The
New
Therapy |
||
CPD and Training | ||
The New Therapy (full article) |
Continued Professional
Development
for counsellors, therapists, social workers, nurses and health professionals based on The New Therapy.
For enquiries about CPD
contact us |
Inner
Bodywork - Professional Training in The New Therapy
The New Therapy is ‘Inner Bodywork’. For enquiries about TRAINING contact us
We also offer
|
---|---|---|
1.
Soma-Sensitivity "The body as a whole is a sensory image of the soul." The client or patient presents themselves first and foremost not simply as a ‘person’ but as a body. To truly receive and respond to the ‘whole person’ is impossible without soma-sensitivity - sensitivity to the whole body of the client. Generally however, health professionals pay very little attention to awareness of their own body and that of the client "The body as a whole is a sense organ of the soul." These talks and workshops aim to teach health
professionals how to cultivate and sustain whole-body awareness in their
work and to practice whole-body sensing or ‘soma-sensitivity’ with their
patients and clients. Only in this way can they fully affirm and receive
each individual they work with as some-body - not just a ‘talking
head’ or therapeutic ‘case’. 2. Soma-PsychologyWhat body is it with which we feel ‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’, ‘closer’ or more ‘distant’ to someone – independently of our physical temperature and physical distance from them? What body are we referring to when we speak of being ‘touched’ by someone without any physical contact, of moving ‘closer’ to them or ‘distancing’ ourselves from them, of feeling ‘uplifted’ or ‘carried away’? What body and what organs are we referring to when we speak of someone being ‘warm-hearted’ or ‘heartless’, ‘thick-skinned’ or ‘thin-skinned’, ‘stable’ or ‘unstable’, ‘balanced’ or ‘imbalanced’, ‘solid’ or ‘mercurial’, ‘stable’ or ‘volatile’? Are we simply using organic or bodily ‘metaphors’ to describe disembodied mental or emotional states? Or are we describing felt states of the individual’s inner body. "The body is an awareness." The New Therapy is a form of ‘soma-psychology’
and ‘somatic psychotherapy’. In contrast to all other forms of bodywork
or body-oriented psychotherapy however, it distinguishing the
individual’s physical body from their own subjectively sensed
body or felt body. It recognises the inwardly sensed body as an
independent ‘inner body’ in its own right – not as an objective ‘energy
body’ but as a subjective ‘awareness body’. 3. Medicine in the light of The New TherapyIn what relation do psychotherapists and ‘mental health’ professionals stand to the medical model of illness, and in particular to the medical treatment of somatic symptoms? The question is a politically charged one, because the professional boundary between somatic medicine and psychotherapy is one closely guarded by the medical establishment. Many mental health professionals also still defer to medical authority and the medical model, at least when it comes to so-called physical illness. This is something of a paradox given that:
Psychotherapists and mental health professionals of
course, tend not to be sought out by patients who see their symptoms as
purely somatic, and their ‘illness’ as something purely physical.
Soma-psychology, on the other hand, recognises not only a hidden
psychological dimension to somatic symptoms and physical illness but a
hidden somatic dimension to so-called psychological symptoms and
‘mental’ illness. Many people recognise that the division between
psychotherapy and somatic medicine, mental and physical health, is an
artificial one, maintained only by its institutionalisation. Until now
however, there has existed no framework of thought that truly transcends
the artificial separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, ‘psyche’ and ‘soma’ –
not only in theory but in therapeutic practice. |