How Your Body’s Reactions Are a Resource for Your Clients, Insights from Bioenergetic Analysis with Vincentia Schroeter

How can you use your own somatic experience as a therapist during sessions? Can your reactivity be transformed into an insight? Can you share those insights with your clients in sessions? From the perspective of bioenergetic analysis, yes, you can!

In PART 1 of this two-part essay, Vincentia Schroeter, PhD, MFT, CBA, one of our online therapy training presenters, shared 9 tips from the perspective of bioenergetics in psychotherapy about how to use your body sensations to help yourself to stay present and open when feeling reactive during a client session.

Vincentia is one of the presenters of Engaging the Body in Psychotherapy: Contemporary Bioenergetic Analysis along with Laurie Ure and Robert Coffman.

Here, Vincentia continues with PART 2 of this therapist resource by showing how you can use your somatic impressions to directly help a client during a session. 

How to Use Your Body Reactions to Help Your Psychotherapy Client (PART 2)

Vincentia Schroeter, PhD, MFT, CBA

“Can I Share My Bodily Sensations with My Client?”

Before sharing your body reactions with a psychotherapy client, you need to have a sense of how receptive the client will be to receiving this information. Base this on your knowledge of the psychodynamic factors, and on the transferential relationship between the two of you.

I did a session recently where the client reported that two days previously she had broken off her engagement. She learned her fiancé had lied about his background and occupation. As she spoke, I felt this kind of spinning sensation behind my forehead. I reported that to her and she said, “My head spins. It feels like popcorn.” 

Thoughts and memories were popping up as she was processing feeling betrayed by him. We normalized this as a natural response to early shock and overwhelm. This helped her be more accepting of her state. 

Soon she was shaking her head right to left, as she moved toward some of the anger and sadness that she felt. I could feel in my body some of what she felt. I mirrored this back to her, and she was able to articulate her body sensations. This is a small example of utilizing your somatic sensations during a session.

Here is an example of going down the road to utilize a somatic reaction in a therapeutic way during a session.

• I notice something in my body. (Let’s say dizziness)
• I take stock: Is it me? Did I forget to eat? Am I dehydrated? Still recovering from a cold? Overtired?  
• Or is it my client? What about my client might make me feel dizzy? Is her material so horrifying that I can’t tolerate it? Is he psychopathic and I am picking up danger that he does not own? Does what the client is doing or saying make me feel like he felt as a wounded child? For example, am I provoked into dizziness as a dissociative response, a response that the client needed to survive, but is unconscious of or feels guilty about? Any of these and many more are possible. 
• Pay attention. Don’t ignore your body in a session, especially when you have a strong visceral reaction. It means that something is going on that you should attend to. Open the gate. Go down the road. Keep breathing. Trust your body. It wants to show you the way.  

What insights might emerge from your focus that your body reaction is part of the client’s (usually unconscious) call for help?  How can you respond therapeutically?

How to Share Somatic Insights with Therapy Clients

Some Therapy Session Examples:

• The client unknowingly puts you in his place, as a wounded child, to let you know how life felt for him at the time.
  
  The therapist can say, “I feel trapped in my gut, and angry inside, but like I better comply with this flat smile.” This often helps the client identify his similar somatic reactions that were adaptive.
• The client (unconsciously) acts like her demonic parents, hoping you could thwart them, like she could not as a child.
  
  The therapist can say, “When you talk to me like that, I feel oppressed/abused/angry and I don’t let people talk to me like that.” You become the voice she couldn’t have. You have role-modeled a new way for the client.
• The client grabs and clings and holds onto you. She is desperately in need of contact and doesn’t know how to get it safely. In your body, you want to push them off you, and lean back into your chair. Yet you know if you say, “I feel like pulling away from you”, the client will feel wounded. How can you use your body reaction and still help the client?
  
  You, the therapist, can say, “I notice when you pause and slow down, my body leans toward you, and when you speed up and talk fast, my body pulls back into my chair.” The client wants the contact, so this will often help them sense their behavior more clearly.

In Bioenergetic Analysis, we believe that bodily reactions should be trusted as a resource for the therapist and for the client. Messages may not always pop up to the thinking part of the brain and tell us clearly what to do next. Go afferent. Go to the gut. Breathe there. Go to the heart. Breathe there. Press your feet firmly on the ground. Breathe there. Let the message, the message that goes toward integration, arise from the body. The body will tell the brain what it knows.