Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma by Sharon Stanley

Author:Sharon Stanley [Sharon Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317432883
Publisher: Routledge

Case 7.2: Bret and Jim

Bret was a therapist who found himself stymied by emotional identification. During our consultations, he described a series of interactions with Jim, his client of five years. Although Jim had been diagnosed with serious personality disorders, Bret saw steady growth and development in him. However, Bret became disturbed when Jim stopped taking his medications and his psychiatrist dismissed him for noncompliance. In his early life, Jim’s mother had abandoned her family for a religious cult, one that Jim, his father, and brothers entered into only to comply with the demands of his mother. Bret was concerned because Jim had announced that he was moving to the small community where Bret was quite active and highly connected. Bret felt his own rage to the point of vertigo, yet another part of him felt numb, analytical, and compliant about Jim’s announcement. When Bret perceived that Jim was trying to communicate his own rage and powerlessness about his mother’s demand to join a church, he could begin to recognize the emotional contagion and identification that was active in his relationship with Jim. Jim had been effective in communicating the intense immobilization with fear that he had felt in his family, and now that Bret was conscious of his contagion and identification, Jim’s decision to move to his small community could be recognized as an unconscious form of communication, one that could be brought into the intersubjective field for processing.

What had been missing from Bret’s relationship with Jim was a sense of fellow-feeling, a shared sense of “feeling felt,” a deeply personal entering into another’s situation that creates an authentic transcendence of one’s self. Fellow-feeling creates a “change of heart,” a fundamental “change in the innermost nature of reality itself” (Scheler 1954, 59). With the intention of fellow-feeling, one is able to concentrate on cherished, intrinsic qualities in another as well as acknowledge suffering and pain. This form of empathy creates an expansion in our lives that enables us to transcend personal limitations and egocentrism. Fellow-feeling is a primary process of somatic empathy, one that fosters embodiment of the intersubjective field and the sense of shared truth and connection. Engaged in this empathic connection with Jim, Bret was able to stay curious and interested in Jim’s decision to move into his small community. He also let Jim know that he now could feel the emotions Jim was trying to communicate, the rage and powerlessness that led to compliance. This made for a series of very rich and transformative sessions: Jim was deeply touched by Bret’s honesty and humility to feel with him. No longer needing to communicate these feelings by moving into Bret’s community, Jim withdrew his decision and found another neighborhood.

When enactments such as the one between Bret and Jim occur, practices of somatic empathy can clarify the breaches in relationship and contribute to the restoration of connection. The silent, receptive energy of somatic empathy allows the active wisdom of the body to regulate and access hidden dissociated traumatic memories.

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