08/07/2024
🦋 THE BUTTERFLY WITHIN: Transformative Trauma Therapy 🦋
I sadly often hear from new clients about their unsatisfying experiences with therapy and coaching. They describe spending years and considerable money seeking help, yet feeling unseen, unheard, unsafe, and misunderstood.
Creating a space where clients feel seen, heard, and understood is a privilege and a wonder for me. In this space, clients can unravel and dissolve their old 'self' to explore and reveal their true nature. They may feel like they're dissolving into a state of vulnerability, only to slowly reform and emerge as their unique, empowered selves. The joy, self respect, safety, and strength they discover within shines through them.
In psychology, the body has traditionally been viewed as an isolated system with its own drives and workings. However, interest in the body's role in mental health has grown recently, and it's now considered cutting-edge to explore this connection. How can we understand the unconscious mind while dismissing the body, which accounts for 90% of the communication to the mind?
The relationship between the physical body and consciousness has a long history. In ancient wisdom, the body and soul were seen as inseparable. This view persisted until the late 17th and early 18th centuries when Descartes introduced Cartesian dualism, separating the mind and body. The beginning of industrialisation. This split explained the mind-body connection in mechanical terms, elevating the mind above the body.
With this shift, mental illness came to be viewed either as a purely physical condition requiring medication or as a behavioural issue requiring moral therapy. The term hysteria was coined and asylums developed, housing mainly women to receive the benefit of “moral treatment” for their ny*******ia, hysteria and melancholy. Maybe a more humanistic approach than the witch hunts of earlier years?
Later, anatomical studies began locating mental disturbances as having a connection to, and coming from, the nervous system. Physicians like Thomas Willis even suggested that the soul could be situated in the body.
Also developing was Mesmer's system of therapeutics, known as mesmerism, a precursor to modern hypnotism and paved the way for the work of Charcot, Freud, and Jung at the turn of the 20th century.
Processwork Psychotherapy is colloquially known as “Jung's Daughter”. It's developer, Arnold Mindell, was a brilliant Psychotherapist, Jungian Analyst and Quantum Physicist with a passion for Daoism. Mindell extended Jungian analysis into the mind-body-soul relationship on an individual, relationship, and collective level during the late 70's as the hippy awakening era began to try to move society away form the cartesian model focus to one of more connectivity.
In my approach to Trauma-Informed Processwork Psychotherapy, I return to the ancient wisdom of the mind-body-soul connection. Combined with an embodied and modern understanding of the nervous system. To create an effective, beautiful, trauma-informed and sensitive environment for healing. Revealing the butterfly within.
