a balance not only in our lives but also in our work. It is essential to achieve a balance in every energy centre we work with because the body needs it in order to live and develop in harmony with its capabilities and its surroundings.
CHAPTER 2
BODY PSYCHOTHERAPY AND ITS LIMITS
Because we work with the body and close contact with it forms part of the therapeutic process, we should not only respect the patient’s boundaries but also ask them frequent questions about our movements and how close we can be to them at any given moment. The experienced therapist knows how to respect a patient’s boundaries without being, or appearing to be, insecure. On the other hand, they know from experience that emotions, transferences and experiences in the therapeutic here and now can change from one moment to the next, and that it is these which determine how close they can get and the quality of their touch. A good and continuous experiential education is, without doubt, essential.
It is not only talent that makes a good therapist. A good therapist should also be a good patient, a person who has acquired, through personal therapy, a good, broad sense of themselves; a person who, recognising their own character-structure, has encountered and dealt with their own blockages in a process in which knowledge passes into and is recorded in the body. Here we are not talking about a ‘perfect’ therapist – the equivalent, say, of a psychoanalyst who has been fully analysed himself. Just as there is no such thing as a perfect parent, there is no such thing as a perfect therapist. Through our training and continuous lifelong education, we try to be as good and effective as we can be in our work as therapists. Besides, who seeks to constantly enrich their knowledge? Only those who believe that, however much they already know, there is always more to learn. And what we learn every day from our patients is simply amazing.
When energy flows freely in the therapist, then it is possible for this energy to make contact with the patient’s energy, and the therapist, in his constant desire to respond to his patient’s needs, will help them to experience the fact that body contact can lead to making a connection and then, in turn, to establishing a relationship, which is the desired aim. In working with the body, we are always in the present. So we encounter the body in the dimension it is living in. And the body always lives in the present. The mind, on the other hand, can travel in whichever time dimension it chooses. The body, like the spirit, knows only the present; the therapy takes place in the present and