Body Process

A Gestalt Approach to Working with the Body in Psychotherapy

James I. Kepner

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317758174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Traditional psychotherapy approaches, focusing on working with and correcting mental events and conditions, have placed little importance on the fundamentally physical nature of the person. Yet many of the problems people bring to therapy are linked with or manifested in the body--such as obesity, psychosomatic distress, chronic tension, and sexual problems. This book provides a therapeutic approach that addresses both the physical and mental nature of clients.In this book, James Kepner shows that a client's posture, movements, and bodily experiences are indeed relevant to therapy, and he offers an insightful framework for incorporating these aspects into a therapeutic framework. This comprehensive treatment explains how body work can be integrated with the aims, methods, and philosophy of psychotherapy, offering a framework within which practitioners of different theoretical approaches can better appreciate body processes in the context of the whole person, rather than as isolated events.This book, including an updated introduction by the author, explores the range of body work in psychotherapy, from the development of body awareness to intensive work with physical structure and expression. And it demonstrates how this approach can be particularly effective with a range of clients, including survivors of sexual abuse, recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, or those suffering from chronic illness.

Part I
Basic Principles

Chapter 1
Self and Embodiment

It seems odd to many people when I suggest that attending to body experience, their own or that of others, can be important in solving problems of daily living: coping with tension, forging relationships, understanding feelings. It may seem odder still to suggest that body experience has relevance to even deeper problems of self, such as identity confusion, emotional conflicts, or a sense of fragmentation. We normally consider “body” to be something other than “self,” and thus irrelevant to the “I” that is struggling with the problems of living a full and meaningful life.

People who are feeling the kind of distress that prompts them to seek help are often intent on getting rid of some uncomfortable body experience. They want to be relieved of the pounding heart and gasping breath that go with anxiety. They want the rushes of anger and the sensations of dread to disappear. They want the discomfort of tense muscles and the constant headaches to be taken away.

In addition to bodily symptoms and discomforts, clients are often at odds with their existence as physical beings. They may think of themselves as ugly or inadequate. They may find that attending to their body experience feels “wrong” too sexual or animalistic. To experience their bodies may have been so associated with pain, sickness, or violation that their bodies have become something to avoid. Thus initially to ask them to attend to this aspect of experience seems counter to the problems for which they are seeking help.

Most therapists also approach therapy from such a disassociated state, although for slightly different reasons. The theories and methods we are taught place the focus of change on mental constructs: conflicts, cognitions interactional loops, and structures of the mind. Body phenomena are considered only as symptoms to be diagnosed, behaviors to be modified, communications to be understood or as symbols for underlying processes.

Added to this is the therapist's degree of contact with his or her own body experience. We frequently feel the same discomfort with our body experience as do our clients. We are products of educational systems and training programs where the intellect is seen as the only relevant tool for dealing with human problems. This is apparent in the work context of the therapist: sitting immobile for hours, barely breathing, listening to and responding from the intellect.

The psychotherapeutic context, however, is not the only factor undermining the linkage of body and self. Our language encourages the distinction between body and “I.” We have no single word that allows us to say “I-body.” At the most we might say “my body” in much the same way we might refer to “my car,” implying that one's body is property, but certainly not self. Our language supports the notion that our body is an object: something that happens to me, rather than the “me that is happening.”

Given this commonly disassociative experience of the body, it is no wonder that suggestions to consider one's body as self and body experience as experience of oneself are met with consternation. What do I mean to suggest such a thing?

BODY EXPERIENCE AS EXPERIENCE OF SELF

In keeping with the experiential focus of this book, I offer an experiment to focus you on your own body experience and the link between your sense of self and sense of body.

Just as you are sitting, without intentionally altering your body posture or position, begin to attend to your body experience. What are your first sensations? What tensions do you feel? Where? How are you breathing: fast, slow, deep? What is your posture? Are you “holding yourself up” or allowing the chair to support you? Are you slouched or loose or straight or rigid? How does that sitting posture affect your breathing?

So far you have just begun the process of attending to your body experience. Many people tell me that they don't feel anything when they first focus on their body. If this is true for you, then this lack of feeling is itself an important statement about your sense of “self.” But most people will have some sensation of their body processes; if you stay with attending to your body patiently enough, the details will become richer and fuller.

As you continue to attend to your body experience, make statements, silently or aloud, starting for example, with: “Right now I notice that my breathing feels tight and shallow.” “Right now I notice warmth in my belly.” Take your time. Let the statements help you to focus on your body experience at this moment.

You may notice that some sensations stand out more than others. You may be more aware of your breathing or of your posture, or perhaps of tension in your neck or legs. In Gestalt terms these sensations are figures that stand out against the general background of your body experience. A figure, something outstanding in your awareness, begins to draw attention and gain energy if it has importance for your self.

Now try changing the “I notice…” to “I am…,” so as to experiment with connecting your “I” to your body experience. For example, change “I notice tension in my shoulders” to “I am tensing my shoulders.” Change “I notice weakness in my arms,” to “I am weak in my arms.” Continue this for five or six statements.

What happens when you shift to the use of the term “I” in reference to your body experience? Some people protest the implication of ownership: “I do not tense my shoulders, they are just like that.” If you felt this urge to protest, then I would ask: Who is tensing your shoulder if not you? Tension is something you do to yourself in response to something. But you may not yet experience your tension clearly enough to feel that it is you who is producing it Let us return to the body experiment to see if we can bring an even fuller sense of “I” to your body process.

Focus your attention on the two or three sensations of tension that stand out most for you. Taking one at a time, how would you describe the character of this tension? Does it feel like compressing? Holding on? Tightening? Binding? Bracing? It might help you to consciously exaggerate the tension so as to get a clearer sense of the character of the tension.

Using the words that describe the character of the tensions (they may be different tensions), let me suggest an additional experiment Assume, for the sake of our experiment, that your body is your “self.” If, for example, the character of one of the tensions on which you focused was that of “compression,” use that word to make a two-part statement about yourself: “I am compressing myself, and this is my existence.” Or, “I am containing myself, and this is my existence.”

Repeat the statements a couple of times to fully appreciate their meaning to you. Feel the impact of considering your bodily state to be descriptive of your existential state.

If you have been doing the experiment and not simply reading about it, one or two of your statements may have become meaningful to you. Perhaps you were able to express something directly that previously you had only vaguely experienced. You might have experienced the “click” of recognition between your physical experience and your sense of present life or some past situation.

Or perhaps you had a difficult time finding anything meaningful within your body experience. You stopped halfway through the experiment, or noticed “nothing” about your body, or felt only “trivial” sensations. In the context of the experiment I would ask you to make statements about your difficulties in the same way that I asked you to make statements about your body experience:

“I don't feel comfortable attending to my body, and this is my existence.”

“I don't feel much of myself, and this is my existence.”

“My body is trivial to me, and this is my existence.”

Your resistance, discomfort, or sense of meaninglessness is just as much a statement of your relationship to bodily self as any other statement

EMBODIMENT

The experiment has given you experiential grounding in a basic premise of the Gestalt approach to body therapy: the self or “I” is an embodied self as well as a thoughtful one. We exist, love, work, and meet our constantly changing needs through our physical being and interactions in the world. Experience of our body is experience of our self, just as our thinking, imagery, and ideas are part of our self.

When we make our body experience an “it” instead of “I,” we make ourselves less than we are. We become diminished. The more we have removed our identity from our body experience, the more things “seem to happen” to us. We feel out of control, dissociated, fragmented. We lose contact with the primary ground of human experience—our corporeal reality. This, of course, is a common description of the difficulties we are called upon to treat as therapists. But it is also not too different from the malaise of our society at large: fragmented, cut off from our feelings, desensitized, and out of control. Could this social phenomenon have roots in our relationship to our body?

Over the course of this book, I will describe how our bodily being is intrinsic to our relationship to our world, and forms a base for our contact with our environment—our physical and especially our human environment—so that we may meet our needs and grow. Working with people as they embody themselves helps us, as therapists, to concretize our abstract notions of self, existence, and being and adds to our appreciation of the whole person.

SELF AS INTEGRATOR OF EXPERIENCE

Since I will use the term “self” frequently throughout this book, it would be useful to describe in more detail how I am using this concept. The concept of the self is a complex and confusing one in the literature of Gestalt therapy, but central to our orientation. The complexity of the notion is attributable to its status as an elusive and ephemeral part of the organism, and the confusion results from the use of the term in a number of different ways. Gestalt therapy views the self not as a thing a static structure, but as a fluid process. The self is not a frozen set of characteristics (“I am this and only this”). In health the self is various and flexible in its capabilities and qualities, depending on the particular demands of the organism and environment The self has no nature of its own except in contact with or in relation to the environment It has been described as the system of contacts or interactions with the environment In this sense the self can be seen as the integrator of experience.

The self has available what are called contact functions, that is, specialized actions and capabilities. In this view it would be accurate to say that the self is nothing else but the system of contact functions. The self and contact functions are one and the same to the Gestalt view. The self has been described as a “system of excitement, orientation, manipulation, and various identifications and alienations…” (Perls, et al., 1951, p. 315). These general categories of contact functions describe the basic ways in which we interact with our environment to satisfy our needs and adjust to environmental changes. Through excitement we feel our needs. Through orientation we organize ourselves to meet these needs in relation to our environment Through manipulation we act in the service of our needs. Through identification we take into our organism (make “I”) what can be assimilated, and through alienation we reject (make “not-I”) what is foreign to our nature and so cannot be assimilated.

Full and adaptive functioning is dependent on contact functions being fully available to the organism to meet the changing requirements of interaction in the environment When contact functions become unavailable to awareness, the organism no longer can adapt fluidly to its world. Those aspects of one's functioning that are disowned—that is, not experienced as self—are not fully available for contact with the environment The more limited one's capabilities for contact, the more one's experience of self and of the environment becomes fragmentary, disorganized, and subject to resistance.

Based on this definition of self, my aim is to show the importance of the bodily basis of our contact functions and how psychological ill health is related to our loss of these functions through estrangement from our bodily being. Part I of this book is devoted to understanding how that which is intrinsically a part of the self, the body, becomes alienated and treated as not-self, and the clinical stance for healing this split Part II presents a detailed theoretical and clinical description of the bodily nature of the contact functions of excitement (sensation), orientation (figure formation and mobilization), manipulation (action), identification (contact), and alienation (withdrawal and assimilation).

Chapter 2
The Body and the Disowned Self

The description of psychological health and disease is a simple one. It is a matter of the identifications and alienations of the self: If a man identifies with his forming self, does not inhibit his own creative excitement and reaching toward the coming solution; and conversely, if he alienates what is not organically his own and therefore cannot be vitally interesting, but rather disrupts the figure/background, then he is psychologically healthy… But on the contrary, if he alienates himself and because of false identifications tries to conquer his own spontaneity, then he creates his life dull, confused, and painful. (Perls et al., 1951 p. 235)

Most of us do not identify or experience our body as “self.” We feel ourselves often to be living in our body, or out of touch with our physical being altogether. In the view of Gestalt therapy noted in the quote above, psychological disease occurs when a person alienates what is organically his or hers and so disrupts functioning. How is it that we come to be alienated from (or to alienate) our physical being and identify only with ourselves as mental and noncorporeal beings?

ADJUSTMENT TO A DIFFICULT ENVIRONMENT

In the Gestalt model of human development, growth and the formation of self come about through contact (interaction) with the environment Through this contact we seek and find that which we require for our survival and development, assimilate those novel experiences that can be used for growth and change, and alienate (reject) that which cannot be assimilated (Perls, 1947/1969). In the course of this process of contact, growth, and development, aspects or qualities of our self may become problematic in a particular physical or social environment. For example, a child's expression of the need for love is met with rejection, aggression with punishment, vulnerability with cruelty, curiosity with defensiveness or impoverished surroundings.

Human beings are resilient as well as persistent, and single instances of rejection or punishment rarely damage the person. We do not require a perfect environment for growth but only, to paraphrase Winnicott (1960), one that is “just good enough” for healthy development. However, there are responses from the environment that have a less than salutary effect A frequently repeated response, such as constant and regular criticism and discouragement from others, can have a major impact on the developing person. Singular events, in which a child's natural impulses are met with a major threat of withdrawal of nurturance, can also have a profound effect, such as when an infant's cries for hunger evoke a look of hatred from an overburdened parent Additionally, double binds, such as when a parent punishes a child's natural sexual play as “dirty and disgusting” while surreptitiously acting coquettish and seductive towards the child, can also have a critical effect on the forming self.

Condit...