When working to resolve trauma through bodywork, the focus is on how the physiology is functioning. How well are the cycles of activation and deactivation moving through to completion? Does the process get stuck anywhere? SE® does not include psychoanalysis or diagnosis. The tools we use are the ‘channels’ all humans process experience through: physical sensation, emotion, mental images, or a story/narrative/meaning.
There is no way to compartmentalize something that’s truly a whole being: you. We are complex, dynamic, marvelous creatures with a body, mind, emotions, and soul, or spirit, etc. Each aspect functioning in harmony with the others, just like our heart does with our bones, and our skin and spleen. The sum of all the different parts comprising a complete whole. There is no such thing as a “body-mind connection” because they fundamentally cannot be disconnected. Not really. We can lose our perception of wholeness, but the wholeness is always the foundational truth.
Ongoing body sensations from unresolved trauma or incomplete stress responses, can be immensely distressing to the mind. By relieving the felt sense of (too many to list then all, but here are a few: racing heart, anxiety, chronic constipation, headaches, muscle/body pain) the mind can experience more ease and comfort, because those sensations are meant to signal alarm (and work well if we are in immediate danger, but not can be counter productive when we are not).
Sometimes the distress in the body can be coming from the psyche being stuck in patterns of thinking that are distress-producing. In that case it can be very helpful to have a mental health practitioner to work as a team with your SE® bodywork practitioner. Working with trauma can be tricky, and often requires a team of helpers.
The purpose of the psyche (mind) is to make meaning. We need this function to help us understand complex concepts all around us, all day long. In the background, at every moment, the body (soma) is giving signals via the ‘felt sense’ about what’s going on internally and externally. As we work with the felt sense, the mind will want to give it meaning. This is unavoidable, and we neither encourage or discourage it – just accept it as another part of the experience of the process.
