Couples and Body Therapy

Barbara Jo Brothers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317788201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bring the physical dimension into your therapeutic work with couples! This helpful book offers couples therapists new and powerful techniques derived from several body-oriented therapies. This fresh approach can help you identify the hidden conflicts and attitudes of your clients. Couples and Body Therapy offers you exercises, tips, and practical suggestions for helping troubled couples. In Couples and Body Therapy, expert therapists candidly discuss the dangers and benefits of using touch to heal. Their discussion of whether, when, how, and whom to touch clients includes valuable suggestions for working through transference and countertransference, as well as for dealing with hostile clients and obtaining informed consent to touch. Couples and Body Therapy provides thoughtful explorations of the ideas and methods of well-regarded experts--including Virginia Satir, Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, John Pierrakos, Fritz Perls, Stanley Keleman, and John Gutman--as they apply to the physical expression of emotional states. This book draws from a number of powerful bodywork systems, including:

• core energetics
• biodynamic analysis
• formative psychology
• Hakomi
• Gestalt

Use it to learn the healing skills of body-oriented therapies, including:

• centering yourself before sessions
• giving voice to your clients' body messages
• doing effective energy assessments
• reading posture, gesture, and somatic signals
• using concentration exercises and grounding techniques

Plentifully illustrated with case studies, Couples and Body Therapy is essential reading for therapists, educators, and students. It offers a repertoire of skills to give you fresh and innovative ways to uncover and heal problems in couples.

Virginia Satir and Body-Mind-Soul

Barbara Jo Brothers

SUMMARY. Featured are excerpts from several edited, transcribed lectures, from 1972–1987, by Virginia Satir on the relationship between body, mind, and soul. The excerpts are woven together with comments, explications, and clarification by the author. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> ©2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Body, mind, soul, affective, cognitive, verbal, non-verbal, cancer, congruence, double messages, interaction

Virginia Satir was about wholeness. Never one dimensional, she always included the body “in the equation” when training, treating, or educating human beings. Virginia considered the specific body-mind-soul of a given person to be one entity. A person is a “manifestation of Life” (Satir, 1987, tape 5) and, by definition, a sacred embodiment. She observed that matters of the spirit also have a direct relationship to styles of interaction. In her work with people, she would aim to stay tuned, at all times, to the three-in-one in herself as well as in the clients and trainees.

Connecting Body and Soul

Universal Personal Resources

Making the connection between spirituality and sensuality-joining body and soul, if you will-Virginia (1983)¹ addresses what constitutes “self.” The following excerpt comes after discussion of the role of the senses, under the heading “Universal Personal Resources.” She is drawing a “Self Mandala” on the blackboard. She says:

Now in the center I want you to make a circle and in that center I want you to write “I.” This is all personal, there isn’t anything else that isn’t personal. Have you ever been aware that there is nothing impersonal in life? Everything is personal; it has to be. So let us forget that nonsense about being personal or impersonal; there isn’t any such thing. If I’m doing it, I’m doing it; that’s me and that’s personal.

That is “I.” And I want to write the word on the top: “sacred.” And on the bottom I want to write: “holy”-and on one side I want to write: “cosmic joke” and on the other side: “cosmic event.” (Banmen and Satir, 1983, pp. 241–242)

She goes on about the body, saying:

Now every “I” ... sits in a temple. And that temple, a place for the “I” to live, is a body. You can call it anything you want but I call [it] the temple-the body. It houses that “I,” that sacred, holy, cosmic event and joke, which you are and I am-different things at different times. So everything physical would be in that, all the things we talk about as physical. . . . (Banmen and Satir, 1983, p. 242)

She goes on to say:

The holes that we have we call the senses, but I would like you to see or hear, “Sense” and think, “Hole”-and when you think “hole,” you think something moving back and forth. Something moving out, something moving in. And without these holes we cannot live. We cannot live. . . . Each of those holes is capable of putting something out and taking something in. [They are] the literal channels for taking in and giving out. (1983, p. 244)

Connecting Mind and Heart

Connecting mind and heart, Virginia explains the distinction between the cognitive message and the affective message:

The cognitive comes from a totally different place than the affective. The cognitive is that which is made up of the “shoulds,” the “oughts” and intellectual output. . . . The affective is the body thermometer ... it is the active manifestation of what is going on in the body. (1987, tape 5)

Profound problems are often created when a given Sam or Sally Jones’ cognitive message doesn’t match his/her affective message-when a person is feeling one thing and saying another.

... it is possible for these two messages to be split. Cognitive goes this way and the affective goes that way. When we have that, we have what is called an “incongruent message,” meaning that the words and the rest don’t match. (1987, tape 5)

Virginia spoke of the power of inhuman system rules, dysfunctional rules taught by parents to children. She set up an exercise to demonstrate the potentially destructive effect of “I must never lie” as a cognitive message:

“I can never lie.” What did your body feel like [during this demonstration]?

“Nonsense.”

Okay, but what is a nonsense feeling?

“It’s not true.”

It is an untruth and our bodies love truth. (Satir, 1987, tape 5)

Using the participants’ sensual reaction to the demonstration, Virginia has pointed out the way body reacts to thought and feeling:

How people convey things back and forth: the [definition] I give communication. I think that is a relatively easy definition: communication is the giving and receiving of information between two people. That’s how it always goes. It is just giving and receiving information. When somebody coughs, what kind of information does the other one receive? Just ask yourself that. If you go beyond words and think about it, when you cross your legs, or you uncross your legs, or lift your head, or say “poof,” or your skin color changes, or you get a lump some place, no matter what, all of that is communication. The giving and receiving of information. (1987, tape 5)

Virginia makes the point that physical symptoms are a message from the bodied aspect of the self.

These are her observations about the influence of thought and feeling on body and vice versa.

I watched people, thousands of them. I have told you that I’m fifty-one years in the field this year, so you can imagine how many different interactions I have seen over time. Lots and lots and lots of them. At a certain point . . . one day a grid appeared to me ... I saw that the communication that was related to dysfunctional behavior was related to people not enjoying their lives and was one of these four forms. (1987, tape 5)²

Particularly in the beginning years of Virginia’s professional career, circa 1948, therapy focused on the cognitive almost exclusively. Gestalt therapy was born later. Psychodrama was born even later. She goes on to say:

In information, there is (1) cognitive information, there is (2) emotional information, and there is (3) sensual information. What Ernie [Rossi] talks about in his book [on the psychobiology of healing] is that when the information from the endocrine system, the neurological system and the immune system don’t find coding ways to connect with each other, they have to separate. In the Western world we have given most of our attention to cognitive information. We read it in a book, we see the words, and the words make the images, but reading it in a book doesn’t show how the person is feeling or thinking or how they are gesturing or how they are breathing ... so it is a totally different thing when we put it into a human context.

I want to give you just enough so that we get a good context for this. If you will remember, when I use information, it is on all levels ... It is not about just giving words. (Satir, 1987, tape 5)

Most of our culture is not tuned in on the psychological level to that emotional information Virginia is talking about. And that is the vital difference. Blocking awareness of emotional information blocks awareness of our nature as whole beings. It also prepares the way for atrocities such as terrorist bombings and the tragedy at Waco at the Branch Davidian compound. All parties involved were focused on their respective causes, regardless of cost to the literal human beings involved.

Blocking that emotional information is a major obstacle to serious movement toward peace on any level-individual, family, or world. If I don’t care how I feel or how you feel, I can do any sort of thing for a principle. That is where the inhumanity comes in-devotion to the cause above the effect on the human beings. Blocking or minimizing that emotional information is what people do when they take the super-reasonable stance³ in communication. The person is, at such a point, trying to cope with the stress of feeling unworthy by simply blocking feeling: you can’t feel bad about yourself if you are not feeling at all.

As I have said in other places (Brothers, 1987,1989, pace Virginia Satir), a body also pays a high price for muting such information. It trains the glands to not perform their normal function simply by continually restraining their output-in Virginia’s more colorful words, there being “a juice for every emotion.” If the emotions don’t flow, the “juices” don’t flow.

Good therapists know the cognitive must not be emphasized at the expense of the affective. Virginia makes the connection between affect and the body:

To finish this, I’m going to put it into an interactional frame. Here is the cognitive and the affective. That brings out the message, Then, somebody over here is receiving that message. Bear in mind that when somebody’s cognitive message and affective message aren’t together, they are coming from two different places. The cognitive comes from a totally different place than the affective. The cognitive is that which is made up of the “shoulds,” the “oughts” and intellectual output, so to speak. The brain is very capable of doing all kinds of wonderful things all by itself. The affective is the body thermometer. Remember that the body is the thermometer and it is the active manifestation of what is going on in the body [body/mind/soul system].

. . . Cognitive, in a way, is a “should” message and you can say that the affective is the “end” message. When I do the pull out here, I put the affective message on one side and the cognitive on the other. [Then] you can say that it is thought and feeling that don’t go together. (Satir, 1987, tape 5)

Virginia’s point is that, whatever a person says with words-whatever lie they tell either to self or to others-the truth in regard to affect will show in the body. I can “do cognitive” however I want to, but there is always the flow of the affective underneath the verbiage. However metaphorical the “dials and gauges,” the body measures and displays feelings. If one is conscious in regard to one’s interior processes, the feelings can be verbalized-and one can cry or sweat or blush. If the feelings are not conscious, not in awareness, the body still registers them-still quivers, gurgles, and crackles the chemistry and the electromagnetism. The therapist who has trained herself to watch the body of herself and of the other can see bodily manifestations and help bring them to the awareness of the other.

To spare clients the disrespect of “interpretation,” Virginia was meticulously careful to only describe what she saw, then maybe inquire as to its meaning: “I see your eyebrows knit together right now. Are you aware of that?” Often all that was necessary was for her to just notice the body behavior and draw it to the person’s attention. Usually, the person would then become aware of feeling angry or feeling puzzled–or whatever feeling went with the eyebrows.

Talking about cognition and affect was preliminary to Virginia’s making her explanation of the need for one of her major vehicles⁴–Family Reconstruction.

This [parent-child interaction] is where, I think, we learned about feeling. Affect is about feeling. Cognition is about the intellect. The mother, who cannot herself stand the idea that she is feeling afraid or that she is feeling guilty, whatever it is [that she is feeling], has to say to the child, “It isn’t true what you see.” Everyone of us . . . with very few exceptions, got this experience from our parents. The reason for it was not because they wanted to hurt us, but because the cognitive part of what they “should be” didn’t match the way they felt. Then, the child tries to make sense out of this.

This is where we come into the [family] reconstruction business. You can [then] understand how come you got such crazy messages. You couldn’t find out what was going on. It was because the “should” of a person in your parent wasn’t equal in their mind or [wasn’t] available [so] that they could openly say where they were. They couldn’t say they were afraid. They couldn’t say they felt hurt or whatever it was. They had to do the defensive reaction.

When you can get no validation cognitively or affectively, two people cannot communicate this way. It’s confusing, and the kid in us doesn’t comprehend and that’s where schizophren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Preface
• Virginia Satir and Body-Mind-Soul
• Grounding in Couples Core Energetic Therapy
• Core Energetic Couples Therapy: An Integrated Approach
• Sexuality and Intimacy in Couples Therapy: The Journey of the Soul
• Keeping It Up
• Couples Therapy as a Formative Process
• Touch in Psychotherapy
• Body Psychotherapy with Couples: Using the Seven Developmental Stages Model of Bodynamic Analysis
• Working Experientially and Somatically with Couples
• Method Acting and Gestalt Therapy with Couples
• Index