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Key points
- The capacity to provide psychological and physical safety is called psychobiological attunement.
- Empathy and attunement occur at a psychobioenergetic level, yet psychotherapists rarely cultivate this state.
- The mind and body are both functioning and interactive aspects of the whole.
The Indigenous Mexican village where I began my work was a small crossroads of the expatriate world, a gathering place for the wounded who sought refuge from the past and bargained for forgiveness from the future. Vietnam veterans searching for human connection south of the border limped and ached along on disability funds. Some traveled in a stupor of alcohol and painkillers by day, and others dived for lobsters and octopus in the quiet of the night.
I worked with a varied group of people: Indigenous villagers, expatriates, and tourists. Their bodies were movable installations of pain and stress, where many had stored their memories of trauma for safekeeping. Early in my work, I discovered that people were talking about important, painful, long-forgotten events in response to my touching the areas that hurt, that their bodies longed to tell the stories that their minds preferred to keep quiet.
When I first began my practice, I treated people who came because their bodies hurt with intractable pain. As they relaxed at the table, they talked to me about their lives, and it became apparent that there was a relationship between the source of their bodily pain and the content of their words. As I grew in my capacity to listen, people began to trust me and opened more deeply to their memories, images, and stored pain. Commonly, areas of acute pain were overlays of chronic, ancient pain buried in layers; the first layer was childhood abuse or beatings, followed by accidents associated with high-risk lifestyles, war, or adult rape or violence. These memorable sensations with history were state-dependent and often waiting to emerge; as with Pandora’s box, the contents, once revealed, could not again be shut away.
Touch and Attachment
The capacity to provide psychological and physical safety is called psychobiological attunement (Field, 1985) or affect attunement. Reite and Capitanio (1985) suggest that attachment “represents a neurobiological based and mediated biobehavioral system one of whose major functions is to promote the development and regulation (or modulation) of psychobiological synchrony between organisms.” Parents, caregivers, friends, family members, and companion animals all share attachment behaviors. Therapy can cultivate attachment behaviors appropriately without enabling dependency.
Touch, the original language, accesses the psychobiological template of attachment and is the cynosure of healing for people who were not touched adequately or appropriately as children. On the other hand, psychoanalytic theories of neutrality, withholding, and distancing reflect the antithesis of psychobiological attachment. Psychoanalysis and many verbal psychotherapies are constructs of patriarchy in their privileging of verbal communication.
Hunter (1985) writes, “Our sense of ourselves as separate beings, as ‘subjects,’ is bound up with our entry into the order of language, in which speech becomes a substitute for bodily connection.” She continues, “In patriarchal socialization, the power to formulate sentences coincides developmentally with recognition of the power of the father.” Indeed, the “grist” of psychoanalysis is predicated on the anxiety from withholding gratification. Thus, it is no surprise that feminist analysts developed the cultural-relational treatment model focusing on a shared Somatic Empathy 101 connection.
One of the clinical challenges is to sensitively empathize with a client who has experienced what is often horrific and unimaginable trauma. We emphasize the importance of empathy in the therapeutic relationship and understand the strengths and vulnerabilities of complex trauma survivors. If successful, we help the individual to “make sense” of their trauma, restore a modicum of self-regulating balance, and love self-care. This leads to opportunities for affect attunement with others. Empathy and attunement occur at a psychobioenergetic level, yet, as psychotherapists, we rarely consciously acknowledge or cultivate this state of consciousness.
Somatic Touch Therapy
As a body-oriented psychotherapist, I blend techniques from the counseling and bodywork traditions of massage therapy—deep tissue, abdominal, visceral, lymphatic, and polarity therapy. Like many clinicians, I work eclectically, attuning the method to the client’s needs.
When I develop a contract to work with an individual by integrating talk and touch, I use the term body psychotherapy or somatic psychotherapy. This refers to the integration of bodywork with psychotherapy. The US Association for Body Psychotherapy (2009) defines body psychotherapy as recognizing the continuity and the deep connections that all psycho-corporal processes contribute, in equal fashion, to the organization of the whole person. There is no hierarchical relationship between mind and body, between psyche and soma. They are both functioning and interactive aspects of the whole.
Because complex trauma occurs “at the hands” of other human beings, at some juncture, healing must be rooted in re-establishing somatopsychic resonance with another. Touch is the curative language of the body and is uniquely suited for treating people with posttraumatic stress. Thus, the agents of psychic and somatic disaster, the hands, may hold meta-restorative value as a method that fosters human connection.
Some of the benefits of skillfully applied touch therapies
- Facilitate somatic empathy, a psychobiological attunement prerequisite for attachment and bonding.
- Desensitize and transduce state-dependent memory.
- Facilitate consciousness states associated with alpha, beta, theta, and delta brainwaves.
- Induce trance and simultaneously provide the grounding rod to gain control over dissociative processes.
- Reduce anxiety and deepen sleep.
- Stimulate circulatory, lymphatic, and immune responses.
- Activate neurohormonal responses, including the release of beta-endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin.
- Regulate cortisol levels and stimulate the endocannabinoid system.
- Change body image and improve body concept.
You can learn more about Touch Therapy for Trauma Recovery in my book Rhythms of Recovery.
References
Field, T. (1985). Attachment as psychobiological attunement: Being on the same wavelength. In M. Reite & T. Field (Eds.), The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation (pp. 455–480). Academic Press.
Reite, M., & Capitanio, J. (1985). On the nature of social separation and attachment. In: M. Riete & T. Fields (Eds.), The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation (pp. 223–255). Academic Press.
Hunter, D. (1985). Hysteria, psychoanalysis and feminism: The case of Anna O. In S. N. Garner, C. Kahane, & M. Sprengnether (Eds.), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (pp. 89–115). Cornell University Press.
