Somatisation
The Physical Expression of Our Unspoken Story
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Saturday 6 March 2021 - A Live Webinar
A live webinar led by Julianne Appel-Opper
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 4.00am EST Wednesday 3 March
In this embodied and experiential webinar Julianne Appel-Opper will offer new perspectives to explore and to work with somatisation and embodied communications. Julianne has developed a way of working – “relational living body psychotherapy” – that is theoretically rooted in integrative gestalt psychotherapy and intersubjective psychoanalytic thinking. This approach also draws on the research fields of attachment, developmental psychology, neuroscience and somatisation.
READ MORE...The focus of the webinar will be to explore how therapists might be able to hear and understand stories without words. For example, what is communicated as a still shoulder, a look away or painful tension in the back? You will consider how silence, rhythms and melodies of movements might tell a story. You will learn to work with fear of exposure and shame which often make somatised stories elusive and finally the nuanced experience of the embodied presence between therapist and client will be explored.
This workshop will be experiential with short exercises, sensitising participants into a greater awareness of their own and client’s embodiment and somatisation tendencies with a particular focus on attachment trauma. You will explore implicit body-to-body-communications and movements to open up embodied stories for further exploration and integration.
FULL PROGRAMME
09.00 EST
Introductions and Zoom Housekeeping
09.05
How Do Living Bodies Speak?
This session will begin with short exercises including the exploration of breathing and moving rhythms, inviting an embodied engagement to the day’s learnings. Julianne will introduce kinaesthetic language as a guide for participants to explore their sensations and experiences.
09.45
Questions
10.00
Break
10.15
Embodied Communications
Here we will explore how living bodies “speak” about their lived experiences and how this ‘speaking’ or communication may impact another living body, that of the therapist. The somatisation processes of chronic back pain will be considered as an example of how a client’s muscles tense up in conflict situations as an unconscious expectation of a past trauma or developmental trauma. Julianne will offer creative ways to open up and make sense of these embodied, yet wordless stories.
11.15
Questions
11.30
Break
12.00
Moving and Being Moved
This session will focus on how therapist and client move and effect each other. With short exercises we will explore implicit body-to-body-communications. Julianne will demonstrate how it might be possible to open up these mute parts that come to the therapy as movements. We will consider what it is that we “inhale” from another living body? What the two spines communicate to each other for example.
Finally, Julianne will look at supervision of clinical work, including considering what is communicated in the first seconds of presenting a client. Participants will explore their physical expression of their time with this particular client and discuss possible embodied interventions.
12.45
Final Reflections
13.15
End