Table Of ContentGernot Hauke · Ada Kritikos Editors
Embodiment in
Psychotherapy
A Practitioner’s Guide
Embodiment in Psychotherapy
Gernot Hauke • Ada Kritikos
Editors
Embodiment in
Psychotherapy
A Practitioner’s Guide
Editors
Gernot Hauke Ada Kritikos
Embodiment Resources Academy (ERA) School of Psychology
Munich, Germany University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-92888-3 ISBN 978-3-319-92889-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92889-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957455
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To Prof. Dr. Norbert Bischof for supporting
me and being a great intellectual model.
To my wife Silvia for supporting me
emotionally.
Gernot Hauke
To Prof. Jason Mattingley, for his emotional
support and intellectual rigour.
To Nicholas Mattingley, for being the “life”
in life–work balance.
Ada Kritikos
Preface
The fundamental premise of this book is that the mind and body are not separate,
contrary to old traditions in philosophy, for example by Descartes. The mind and
body are tightly related, and evidence for the properties of one can be found in the
state of the other.
For example, a grinning mouth (body) is associated with happiness and a posi-
tive evaluation (mind) of the world around us. Also compelling is the evidence that
we can induce the state of mind by arranging the body: adopting a “grinning” pos-
ture generates positive evaluations.
In this book, we are not concerned with only presenting something surprising
and new on the marketplace of psychotherapeutic methodology. The perspective of
embodiment points to a paradigm shift, too. According to this shift, the brain is not
the sole cognitive resource we have to deal with. The body is a co-designer of men-
tal processes with emphasis on the role of the body in embodied interaction. This
mind–body reciprocity means that the mind is embodied and the body is mental.
We argue in this book that the body builds the mind—we use our internal and
external sensory organs to gather information about our environment and to reduce
error when we predict and anticipate what will happen next. What this process actu-
ally achieves is the building of the self: the information that our sensory organs
sample does not dissipate but is evaluated cognitively and affectively, retained and
then acted upon—with the body. This builds memory traces of the self across time,
as proposed by William James—what we did, how it felt, what the consequences
were, what we should do the same and what we should change next time we come
upon the situation.
Of course, our environment is not only physical it is also social, and if Hell is
other people, then so is Heaven. We gather both positive and negative information
from people, too, and it changes both our body and our mind. If, while holding a
conversation with our friend, he moves his pupils (body) and gazes away from us
and to the left, we know that his attention (mind) is not on us any more; it has moved
to the left. Our own focus of attention is now redirected away from our friend and
towards whatever it is that he is looking at. That may be of benefit to us if the object
vii
viii Preface
is important, enhancing the connection between us and our friend. Or it may be
irrelevant, thus disrupting our connection.
Importantly, sometimes we can articulate what is happening to us—we can use
our mind to reflect, assess and make resolutions. But quite often, and particularly
with some clients, the link between the mind and body is below the level of
declarative processes, and this is where the novel techniques outlined in this book,
used as an adjunct to traditional reflective ones, can help clinicians and clients make
progress in therapy.
Embodiment and the building of the self as it applies to therapy appears to be a
sudden, rapidly expanding field, but it is based on many decades of research into
sensory and perceptual processes, for example the cocktail party effect, described in
the 1950s.
This book is a multifaceted and creative project. Specialists in neurobiology,
cognitive science and psychology, as well as psychotherapy, are involved. Several
reasons brought us together. All of us are passionate about the explosion of ideas
and research in the science of embodiment giving us a broadened understanding of
who we are. We think sufficient information has accrued from all aspects of sensory
and cognitive research to justify a novel approach to therapies. We now have a lot of
equally important as well as amazing research results. On the other hand, there is a
lack of transfer from significant knowledge into clinical practice.
Does this accruing knowledge benefit psychotherapy? We are deeply convinced
of that!
Embodied work as described in this book is intended as an extension of the
clinician’s armamentarium, not replacing but rather complementing the traditional
techniques. Relevant therapeutic processes can be deepened by using the body’s
display of important information from the unconscious impulsive system. These
somatic markers can be translated subsequently into verbal language by using
pictorial language. Our position, however, is that between the client and the thera-
pist we need a verbal, explicit as well as implicit, non-verbal exchange, to develop
a nuanced self- awareness in the client. Carefully selected empirically grounded
physical activities in the therapy room can complement the verbal exchange in
psychotherapy. To include the body can enrich and deepen the purely verbal
exchange because the pre- linguistic material is added.
How to Use the Book
This book is intended to give psychotherapists a first up-to-date introduction into
the science of embodiment and offer practical instructions inspired by research on
embodiment. We have developed these instructions so that they can be tried in any
setting.
We recommend that you first read the first two chapters. It provides an overview
of the perspective of embodiment and also shows how it is realized in different
modules by us. We have chosen here a form of representation that should be
Preface ix
understandable without any significant prerequisites on the part of the reader. It is
important to us to address as many readers as possible, regardless of which
therapeutic school they feel at home. At this point, besides the regular reading
through, there are several possibilities to get started reading:
• We strongly encourage you to trust your ‘somatic markers’ when reading the
table of contents or by browsing through the book for the first time.
• If you are more interested in the practice, you might want to read a case discus-
sion after reading the first two chapters. It’s best to start with an example from
the individual therapy (Chap. 16).
• If you now see our perspective of clinical cases as profitable, you can proceed to
read the modules in Part II. Here we describe—again by a concrete case from
practice—our work in more detail and how in particular the perspective of
embodiment is anchored in it. You may come across aspects that make you want
to read previous chapters.
• After the first two chapters, it is also a good idea to look at the formulated
instructions in Part II. Ask yourself: “How would I feel in my role and w orking
as a therapist and how would I feel like a client?” Again, this can be motivation
for a more systematic reading.
München, Germany Gernot Hauke
Brisbane, Australia Ada Kritikos
Contents
1 Building a Body of Evidence: From Sensation to Emotion
and Psychotherapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Gernot Hauke and Ada Kritikos
Part I Basics for Clinical Applications of Embodiment
2 Interoception: Definitions, Dimensions, Neural Substrates . . . . . . . . 15
Olga Pollatos and Beate M. Herbert
3 Embodiment as an Organising Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Ada Kritikos and Samuel D. Sparks
4 E mbodiment of Emotion Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Olga Pollatos and Eszter Ferentzi
5 E mbodiment of Social Interaction: Our Place in the
World Around Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Wolfgang Tschacher
6 T he Thoughtful Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Sheila J. Cunningham
7 T he Extended Self: “I Am a Part of All That I Have Met” . . . . . . . . . 83
Ada Kritikos
8 E mbodiment: Reflective and Impulsive Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Anita Körner and Fritz Strack
9 E mbodiment Research – Building Bridges to Evidence-Based
Clinical Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Felicitas Weineck and Matthias Messner
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xii Contents
Part II Elementary Embodiment Techniques for the Practice
10 Generating Body Focus: A Stepping Stone to Emotional
Awareness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Felicitas Weineck
11 Getting the Embodied Emotional Survival Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Gernot Hauke
12 Mapping the Embodied Emotional Mind: The Emotional Field . . . . 163
Gernot Hauke
13 Resource Activation: Bringing Values into the Flesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Gernot Hauke
14 Emotional Mastery and Life Strategy: Moving to Solutions . . . . . . . 211
Christina Lohr
15 T herapeutic Alliance: Grounding Interaction in Space . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Christina Lohr, Tania Pietrzak, and Gernot Hauke
Part III Elementary Embodiment Techniques Applied to a Single
Therapy Setting
16 Psychotherapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Tania Pietrzak and Evelyn Beverly Jahn
17 Coaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Tania Pietrzak and Gernot Hauke
Part IV Further on Up the Road: Embodiment Techniques
Applied to More Complex Systems
18 Distressed Couples: Improving Mutual Empathy and Emotional
Regulation Using Embodied Empathy Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Christina Lohr and Tania Pietrzak
19 Embodiment in Group Therapy: From IQ to WeQ—Together
We Are Stronger!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Evelyn Beverly Jahn
20 The Power of Embodying Values in Work Place Teams . . . . . . . . . . . 371
Christina Lohr
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
