Healing the Heart, Reaching the Soul: The Neurobiology of Body-Centered Psychotherapy

Linda Marks, M.S.M., and David Lee, M.Ed.

FOR many clients, particularly people who have a history of trauma, talk and insight alone are not sufficient for healing and change. Clients often understand why they have their problems, but their understanding doesn't result in their healing. When this happens, the client's response is telling us that we as therapists are not working "where the problem lives."

Effective therapy involves understanding a person's phenomenological world and speaking their experiential language. The more our communication reflects this understanding, the greater the impact. In order to heal, therapy needs to work at a deeper level than words alone, impacting the client at a level that makes a difference in how the problem is represented or coded in the mind and body.

We can extend our ability to enter a person's phenomenological world by learning how, at a primitive biological level, we as living organisms make sense out of and respond to the world. Body-centered and other non-verbal psychotherapies have the power to work with the client at a primitive biological level. In this article we will discuss how this happens and illustrate why body-centered and other non-verbal therapies are an essential part of effective psychotherapy and healing.

While conventional psychotherapy focuses on the intellect and the mind, deep healing often involves the heart. We are most familiar with the heart's most basic physiological function as the life-giving pump that lives in our chest, whose rhythm signals that we are indeed alive. Without the heart, no other organ can function. In this sense, the heart is our life source.

The heart is also our emotional and spiritual life source, tightly linked to our somatic sensory experience. If you set your mind on doing something that isn't really right for you, you are likely to feel a sinking feeling in your heart. In her book Awakening in Time: The Journey from Codependence to Co-Creation (Bantam: 1991), Jacquelyn Small notes, " Without the heart, the mind cannot really function. When our thoughts and intuition cannot agree, we feel pulled by the opposing forces of what the intellect thinks ought to be and what the Heart knows as true ... While the ego's intellect can study isolated facts without linking them, the Heart just naturally links them, seeing the relationships among them all. Where the mind's intellectual arguments divide us, the Heart unites us." This is not only in relationships with other people, but also intrapsychically - in the relationships between and among the different inner parts that collectively comprise the self.

Researchers at the Institute for HeartMath Research in Boulder Creek, California, have found that the heart is a highly intelligent system that plays a far more central role in perception of mental/emotional balance and stress than previously believed:

The heart's electrical system is similar to that of a radio transmitter, generating forty to sixty times more electrical power than the brain. Negative mental and emotional processes electrically scramble the natural rhythms of the heart, creating jerky rhythms as well as incoherent patterns in the heart's electrical frequency domain. Since the heart's electrical signal is so strong, these frequencies are radiated through the entire body and permeate every cell. Due to the increasing level of stress in society, most people's ECG (electrocardiogram) frequency spectrum is scattered and incoherent.

This information suggests that when a person goes through an emotionally painful experience, the electrical patterns of the heart and the whole body are affected. To heal from traumatic experience, therapy must intervene at the level of the heart. Emotional-Kinesthetic psychotherapy (EKP) is a heart-centered, psychospiritual method that will be discussed to illustrate the depth of healing that can take place when using body-centered psychotherapy methods. EKP facilitates a client's ability to heal through grounding the client in his or her heart and body. While talk is part of the EKP process, the purpose of talk is to create a context for deeper healing that may move beyond words alone. The EKP therapist works with tools that increase safety, and slow down pace, increasing the client's access to his/her felt experience in the here and now. These tools include: the quality of attention and holding that is created by the therapist's embodied emotional and spiritual presence in relationship with the client; meditation as a way of slowing down the client's pace and helping him/her connect to somatosensory experience both in the heart and the rest of the body; safe touch (with permission) to facilitate emotional process; and helping the client learn to relate story to felt experience moment by moment. All of these tools can have a healing impact at an energetic level.

As healing takes place in the emotional field that both comprises and is generated by the heart, one could speculate that the healing power is radiated through the entire body and permeates every cell. The Institute for HeartMath Research has found that the ECG can become dramatically ordered and coherent while a person is sincerely feeling love, care, or appreciation. "It is as though the heart, brain, and rest of the body were designed to function best when we experience positive emotional states."

Many of the principles and techniques of EKP are designed to create a safe, loving, holding environment that enables the heart's rhythm to become coherent. In a state of "heartfulness," the client has a safe context for moving deeper into vulnerability, power, forbidden feelings, body process, untold story, and unmet needs. The therapist offers the client a sense of sacred respect, welcoming both the whole of the client and all parts that comprise him/her and an ability to truly hear and respond to the client at whatever level they are "speaking." This experience allows the client to heal and get what they need.

The right hemisphere of the brain appears to be where non-verbal, emotional components of memory are stored. A growing body of literature suggests that the right hemisphere mediates the production of negative emotional states, while the left mediates the positive emotional states. Research on alexithymia, which is characterized by an inability to express one's emotions and a tendency to develop somatic problems, implicates the right hemisphere as the "storage house" of painful emotions. Recent MRI research with combat survivors has shown that traumatic emotions generated in people with post-traumatic stress disorder also activate regions in the right hemisphere.

This research points to the right hemisphere as playing a central role in both the processing of emotional information in general and the generation and storage of negative emotional responses. Thus, inferential communication, music, and imagery, therapeutic interventions that incorporate these kinds of techniques can bypass the logical, rational form of thought of the left brain, and "talk to" the non-logical, associational right brain. Dr. Milton Erickson, a master of speaking to the right brain, was famous for telling jokes, stories, and riddles - all forms of communication mediated by the right hemisphere.

The limbic system is a primitive region of the brain that plays a central role in the transduction of thought into emotion and physiology. It is also believed to play a major role in psychosomatic symptoms. When problems are not communicated verbally, they often are communicated by the limbic system through "organ language," somatic sensations, and psychosomatic symptoms. Therapeutic approaches that involve work with the body speak this language.

This is important because the limbic brain, although primitive, exerts powerful control over our more intellectually sophisticated neocortex. The emotional states generated by the limbic system color and can even override the cognitive processes mediated by the neocortex. Such statements as "I saw red"

and "I was so shocked, I was speechless" reflect common experiences of the cognitively advanced neocortex being controlled by the primitive limbic brain. To help a client shift an emotional state and therefore to move forward, therapy needs to affect awareness at the limbic level.

In EKP, the therapist pays attention to both the symptoms the client brings into the therapeutic process (for example, insomnia characterized by recurrent intrusive thoughts, a nervous stomach that won't let up, tension in the throat that makes it hard to speak ) and to the gestures and felt experience (the sensations that take place inside the client) within the therapy session. The therapist tracks the client's somatic sensations just as closely as she/he tracks the content of the conversation that is also taking place.

For example, as a client explores the tension in his throat, he might experience a racing in his heart. When asked what the racing part might say, if it had a voice, the client might answer, "Let me out!"

When questioned further about the heart's voice, the client begins to cry, and says that the tears are expressing, "I've never felt safe to have a voice, to say the things I've been yearning to say." The therapist then asks what truth the client needs to feel safe to speak, and the client responds, "to know that if I get angry you won't go away."

The therapist affirms that this is true, and the client reports a sense of relief, experienced as a calmness in the heart and relaxing of the throat. The limbic system's knowing at a felt-sense level corresponds with the experience of knowing something to be true in one's heart. The EKP therapist literally incorporates the felt experience of "heart" into the therapy process. In fact, in EKP the heart is viewed as an anchor for the client's emotional and sensory process. The "emotional-kinesthetic charge" - an energetic current within the client that has both emotional and somatosensory content - is tracked by the EKP therapist in order to follow and work with the emotional currents that move within the client. The heart enables therapist and client to monitor the pacing and safety of the therapy process.

The past does not exist in the bodymind. All we have is our current cognitive, perceptual, somatosensory, and physiological representations of our experience. For instance, when we recall a childhood experience, we re-create it in this moment. The thoughts, emotions, and biochemical reactions we have about this experience all happen in the present.

When we have a thought, an image, a memory - or any mental event - something happens physiologically in the brain. Synapses are firing, neurotransmitters are being released, and various brain regions are being activated. Since the brain isn't separated from the body, these physiological processes cascade throughout the whole body.

This is evident whenever we think about a frightening experience or any other emotionally evocative memory. As we recall such an event, our body begins to feel different. The emotions and sensations that were associated with the experience are activated by the memory. The memory is being recalled by the whole body.

Just as thinking about an experience can bring up the bodily sensations and emotions associated with the experience, working with bodily sensations and emotions can elicit the cognitive aspects of memory. For example, a client who was having pain in her upper back and felt an unending heaviness in her heart began to explore her inner experience with an EKP therapist. The therapist suggested an experiment - to put one hand on the back where the client experienced the pain, and the other hand on the front of the heart where the client experienced the heaviness. The therapist adjusted her hands to match the intensity of the pain and the heaviness.

The therapist asked the client to see if any memories or images came to mind of when the heaviness first started. The client began to cry profusely, as she saw images of herself as a little girl being sexually abused by her father. She found herself feeling grief and rage simultaneously. The hands of the therapist provided safety and the containment the client needed to access her deeper feelings and the cognitive memory associated with the felt experience. Once the physical, emotional, and cognitive pieces had been accessed and linked together, the therapist could help provide the healing that the client needed.

How could the client have had such a painful experience, and not remember the details until her physical symptoms brought her to body-centered psychotherapy? This is because during a traumatic event, a person's ability to process the event is overwhelmed by the emotional/physiological effects of the event. During states of overwhelming arousal, the hippocampus, a brain structure that is essential for any form of memory we can consciously recollect and talk about, gets "short-circuited." This temporary short-circuit results in the memory not being coded explicitly. The person has no conscious recollection of the event, but the experience still gets stored.

As one researcher puts it, "The (traumatic) experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level and this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks." These non-verbal forms of memory do not lend themselves to linguistically-oriented therapeutic approaches; non-verbal interventions are required to access and heal them.

In the world of bodymind healing, we see that not only do thoughts affect the body and create emotional and physiological experience, but also that emotional and somatic experience affects our neurophysiology and our thoughts. In body-centered and other non-verbal therapies, we can change how painful experience from the past "lives on" in the bodymind, broaden our tools for working with current experience, and increase health and well-being at many levels. The therapist has the ability to create possibility through experience, meeting clients at many levels of being, but most importantly, helping them have healing experiences by meeting them where they live. David Lee, M.Ed., has lectured throughout North America and overseas on mind/body communication. His approach is based on a synthesis of clinical and research findings from the fields of neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, and evolutionary biology. David may be contacted at 351 Simpson Road, Saco, ME 04072 (207) 929-8565.

* * * Linda Marks, M.S.M., is founder and executive director of the Institute for Emotional Kinesthetic Psychotherapy in Newton, MA. She has taught both in North America and Europe on the place of the body and touch in psychotherapy. She holds degrees from Yale and MIT, is author of Living with Vision: Reclaiming the Power of the Heart (Knowledge Systems, Inc.: 1989), and is on the board of the AHP. Linda may be contacted at Institute for EKP, 3 Central Ave, Newton, MA 02160 (617) 965-7846.

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