Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy

Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain

forewords by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., and Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

Praise for Trauma and the Body:

“I strongly recommend this fascinating and essential reading as it offers clinicians of all orientations a variety of psychosomatic treatment strategies allowing an integration of trauma-related physical manifestations in psychotherapeutic trauma treatment.”

—Journal of Psychosomatic Research

"This is the book the field of pychotraumatology has been waiting for! Clinicians at last have a major practical and theoretical source for more fully understanding the central role of fixed sensorimotor patterns in trauma survivors."
—Onno van der Hart, Ph.D., Professor of Psychopathology of Chronic Traumatization, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Overview

The body, for a host of reasons, has been left out of the "talking cure." Psychotherapists who have been trained in models of psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, or cognitive therapeutic approaches are skilled at listening to the language and affect of the client. They track the clients' associations, fantasies, and signs of psychic conflict, distress, and defenses. Yet while the majority of therapists are trained to notice the appearance and even the movements of the client's body, thoughtful engagement with the client's embodied experience has remained peripheral to traditional therapeutic interventions.

Trauma and the Body is a detailed review of research in neuroscience, trauma, dissociation, and attachment theory that points to the need for an integrative mind-body approach to trauma. The premise of this book is that, by adding body-oriented interventions to their repertoire, traditionally trained therapists can increase the depth and efficacy of their clinical work. Sensorimotor psychotherapy is an approach that builds on traditional psychotherapeutic understanding but includes the body as central in the therapeutic field of awareness, using observational skills, theories, and interventions not usually practiced in psychodynamic psychotherapy. By synthesizing bottom-up and top down interventions, the authors combine the best of both worlds to help chronically traumatized clients find resolution and meaning in their lives and develop a new, somatically integrated sense of self.

Contents Include

• Top-down and Bottom-up Psychotherapy: Hierarchical Information Processing
• From Pierre Janet to the 21st Century
• The Window of Tolerance: Self-Regulation and Information Processing
• Disrupted Memory of the Future: Traumatic Orienting and Defensive Responses
• Introduction to the Clinical Practice of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• Somatic Awareness: Body Sensation and Psychotherapy
• Working with the Organization of Experience: Tracking, Contact, and Accessing Mindfulness
• Tapping the Intelligence of the Body: Building Somatic Resources
• The Use of Touch
• A Somatic Approach to Phase Oriented Treatment
• Conclusion: Limitations and Future Directions

About the Authors

Pat Ogden, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute

Kekuni Minton, Ph.D., is a faculty member at Naropa University.

Clare Pain, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Universities of Toronto and Western Ontario.

ISBN: 0-393-70457-2
September 2006 / 320 pages / Cloth