Somatic Psychotherapy Today

14/07/2025

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.

05/07/2025

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...

04/07/2025

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

01/07/2025

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

16/05/2025

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

10/04/2025

I don’t typically review fiction books; however, having read and reviewed several of Dr. Ferraiolo’s books, I was curious about how he wove philosophy into a fictional character’s psychological well-being. The title alone—An Ethical Assassin- caught my attention. Can killing be considered ethical?

The premise:

We have a man who lost his family in a tragic car accident. He spends the next four or so years after their death narrating the events of his life via the pages of a leather-bound journal. He leaves the book on the table in a diner where he'd finished breakfast, along with cash for the meal and two tens slipped partway into the book’s pages. Supposedly, the waitress passes the book forward, and thus, it comes to be printed for all to read.

The character:

From the onset, the character’s voice reminded me of Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) albeit aided by the intellect of ancient philosophers (think Epicurus/Socrates/Heraclitus). Of course, the book’s author is Dr. William Ferraiolo, a philosophy professor at San Joaquin Delta College and author of numerous books, including You Die at the End: Meditations on Mortality and the Human Condition and A Life Worth Living: Meditations on God, Death, and Stoicism.

The take away:

Like all of Dr. Ferraiolo’s books, The Ethical Assassin is well written. The character, the specific situations, and the context were intriguing enough to keep me reading despite feeling emotionally conflicted. I remember reading Catcher in the Rye as a freshman in high school and feeling humiliated when the teacher explained that Holden was not to be trusted, his story tainted by mental illness. Holden had drawn me into his world, and the assassin got me thinking just as easily.

Overall, this book has a hook—getting readers to pause and consider what truth, justice, life, death, and so forth are and who decides. And ultimately, do I trust this narrator enough to dive into his philosophical ramblings?

You can read the review in its entirety on our website: www.SomaticPsychotherapyToday.com

25/03/2025

SPECIAL ISSUE CALL EXTENDED until 12th MAY 2025

Special issue on Body Politics in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Body Psychotherapy.
Guest editor: Sara 'Zora' Boas

Deadline for completed manuscripts: 12th MAY
Issue planned for Winter 2025.

The special issue will explore how embodied psychotherapies can reveal the workings of power in, on, and through the body.

See the Call for Papers here

Explore how embodied psychotherapies can reveal the workings of power in, on, and through the body.

22/02/2025

Join us for a somatic movement and mindful body-awareness program on Feb 27. Register free at, https://usabp.org/event-6052770

This movement programs topic - Embody Your Heart: Increase Your Vagal Tone.

Join us at any of our upcoming free On the Move events to discover how conscious movement can bring nourishing restoration, playful community connection, and the understanding of how moving helps our thoughts, words, and actions.

Somatic tools may include, among others, breath, movement, self-directed touch, sound vibration, and conscious dialogue.

11/02/2025

We are excited about this event tomorrow. Join in, if you can.

Join Herbert Grassmann, Maurizio Stupiggia, and Stephen W. Porges (Polyvagal Institute) for a virtual event on Wednesday, February 12th at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST, celebrating their new edited book, SOMATIC-ORIENTED THERAPIES: Embodiment, Trauma, and Polyvagal Perspectives. Attendees will participate in an embodiment experience, explore the diversity of somatic practices and their common threads, followed by a Q&A and overtime event.

Use Discount Code: usabpmemberguest for $10 off the $25 non-member fee.
RSVP at https://usabp.org/event-5992956

17/12/2024

Volume 14, Number 2, Winter 2024 is live on our website. With this issue, we celebrate our homecoming to the USABP as we join resources with their membership, outreach and The International Body Psychotherapy Journal.

It is fitting that these two publications now reside under one roof. They share the same goals and principles: both are community-generated and free to read. By bringing both publications together, we can now support a platform that offers a full range of information—from peer-reviewed articles that cover research, case studies, emerging clinical practices, and interviews with community leaders who are charting new paths, and spearheading new theories, to book and film reviews, important online webinars and events, and musings that light up our creativity.

And, if we are to fully represent our members and serve the diversity of the USABP Alliance of Somatic Educators, we need your help. If you have professional experience in publishing or see this as an opportunity to take your first steps in that direction, connect with us. We need readers, peer-reviewers, content and copy editors, designers, and social media communicators—wizards of all sorts to make a journal and a magazine happen.

We look forward to writing together in 2025.

10/12/2024

Body, Movement and Dance In Psychotherapy is offering a free journal download entitled:

A mover’s practice of transition in authentic movement: an embodied non-dual lived experience
Christina Bracegirdle
https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2023.2254834

They also shared a call for papers for their UPCOMING Special Issue:
Body Politics in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Body Psychotherapy

Guest editor: Sara 'Zora' Boas

Deadline for completed manuscripts: 31st March 2025. Issue planned for Winter 2025.

The special issue will explore how embodied psychotherapies can reveal the workings of power in, on, and through the body.

See the Call for Papers here
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/body-politics-dance-movement-psychotherapy-body-psychotherapy

Explore how embodied psychotherapies can reveal the workings of power in, on, and through the body.

09/12/2024

SPT Magazine is pleased to share our review of, What Sustains Me. Edited by Serge Prengel, the collection of personal essays, written by seven therapists who use their skills for observation and self-reflection, dive into their lives and explore the experiences that brought them to where they are, who they are, and why they are here today.

Each shares a deeply personal reflection of self and others, their initial wounds in childhood, and the continual assaults that resulted from self and others. They are vulnerable and intimate. There’s a sense of expansion as each writer breathes life into words landing on the page. The stories touched the essence of my being as experiences resonated with what’s happened in my life. Some spoke directly to me; some challenged me to stay present and read through from start to finish to understand their perspectives. It wasn’t about simply resonating, not about connecting with what was familiar. It was more about learning from these colleagues who took the time to share their personal essays about themselves and how they make sense of their experiences as unique human beings (Pregel, pg. 5).

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