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Somatic Empathy
DOI link for Somatic Empathy
Somatic Empathy book
Somatic Empathy
DOI link for Somatic Empathy
Somatic Empathy book
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ABSTRACT
Somatic empathy is a complex mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual art. Somatic empathy has the power to strengthen an intersubjective connection with another because it is a receptive and invitational as contrasted to a projective form of empathy. The distinction between projective empathy and receptive empathy is particularly important to people who have experienced neglect, oppression, and traumatic intrusions into the boundaries of the self. Maintaining somatic empathy with someone who is stuck in immobility can be challenging and can also reveal our own dissociated immobility, a reality the author discovered while working with Denise, a psychotherapy client with a history of sexual abuse. The practice of somatic empathy for the self holds awareness of internal visceral states in each moment. When two people share a mutual visceral state through somatic empathy, coregulation entrains the two nervous systems so traumatized person can enter into calm states of social engagement and begin reorganizing their inner world of sensation and primitive emotion.