‘seas’ of our childhood and fail to see the calm waters we are now heading towards. The tried-and-tested formula that once saved us is no longer essential or the right method to use when both we and the world around us have changed. When we refuse to recognise a simple feeling of malaise as a harbinger of something else, we can expect other less persistent but clearly more effective states to follow: panic attacks with sudden bolts from the blue, the depression that deprives us of the joy of living, the phobias that restrict our living space, and other physical illnesses that desperately try, before the final embrace of death, to let us know what is happening in the depths of our being… These are the things that restrict us and inspire fear in us, yet these are also the things that speak to us of new pathways and possibilities. Will we remain in the familiar ‘security’ that the child clings to or will we, as adults, take the frightened child by the hand and, with the therapy we offer, lead it out into the light of day?
We strive to achieve a balance not only in our lives but also in our work. It is essential to achieve a balance in every energy centre we work with because the body needs it in order to live and develop in harmony with its capabilities and its surroundings.
CHAPTER 2
BODY PSYCHOTHERAPY AND ITS LIMITS
Because we work with the body and close contact with it forms part of the therapeutic process, we should not only respect the patient’s boundaries but also ask them frequent questions about our movements and how close we can be to them at any given moment. The experienced therapist knows how to respect a patient’s boundaries without being, or appearing to be, insecure. On the other hand, they know from experience that emotions, transferences and experiences in the therapeutic here and now can change from one moment to the next, and that it is these which determine how close they can get and the quality of their touch. A good and continuous experiential education is, without doubt, essential.
It is not only talent that makes a good therapist. A good therapist should also be a good patient, a person who has acquired, through personal therapy, a good, broad sense of themselves; a person who, recognising their own character-structure, has encountered and dealt with their own blockages in a process in which knowledge passes into and is recorded in the body. Here we are not talking about a ‘perfect’ therapist – the equivalent, say, of a psychoanalyst who has been fully analysed himself. Just as there is no such thing as a perfect parent, there is no such thing as a perfect therapist. Through our training and continuous lifelong education, we try to be as good and effective as we can be in our work as therapists. Besides, who seeks to constantly enrich their knowledge? Only those who believe that, however much they already know, there is always more to learn. And what we learn every day from our patients is simply amazing.
When energy flows freely in the therapist, then it is possible for this energy to make contact with the patient’s energy, and the therapist, in his constant desire to respond to his patient’s needs, will help them to experience the fact that body contact can lead to making a connection and then, in turn, to establishing a relationship, which is the desired aim. In working with the body, we are always in the present. So we encounter the body in the dimension it is living in. And the body always lives in the present. The mind, on the other hand, can travel in whichever time dimension it chooses. The body, like the spirit, knows only the present; the therapy takes place in the present and it is in the present that, in the absence of knowledge, what we call ‘miracles’ take place.
People who have not developed flexible and stable boundaries are capable of connecting and having contact with others but are incapable of developing relationships. Relationships presuppose the existence of boundaries. Let us take the example of a person whose boundaries have been violated and the person who is responsible for the violation. Without effective body therapy, the victim and the offender might remain connected for ever. This connection, however, can never be regarded as a relationship.
The same thing happens in the case of people who, as children, had parents who did not respect their individuality. I am not referring to the type of parents who flagrantly violate their children’s boundaries by sexually molesting or having penetrative sex with them. I am referring to those parents who, under a variety of pretexts, become abusive by expressing their own sexual repression and problematic nature, without assuming responsibility for their desires, which very often remain unconscious. The harm, however, is done. When a parent, without respecting the privacy of the moment, enters a toilet just when a child of theirs, who is old enough not to require their help, is busy attending to his or her own personal needs, this constitutes a violation of the child’s personal boundaries. Another violation of this kind, and one which is also recorded in the child’s system, is when a parent asks a child or teenage son or daughter to clean their back while they are in the bath, or when a mother asks a son or daughter to fetch her sanitary napkins because she is on the toilet and cannot reach them. The victims of such violations will have a deficient sense of self. Their relationships, based on a weak will and an insufficiently integrated self, will be tossed about uncontrollably by the winds and the waves, which will push them either very close to or very far away from the other person in each relationship. They will also suffer in respect of their needs and their desires. It will be difficult for them to distinguish their own needs and place them above the needs of others. As for their desires, it will be difficult for them not only to place them above the desires of the other person in a relationship but also to recognise them as their own, distinguishing them from the needs of others. To this category belong all those who may be described as having an ‘as if’ or ‘false self’ personality.
Our modern societies do not love children
Our modern societies are only euphemistically called ‘child-centred’, however much we like to characterise them as such. Societies whose main priority is the production of material goods are bound to be less joyful and to turn life into a struggle for existence. In these societies – and however harsh it may sound, it needs to be said – people do not have the time to raise healthy children. Haste in itself and the lack of respect for a child’s own rate of development constitutes a violation and is recorded in that child’s system. How many mothers, under the relentless pressure of work, stop breastfeeding their babies very early on? And what about all those mothers who, either as a result of being misinformed or as a result of the belief that they might lose their breast shape, do not even breastfeed their babies? This deficiency will be recorded as a trauma, with the resulting effects. The same thing happens in the case of an adult who holds a child in such a way that they show no respect for the sensitivities of the child’s body. The young human being that has just seen the light of day and come into direct contact with the outside world for the first time – without the protective buffer of the womb that nourished it and helped it grow from a single-cell organism, an amoeba, into a fully-formed human being – is much more sensitive than some people would like to believe. Whatever the child might store in its memory as an engram, the original experience, if it is a traumatic one, will never be erased. What is trivial and unimportant for an adult may often be of great importance to an infant. For example, many early traumas that we come across in therapy originate in bad, sudden or hasty manoeuvres by the medical or paramedical staff during the process of childbirth. In no case should the delivery room become a factory production line as a result of financial or any other kind of pressure. Human beings produce machines; we are not machines ourselves. I can clearly recall the crying and wincing of a helpless infant displayed by many of my patients when, despite the fact that my surgery was properly heated, they trembled with cold as they relived the experience of their birth. Only a warm hug, a gentle caress and a loving, welcoming smile could warm them up.
Oh my God, where are they putting me? Why don’t they leave me inside my mummy? They’re holding me upside down and putting me in something made of metal. It’s even colder than the room. I don’t like it… I want my mummy.
Mothers, however, are, like almost all people nowadays, subject to the dictates of a biomedical model that cares more often about the comforts of medical and paramedical staff, operating schedules and the orderly running of the health system than patients.
