There can be many ways on how we can better build connection with ourselves and others, but my focus today is on how we can use our body movement to re-connect to the wounded parts of ourselves and how expressing these wounds to the other will facilitate the process of deeper connection and well-being. The body movement can be used as a means of creative expression, projection, communication and catharsis. Through kinesthetic empathy we can feel our own body and emotional sensations, as well as through mirroring the movement of our peer, we can sense and reflect his/her body language and emotional sensations.
Research in neuroscience (Gallese, 2007), as well as Stern’s theory (2010), confirms that human relationships are driven by the perception of the intentional movement of another. Our brains are designed to develop empathy for the intentional movements of others, and our consciousness is created by forms of vitality (Francesetti, 2019). Thus the movement or the gesture that the receiver creates as a response to the protagonist’s story will have the healing effect.
Have you ever experienced a situation in which you became speechless or numb, as if something blocked your throat and no words would ever come out? Or a situation in which you experience a lot of emotions but have difficulty to express them in words?
Bessel van der Kolk explains the complex physiological process by which trauma memories remain in the non-verbal, subconscious, subcortical regions of the brain, where they are not accessible to the frontal lobes: to the areas of the brain associated with understanding, thinking and reasoning.
When people remember traumatic events, the frontal lobe becomes dysfunctional, and they experience thinking and speaking limitations as a result, in contrast the right hemisphere areas associated with emotional states and autonomic arousal are activated (Hamel, 2021). For van der Kolk, it’s the body that controls our response to trauma, not our mind; once you can do what you could not do during the trauma, and once you are able to return to your center and refocus on a solid organismic basis, you will change.
An emotional memory is an implicit memory that can be reactivated with or without the input of the declarative memory. Peter Levine developed a model called SIBAM: sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning. This model explains how we create a complete experience, but also how dissociation happens.
Levine says that these elements are dissociated during traumatic experiences, while other elements are associated, which leads to different forms of re-experiencing. He thinks that when a person is unable to defend himself when a trauma occurs or to prevent it from happening, unfinished defensive actions become blocked and stored in the nervous system as non-discharged energy.
Levine explains somatic dissociation as trauma being trapped inside the body. Attention to one of the elements of the model gives access to others. A person with complex feelings is insensitive to the movement of another and does not make a movement toward another. Thus, we begin the process by renewing sensitivity to the boundary of contact with one another, when we allow the other to see us and acknowledge our existence.
Accessing and bringing up to the conscious level difficult life stories helps to process them and come to the resolution. Kalshed writes that understanding the inner world of trauma helps to explain two things: 1) the traumatized psyche continues to traumatize itself (the traumatic process continues in the inner world, and we can discover this through dreams and fantasies), 2) people who have experienced psychological trauma constantly find themselves in life situations in which they are traumatized again (Kalshed, 1996).
Trauma as an unfinished situation from the past and a fixed perception was first described by the founders of Gestalt psychotherapy (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1951). The unfinished situation from the past that holds unexpressed feelings gets never fully experienced or discharged. Such situations make it difficult for the person to be conscious, centered, present in the here and now moment and be authentic in contact with another. Unfinished situations seek completion and when they become strong enough, the individual becomes surrounded by previously captured compulsive behavior, caution, suppressed energy and self-harmful activities (Polster and Polster, 1973).