ABSTRACT
Here is a summary of the most important points in Chapters Five, Six, and Seven.
As well as the effects of our personal history, embodiment also shapes and is shaped by the ensemble of present and past familial and social relations, on every level from the personal to the global, which provides a guiding context for individual relationships.
This context is a mixture in varying proportions of the benign and the repressive, and often includes contradictory elements, which tend to be held out of consciousness.
We each use our environment as a set of “exograms”, an extension of our thought processes into the world. In particular, we use other people in this way, as they equally use us. Hence “our” minds are not wholly “ours”, but part of larger collective projects.
Embodiment and embodied relating are constrained by socially constructed understandings of what they are and can be, which encode complex organisations of power in relation to class, gender, race, and other categories.
110Hence it can be said that bodies are produced by discourse. However, it is also true that language itself is produced by and through the body; a further example of circular causality.
As a framework for these complex relationships, it is helpful to consider embodiment in three aspects: the body as something we have (object), as something we are (subject), and as something we become (process).
In the embodied therapeutic relationship, we as therapists directly and concretely experience how the client’s embodiment is embedded in social narratives, and also how it resists or evades this embedding, and even exploits it for its own purposes.
Social structurings of power mediated through the family, together with our resistance to them, place us in character positions which embody the history of our embodied relationships with significant others and with the social structures that their bodies transmit to us. Character structure is the matrix formed by and forming ensembles of engrams. As with every other consequence of power, character also contains within it the possibility of freedom.
From the earliest part of life a person’s character structure filters and gives a particular spin to new relational experiences, at the same time as it—reluctantly—adjusts its own assumptions in the light of those new experiences, and feeds that adjustment back onto its picture of previous experiences.
