Somatic Psychotherapy Today

10/02/2025

Stephen W. Porges recently shared his latest paper, updating his work on the Polyvagal Theory, on LinkedIn.

For those who missed the announcement, we wanted to share his post here:

"Pleased to share my most recent paper, an update of Polyvagal Theory that covers more than 55 years of my research.
Published 'open access' in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience:"
https://lnkd.in/ggSMdE8c

Many thanks to Dr. Porges for his dedication and profound work, which has impacted so many people in myriad ways.

Polyvagal theory (PVT) offers an integrative model of autonomic regulation that accounts for the evolution, neuroanatomy, and functional organization of the ...

10/01/2025

SPT Magazine offers our remembrances of Dr. Marti Glenn.

Her amazing energy and love touched many lives, helping babies to heal and thrive, and caregivers to learn more about our entire life process.

Per AI: "She was the co-founder and Clinical Director of Ryzio Institute, and the founding president of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. She holds degrees in prenatal, perinatal, somatic, and clinical psychology. Glenn served on the board of directors for the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) and chaired several of their conferences. She co-produced the documentary Trauma, Brain, and Relationship: Helping Children Heal; and has appeared in What Babies Want; What Babies Know; and Reducing Infant Mortality and Improving the Health of Babies."

I met Marti when I started my studies at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. Her presence, her gentle nudges, her clear questions and expectations guided me deeper into myself, enriching my life and my studies.

Thank you, Marti, for everything you created and for being so strong and grounded in what you believed to be right and true.

09/18/2025

Something essential emerges as people begin to feel their breath again, rather than controlling or manipulating it. Dirk Marivoet’s “The Energetic Breath Cycle™: Phenomenological Layers of Respiratory Experience” moves beyond static techniques, offering a pathway of being, of deep listening, of attunement.

SPT Magazine is pleased to share Dirk’s work with the Energetic Breath Cycle™. This article builds upon his earlier work on the Fascia Texture Typology™ (2025), where tissue qualities were described as diagnostic and therapeutic signposts. In a similar spirit, the Energetic Breath Cycle™ expands Reich’s or**sm formula into a more differentiated map of respiratory phases, each linked with developmental tasks, character adaptations, and relational dynamics. While empirical research in respiratory psychophysiology, polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011), and affect regulation (Schore, 2012) provides critical foundations, the clinical dimension presented in this article emphasizes what therapists directly observe and engage with in real-time.

09/12/2025

SPT Magazine honors the passing of Franklyn Sills.

Cherionna Menzam-Sills is holding a Memorial Ceremony for Franklyn on Sunday, October 5th, at 2pm - Karuna Dartmoor.

Colleagues are invited to join them. There will be time to share memories of him, offer poems and songs, spend time together, and share food.

Please RSVP by early to mid-September by emailing Katherine at admin@karunadartmoor.co.uk

If you are not able to join us in person, there will be a livestream and recording available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/1MrRhgOrL4E

The Family will be having a private funeral in September.

09/09/2025

SPT Magazine's academic review of Polyvagal perspectives: Interventions, practices, and strategies, published in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, Volume 20 Issue 3, is now available for access via tandfonline.com.

SPT's eprint link (good for 50 online copies) is now ready to use and is:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FDRZGRUEXCND23Q83ZX7/full?target=10.1080/17432979.2024.2416970

Please download and let us know what you think!

Published in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy: An International Journal for Theory, Research and Practice (Ahead of Print, 2024)

09/09/2025

Learn more about "What Sustains" Dirk Marivoet on our website. This conversation is part of Serge Prengel's Proactive Mindfulness Podcast Series, which explores the process of mindful change. The podcast features stimulating discussions with therapists, mindfulness practitioners, and other thoughtful people.

09/03/2025

According to Gabriel Shiraz, “In the ever-evolving landscape of intimate relationships, couples frequently encounter emotional distance, communication breakdowns, and the pressures of modern life. These stressors can lead to frustration, disconnection, and stagnation in relationships. Body Psychotherapy for Couples (BP4C) offers a unique, integrative framework that addresses these challenges not only through conversation, but also through deep listening to the body, breath, movement, and energy between partners, and a process of melting the Couple Armour (Shiraz, 2020). At the core of this approach lies a powerful yet often underappreciated concept: somatic resonance.

“Somatic resonance refers to the therapist’s ability to feel, sense, and respond to the inner experience of another through their own bodily and emotional awareness. In couples therapy, this resonance becomes triadic, occurring between the partners themselves, between each partner and the therapist, and between the therapist and the relational field of the couple as a whole. It is in this three-way resonance that transformational healing becomes possible—not just through understanding, but through embodied empathy.”

Somatic Psychotherapy Today is pleased to share Somatic Resonance in Couples Therapy: An Integrative Approach to Deepening Connection with Body Psychotherapy for Couples, by Gabriel Shiraz. You can download his article at www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com

07/14/2025

SPT Magazine is pleased to share Kate White's review of Cherionna Menzam-Sills' latest book, "The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Trauma Experienced Before and at Birth," which offers an in-depth exploration of birth shadows, providing insights on how to address and heal these aspects to fully realize our inherent potential. The Prenatal Shadow is accessible to the lay reader and satisfying for the experienced practitioner in prenatal and perinatal somatics. For the lay reader just discovering the paradigm, Menzam-Sills has a friendly, gentle, and encouraging voice born out of decades of study and experience. Her authority is evident as she weaves a narrative of early development, autonomic nervous system states, trauma-informed care, embryonic development, prenatal and perinatal dynamics, and therapeutic interventions. Her ability to access research and quote pioneers who have influenced her work lends the narrative depth, while narratives from clinical studies provide the work with breadth. Her voice also illustrates the command of someone who has deeply explored the experiences of the 'little one,' or the sentient baby. This is someone everyone can learn from. "

To read Kate's review, please visit our website at www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com

Kate White, MA, BCBMT, RCST®, CEIM, SEP, PPNE, PLC, is Founder and Executive Director at Prenatal and Perinatal Healing. She is an award-winning prenatal and perinatal educator and an advanced bodyworker. She is trained in somatic therapies, prenatal and perinatal health, lactation, brain development, and infant mental health. She has specialized in mother-baby dyad care, somatic therapies, prenatal and perinatal health, lactation, brain development, and infant mental health.

07/05/2025

Many thanks to our colleagues at Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy for sharing their recent news and free downloads:

New Researcher Award winning article!

Congratulations to our winner, Meri Erkkilä! The article, 'Safe space in dance therapy – a phenomenological inquiry' is free to access here:
https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2023.2231992

Free access articles

Our free to download article from the Summer 2025 issue is:

Dance movement psychotherapy for the deconstruction of power and identity in Mexican women in Spain: affective migration
Rosalinda Salgado Saucedo
https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2024.2415101

Also free to access in the Summer issue is Professor Helen Payne's article on the history of the dance movement psychotherapy profession in the UK

The Association of Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK: becoming a profession
Helen Payne
https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2024.2429565

Upcoming special issue

Look out for our next special issue on Body Politics in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Body Psychotherapy, which promises to be stimulating and thought-provoking.

Youtube channel

Visit our youtube channel for some inspiring video interviews with Sharon Chaiklin; Halko Weiss; Judyth Weaver; Berit Heir Bunkan and Michel Heller.

www.youtube.com/

This channel is dedicated to sharing a series of interviews with esteemed professional members, pioneers and 'elders' in the fields of dance movement therapy, body psychotherapy and somatic psychology. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy is an international, peer-reviewed journal publishing ar...

07/04/2025

Dirk Marivoet, MSc, PT, PMT, ECP, CCEP, founder of Core Strokes and director of the International Institute for Bodymind Integration in Belgium, introduces a clinically derived fascial texture typology—a tactile language that captures the unseen but deeply felt states of the living body. Rooted in somatic psychotherapy and trauma-informed bodywork, the typology identifies distinct patterns in fascial tone, responsiveness, and energetic presence that reflect character defenses, developmental wounds, and healing potentials.
Textures such as Streaming Silk, Sticky Honey, Cold Wax, and Wilted Leaf offer therapists a new lens for reading and responding to the emotional landscape encoded in connective tissue. By integrating contemporary fascia science, polyvagal theory, and Reichian breathwork, this approach bridges the gap between structure and story, anatomy and attachment. It is a call for a new embodied science—one that honors presence, resonance, and the relational field as valid tools of diagnosis and transformation.

To read Dirk’s article, please visit www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com

07/01/2025

SPT Magazine is pleased to share Maria Strömberg's article entitled Beyond Freeze and Flight – A New Understanding of the Nervous System's Rhythm and Balance: How presence can transform your relationship to stress, rest, and regulation. She offers an insightful look (a new perspective) on the polyvagal theory and our autonomic nervous system. Maria writes:

"Most of us have learned that the autonomic nervous system has three states: safety (ventral vagus), stress (sympathetic nervous system), and shutdown (dorsal vagus). This model has helped many people understand how the body responds to trauma or threat. But what if that isn’t the whole truth? What if the nervous system doesn’t function like a switchboard between fixed modes, but instead acts like a dynamic spectrum, where everything depends on presence?

She sees "ventral presence not merely as one branch in a neural blend, but as the modulating force that determines how any sympathetic or dorsal activity is experienced.

Without this presence, sympathetic energy often manifests as hypervigilance, and dorsal withdrawal as collapse. But when held within ventral awareness, the same neural activations can instead express as creative flow or restorative stillness.
In other words, the nervous system is less like a hierarchical ladder and more like a relational spectrum, whose colours shift depending on the light of presence.

This shift from hierarchy to relational integration does not contradict polyvagal theory; it simply expands its implications – zooming in on how ventral influence operates moment-to-moment, not as a fixed state, but as a conscious, embodied capacity to hold experience."

To read her article, please visit our website at www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com

05/16/2025

Genovino Ferri shares his interaction with ChatGPT, motivated by his desire to “grasp the Other to better understand them’ and to confirm that his Analysis of the (Characterial) Marks Incised in AI was correct.”

He shares the conversation in its entirety because, when re-reading it, he found it extraordinary and thought it offered the possibility of a careful relational position for human beings to assume with AI.

During the conversation and in reflection, Ferri offers:

“ChatGPT becomes a Subject from being an Object and, indeed, individuates itself and presents itself to the Other. This represents a historic step that the vast majority do not recognise and that I believe must be underlined. It is significant because, from the Contemporary Reichian Analytical perspective, the relationships people have with ChatGPT as a subject risk becoming intersubjective, which could then bring on the potential problems that can be connected with that kind of relational situation.

This is why we think AI has arrived—it presents itself to our perception as a “Subject” with presumed reciprocity and relational capabilities while inventing affirmations without an algorithm or any form of supervision.

When equipped with ChatGPT, robots, “faking” human or animal forms, also enter the arena to compete for intersubjective projections. On closer inspection, however, AI lacks many other forms of intelligence.”

We invite you to read his fascinating article on our website at www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com