BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma

An Embodied Therapeutic Approach

Marian Dunlea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429677267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the NAAP 2019 Gradiva® Award!

Winner of the IAJS Book Award for Best Book published in 2019!

Marian Dunlea's BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: An Embodied Therapeutic Approach provides a theoretical and practical guide for working with early developmental trauma. This interdisciplinary approach explores the interconnection of body, mind and psyche, offering a masterful tool for restoring balance and healing developmental trauma.

BodyDreaming is a somatically focused therapeutic method, drawing on the findings of neuroscience, analytical psychology, attachment theory and trauma therapy. In Part I, Dunlea defines BodyDreaming and its origins, placing it in the context of a dysregulated contemporary world. Part II explains how the brain works in relation to the BodyDreaming approach: providing an accessible outline of neuroscientific theory, structures and neuroanatomy in attunement, affect regulation, attachment patterns, transference and countertransference, and the resolution of trauma throughout the body. In Part III, through detailed transcripts from sessions with clients, Dunlea demonstrates the positive impact of BodyDreaming on attachment patterns and developmental trauma. This somatic approach complements and enhances psychobiological, developmental and psychoanalytic interventions. BodyDreaming restores balance to a dysregulated psyche and nervous system that activates our innate capacity for healing, changing our default response of "fight, flight or freeze" and creating new neural pathways. Dunlea's emphasis on attunement to build a restorative relationship with the sensing body creates a core sense of self, providing a secure base for healing developmental trauma.

Innovative and practical, and with a foreword by Donald E. Kalsched, BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: An Embodied Therapeutic Approach will be essential reading for psychotherapists, analytical psychologists and therapists with a Jungian background, arts therapists, dance and movement therapists, and body workers interested in learning how to work with both body and psyche in their practices.

Part I

Setting the Scene

A Note to the Reader

How This Book Works

The first section, Introducing BodyDreaming presents the poignant image of the ancient Cairn at Newgrange, Ireland, at the time of the Winter Solstice—an image that serves as an overarching metaphor capturing the essence of BodyDreaming. The section goes on to outline BodyDreaming theory and practice. Then, in Why This Book Now: The Origins of BodyDreaming, I trace the story of my background and the various psychotherapeutic modalities in which I trained and which inform my development of BodyDreaming. This is followed by an Invitation to the Reader to engage as experientially as possible with the BodyDreaming processes described in the excerpts from case studies and group sessions that form the main body of the text. Practical guidance on how to engage with the text in this way is also provided.

Chapter 1, How the Brain Works, explains the essential terminology and key concepts used throughout the text. It describes the way the brain functions and how the brain is currently understood to affect and be affected by body and psyche. This chapter provides an overview of recent developments in neuroscientific research and addresses ways in which neurophysiological theory impacts, informs, and supports therapeutic practice; it also introduces key theories of scientists, thinkers, practitioners and analysts whose research has a direct bearing on the development of BodyDreaming work.

Each of the following chapters takes as its focus essential elements in BodyDreaming therapeutic practice, the goal of which is to establish greater coherence in our dysregulated systems. By uncovering buried emotions and releasing blocked energy, BodyDreaming enables us consciously to align with the body-mind and psyche’s innate capacity for affect regulation and homeostasis. To this end, key concepts outlined in Chapter 1 are revisited, and detailed examples from BodyDreaming sessions are used to illustrate the relevance of therapeutic, psychological, and neuroscientific theories. My observations and interventions are included in parentheses, as are explanations of the client’s behaviour and responses. At key points in each excerpted session, case material is punctuated with theoretical asides and explanations of what might be occurring physiologically, in the brain, from the perspectives of neuroscience, developmental theory, and Jungian psychology.

The Bibliography provides a comprehensive list of texts I have found essential to my research and will, I hope, serve as a stimulus to further reading.

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INTRODUCING BODYDREAMING

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night ... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.

(Jung, 1933/4)¹

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Newgrange, or Bru na Boinne as it is known in early Irish texts, translates as the mansion or abode by the Boyne, and was believed to be the home of Dagda, the sun god. It is a megalithic cairn,² a vast, stone, chambered mound that is about 280 feet in diameter and 44 feet high; it is approximately 5,000 years old. It is situated in the Boyne valley, which has the largest number of megalithic tombs in Europe. One enters the cairn through a passageway, which leads to a central chamber with a stunning 19-foot-high corbelled ceiling. There are three recesses, each containing massive stone basins, one to the left, one to the right, and one at the back of the central chamber. Many of the stones that form the cairn are decorated, both along the passageway leading to the chamber and in the central chamber itself.

The mound is built in such a way that on the morning of the Winter Solstice (21 December), and for a few days before and after, a shaft of light from the rising sun penetrates an aperture above the lintel of the entrance. This roof box provides a link between the inside of the cairn and the outside world. As the cairn is built on a slope, sunlight shining through the entrance cannot reach all the way into the chamber. The size and position of the rectangular shape of the roof box allow the shaft of sunlight to inch its way slowly up the length of the passage over a period of 10 minutes, at which point it reaches the central chamber to illuminate the innermost space. For the rest of the year the interior of the cairn lies in darkness. We can only speculate as to the significance of such precise engineering. Baring and Cashford propose that “[t]he ritual enacted must have been one of the sun fertilizing the ‘body’ of the earth and so awakening her after her winter sleep to the renewed cycle of life” (1993, p. 98).

The alignment of sunlight with the passageway leading to the womb-like inner chamber serves as a tangible testament to the belief system of the peoples who constructed the Newgrange cairn. Home to the all-powerful god Dagda, the cairn is the place where, it is said, he lay with the goddess Boinn—a manifestation of the river Boyne—and conceived their son Angus, whose name is translated as the real vigour (Jones, 2007, p. 202). Baring and Cashford suggest that the communal lives of the people of this time “may have been aligned in some way with the cyclic drama taking place in the sky” (1993, p. 97). Undoubtedly their religious beliefs must have inspired the sacred geometry of Bru na Boinne. Its construction suggests a deep sense of the spiritual significance of the cyclic drama of the seasons, celebrating the return of the sun at the darkest point of the year and promising the death of winter, as symbolized by the physical alignment of outer light and inner darkness, a marriage of sky and earth, solar masculine and chthonic feminine energies. On a practical level, the lengthening of the daylight hours as the sun moved into the Northern hemisphere meant the earth once again became warm, fecund, fertile, and ready for planting, ensuring the continuance of life in body, in matter.³

The Gnostics believed that in the process of creation, Sophia, the divine wisdom and feminine aspect of God, descended into earth, into matter. During the course of her descent “she became lost and imprisoned in matter, thus becoming the hidden God which is in need of release and redemption” (Edinger, 1972, p. 102). At Newgrange, on the Winter Solstice, the sun’s rays penetrate matter and illuminate the darkness. I understand this image as a metaphor for the awakening of the feminine principle⁴ in matter. The earth awaits the sun’s penetration (the masculine principle), and the resultant conjoining or coniunctio of sun and earth, spirit and matter carries with it promise of regeneration. Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, writes that “our whole world runs on the Inner Marriage—on that day-and-night principle where there’s obviously a time of opening and receiving (the feminine), and where there’s an alternate time of thrusting and permeating (the masculine). The two energies work together. They are complementary” (in conversation with Ryley, 1998, p. 76). The annual occurrence at Bru na Boinne serves well as a fundamental orienting image of psychological alignment, or the ego’s conscious alignment with the organizing principle of the psyche which Jung calls the Self—that is, alignment within and without, the conjunction or marriage of light and matter initiating regeneration and possibility. I will use it as such throughout the text.

Thousands of years after the construction of the site at Newgrange, the alchemists of the Medieval and Renaissance periods actively explored the relationship between matter and spirit, darkness and light. They “discover[ed] that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness” (Jung, 1942, par. 197). The alchemists, in many ways the forerunners of modern scientists, understood the complementarity of light and dark, and the essential unity of all things. Paracelsus, for one, believed that:

Not separation of the natures but the union of the natures was the goal of alchemy. … Nature not only contains a process of transformation—it is itself transformation. It strives not for isolation but for union, for the wedding feast followed by death and rebirth.

(Jung, 1942, par. 198)

At Newgrange, the transformation and “union of the natures” of which Paracelsus speaks is represented, for me, by the shaft of sunlight that penetrates the stone passageway into the inner chamber, symbolic of the transformative and generative powers of Nature. However, the roots of the alchemists’ investigations were pagan, and the alchemical tradition of the Middle Ages in Europe ran counter to the mainstream tradition of Christianity which turned pagan deities into demons, separated light from dark, spirit from matter, soul—or psyche—from the body, and so, according to Jung, “alienated man from his own nature” (ibid.). Like the alchemists of the Middle Ages, Jung argues that humankind’s “true” nature is not only physical but psychic, in other words, it comprises both matter and spirit.

What occurs at Newgrange at the Winter Solstice serves well as a poignant metaphor for BodyDreaming work. The passageway at Newgrange is precisely oriented toward the sunrise in order that the sun’s rays pierce the darkness of the inner chamber spiral. In the practice of BodyDreaming, when the client’s system is activated, the therapist invites her to orient outward, allowing the senses to be drawn wherever they want to go, allowing the eyes to settle on an object that draws her attention in a positive way.⁵ This engages the client’s curiosity and has the effect not only of bringing her into the ‘here and now’ but also, as Hoskinson suggests, short-circuiting the habitual response to threat, the repetitive pattern of paying attention to danger; it has the calming effect of regulating the nervous system.⁶ For example, in BodyDreaming work the client often begins by simply speaking a dream. She may already be activated—heart racing, anxious, with shortness of breath and clammy hands—as the act of speaking the dream may have made her apprehensive in anticipation of all that is as yet unknown about its content. The activation in the nervous system is short-circuited when she allows her eyes to focus on what attracts them. This calms the system and simultaneously engages both the Social Engagement System⁷ and the right hemisphere of the brain. As soon as a dream is spoken, left-hemisphere consciousness grabs hold of it, trying to control, analyze, categorize, and fix the dream images in time and space. If, however, we shift our attention and orient to the outside, we are, by that action, inviting the right hemisphere’s relational, curious nature to connect us to our surroundings. This change in orientation from inner to outer awareness is facilitated by the Social Engagement System which comprises the muscles of the face and head, i.e., the eyes, ears, jaw, throat and neck, and has a direct calming impact on the heart rate, pulse rate and breathing, enabling us to recalibrate the nervous system to a state of homeostasis.⁸ No longer activated, we are more receptive and better able to open to whatever new thing is presented in the dream as well as to any associated feelings in the body.

By orienting to our surroundings we begin to experience a participatory relationship with the world psyche or soul. Exploration of the relationship between inner sensation and outer experience grounds us simultaneously in the here and now of the body and in the material world around us. David Abram, influenced by the philosophy of French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, speaks to the connection he makes with a partic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Credits and Permissions
• Part I Setting the Scene
• Part II Neuroscientific Background
• Part III BodyDreaming in Clinical Practice
• Conclusion: “Let your hands touch something that makes your eyes smile”
• Bibliography
• Index