ABSTRACT
The foundation for helping people suffering from trauma lies in the development of an empathic embodied relationship, a connection that provides the intuitive wisdom to respond to the person in the moment with resonance and contingency. People who have experienced complex trauma are in need of embodied intersubjective relationships, where the intense dissociated emotions from "forgotten" traumatic memories can be met, felt, and incorporated into the relational field. As a body-mind approach to complex trauma, Somatic Transformation is particularly interested in unconscious perceptions through the eyes, ears, face, throat, larynx, pharynx, skin, muscles, and other parts of the body. When relational-developmental trauma and aversive events occur simultaneously or in accumulative experiences that link together in dysfunctional neural patterns, complex trauma is the result. The psychological effects of trauma are emotional, physical, behavioral, social, and spiritual with a wide variety of symptoms, and recent studies indicate that far more people are suffering from trauma than has been previously acknowledged.
