Points To Ponder

WORKING WITH TRAUMA

“Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity—which is why, in addressing trauma, each of us needs to work through it slowly, over time.

We need to understand our body’s process of connection and settling. We need to slow ourselves down and learn to lean into uncertainty, rather than away from it.

We need to ground ourselves, touch the pain or discomfort inside our trauma, and explore it—gently.

This requires building a tolerance for bodily and emotional discomfort, and learning to stay present with—rather than trying to flee—that discomfort.”

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW. My Grandmother’s Hands (pp. 13-14). Central Recovery Press, LLC. Kindle Edition.

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SOMATIC PSYCHOTHERAPY IS ABOUT BEING NOT DOING.

“Being is the state of aliveness of the body. The more alive the greater the being.

Being is reduced by every chronic tension that restricts the motility of the body. that decreases its respiration and blocks its expressiveness.

It is enhanced every time we allow ourselves to feel deeply and to express our feelings in appropriate action.

There is one further aspect of the antithesis between being and doing that needs some discussion.

IF WE ARE AFRAID OF BEING, OF LIFE, WE CAN MASK THIS FEAR BY INCREASING OUR DOING.

The busier we become, the less time we will have available for feeling, being and living.  And we can delude ourselves into believing that doing is being and living.

We can measure our life by what we accomplish rather than by the richness and fullness of our experience.

In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life.

And as long as this fear persists in a person’s unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.”

Fear of Life, pg 107, by Dr Alexander Lowen

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ON THE DANGERS OF DIAGNOSIS

Here’s a quote from Irvin Yalom, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University:

“What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said?
Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that.
That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines.

Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label.”

― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch

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“I know that it was not the books that I read , it was not my teachers or my study of philosophy, nor was it my training to become a psychoanalyst that provided me with this knowledge.

On the contrary, all of these together, with their mystifying conceptualization and their rejection of reality, prevented me from recognising the truth for years.

Surprisingly, it was the child in me – condemned to silence long ago, abused exploited and turned to stone – who finally found her feelings and along with them her speech and told me, in pain, her story.

Thus it was my story I was telling in The Drama and many people saw their own mirrored in it”

from The Drama of Being A Child, by Alice Miller, New Preface 1986, pgs xii and xiii

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