10/20/2024
The Body Places Us in the Here and Now Where Change Happens
When the client focuses on the body in the present moment, unconscious material can surface into awareness. Implicit memory doesn’t feel like memory—it is perceived in the present.
There will be images, memories, phrases, affect, behavior, impulses, and states of consciousness, all related to a theme. Each is tied in with particular somatic markers. As Kurtz says, “Finding the meanings [bodily sensations] embody is an important part of changing them” (2004, p. 63).
Touch one aspect of the package—use mindful attention and stay with the experience—and the rest will emerge into awareness.
Often it is experiencing the somatic marker that is the doorway opening to awareness and change.
The good news for psychotherapy is that memory and brain structure are much more plastic than previously thought (Fuchs, 2004). We are constantly storing, activating, and restoring memories. Lynn Nadel (1994), a researcher on the function of the hippocampus, found that when a memory trace is activated, it is vulnerable for a short time and can be changed before it is recoded. Further research is confirming this finding (McCrone, 2003). This would affirm the importance of working in the here and now. The hippocampus can make a new memory, based on a different experience, this time putting it in context and time sequence. Sleep and dreams, along with neural communication between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, are thought to help turn the new memory into a permanent one (Siegel, 2003).”
Excerpted From “The Central Role of the Body in Hakomi Psychotherapy", Marilyn Morgan, in Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy
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