ABSTRACT
Now a brief summary of the major points made in Chapters Eight to Ten.
Play is a basic human activation pattern, shared in its essentials with all other mammals. It enables us to operate in an “as-if” frame, where actions do not mean what they would normally mean.
Rather than “signals” informing us that the other is playing, we have direct embodied experience through the resonance between our embodiment and hers.
This activation pattern is of vital importance to psychotherapy, which takes place largely within an “as-if” frame, allowing us to experience intense relational feelings without acting on them in the ways we otherwise would.
Play also gives us access to the “transitional space” described by Winnicott, the space within which creativity and relaxation can occur. It makes deep change possible.
The widespread belief among therapists that language and embodiment occupy separate spheres, between which little traffic can pass, is untrue. Embodied experience is not fundamentally 168any more difficult (or any easier) to language than other complex phenomena.
Speech can be either embodied or disembodied—“full” or “empty”. Full speech is embodied both in the physical sense of emerging from a vibrant body awareness, and in the sense that it reflects our embodied experience and understanding. These two aspects are entwined together.
To be fully effective, psychotherapy requires both embodied experience and embodied languaging.
Trauma is an attack on all aspects of our being, but most fundamentally on our body, as is indicated by the metaphors we use about it.
It tends to create a dissociation between “mind” and “body”, such that a person’s embodied experience is no longer fully available to her. This has a crippling effect on the psyche.
There is a doubling effect in psychotherapy between the disembodiment created in our traumatised clients, and the disembodiment of psychotherapy itself, which makes it very hard for us to stay centred around trauma.
We can usefully identify two sorts of trauma, although there is no gap between them but rather an overlapping continuity. These are “acute” or “massive” trauma, managed by dissociation, and “chronic” or “developmental” trauma, managed by repression and the formation of character.
Therapy with severely traumatised people—which in some ways means all of us—demands that we approach our clients in a humane, authentic, and gentle way, including being open when necessary about our own traumatised state. Trauma demands enactment, the playing out of its origins in the therapeutic relationship; any quality of “ungenuineness” or persecution will render the enactment unresolvable.
