Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy

The body, for a host of reasons, has been left out of the "talking cure."

Psychotherapists who have been trained in models of psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, or cognitive therapeutic approaches are skilled at listening to the language and affect of the client. They track the clients' associations, fantasies, and signs of psychic conflict, distress, and defenses. Yet while the majority of therapists are trained to notice the appearance and even the movements of the client's body, thoughtful engagement with the client's embodied experience has remained peripheral to traditional therapeutic interventions. Trauma and the Body is a detailed review of research in neuroscience, trauma, dissociation, and attachment theory that points to the need for an integrative mind-body approach to trauma. The premise of this book is that, by adding body-oriented interventions to their repertoire, traditionally trained therapists can increase the depth and efficacy of their clinical work. Sensorimotor psychotherapy is an approach that builds on traditional psychotherapeutic understanding but includes the body as central in the therapeutic field of awareness, using observational skills, theories, and interventions not usually practiced in psychodynamic psychotherapy. By synthesizing bottom-up and top down interventions, the authors combine the best of both worlds to help chronically traumatized clients find resolution and meaning in their lives and develop a new, somatically integrated sense of self.

Topics addressed include:

• Cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor dimensions of information processing
• modulating arousal
• dyadic regulation and the body
• the orienting response
• defensive subsystems
• adaptation and action systems
• treatment principles
• skills for working with the body in present time
• developing somatic resources for stabilization
• processing

Kekuni Minton, Ph.D., is a faculty member at Naropa University.

Pat Ogden, PhD, is a pioneer in somatic psychology and the founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Clare Pain, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Universities of Toronto and Western Ontario.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is the Cofounder of Mind Your Brain, the Founder and Director of Education of the Mindsight Institute, Founding Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and an international conference speaker. He is a NYTimes-bestselling author of books like Mind, The Mindful Therapist 2nd Edition, The Mindful Brain, Aware, and The Developing Mind, and Founding Editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), with over 1.4 million books sold. Learn more about the IPNB Series at wwnorton.com/ipnbseries.