By Sarah Suatoni

For the past several years I have been experimenting with new ways of using dialogue during Hellerwork.  Like most of us, my experimentation came in response to my clients.  For the past several years I have worked with people suffering from severe chronic pain.  (These people struggle with diseases such as endometriosis, vulvadynia, prostidynia, interstitial cystitis, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia.)  One of the characteristics common to these clients is their insistence that their disease is ‘not all in their heads’. For them, talking about the themes that accompany the series, or the way in which emotional patterns reflect in the body arouses defenses rather than enlightening their minds and helping their pain. They do not want to talk, they find analysis of any sort patronizing, and mind/body theories too abstract.  They are in severe pain and suffering from varying degrees of trauma. These clients want to be fixed, fast. 

Still, there is a relationship between their emotional life and their body.  The question is how to work with it?  This question took me back to school in pursuit of my masters in Counseling Psychology as well as deep into my background as a Dancer and Choreographer.  What was clear is that my clients could not connect their pain symptoms and their emotional life and no amount of talking or being told about the connection was helping.  I realized these clients need a ‘bottom up’ process rather than a ‘top down’ one.  (I learned this terminology from Linda McClure; from Hakomi Somatics).  In other words, they need a process which comes from the body into their field of awareness rather than from a mental process of analysis and deduction. 

After one of my chronic pain clients informed me that she (a successful psychotherapist) could not stand when I asked her what she was feeling in her body because she did not know how to feel in her body or talk about it, I knew where I needed to begin.  I had tools as a bodyworker, dancer, artist, and hopelessly non-linear thinker that she did not have.  We started to practice feeling the body during the table work and putting language to the sensations which arouse.  We created a bridge between sensation and language using images, descriptive words, and other ‘vagaries’.  In the beginning my client began every sentence with the phrase, ‘this sounds really stupid but, I feel….”  Despite feeling stupid the process was monumental for her.  After several sessions she told me that no-one had ever told her that her inner impressions were important, so she had never valued them, she had learned to value only what she had learned from the outside world.  At this point, her pain began to heal.

This told me that I had something to teach that comes as second nature to most Dancers and Artists.  I knew how to feel bodily sensations and track the images, memories, impulses, and thoughts which emerge until those responses form into meaning.  This process is the opposite of a talk therapy approach.  It starts with the body, allows for ‘nonsense’ to emerge, and then waits for meaning.  It is not reductionistic, it does not insist on one dimensional answers, and it does not need to fix or explain matters.  This process begins at the edge of language, in that dreamy space where information comes to us through our senses, intuition, and imagination.  When you linger in that space long enough nonsense settles into meaning and language emerges.  Often what we discover is surprising and new, it is not the same old idea, it is not what we thought we should do or know, and it is not what everyone else thinks.  It is information that comes from mining the unconscious using the tools of sensation and imagination.  It is the knowledge the shaman retrieves, the gold the alchemists sought. But if you have lost touch with your senses, imagination, and intuition you have no way toward this information.  You have to retrieve those gifts first, and then they can help you heal.  This is one of the great functions of combining bodywork and dialogue.

After creating this process from the seeds of the artistic process and bolstering it up with my studies of Jungian, Archetypal, Gestalt, Rogerian, and Self psychology I named it “Embodied Dialogue”.  “Embodied Dialogue” is a technique for using the sensations, images, word phrases, thoughts, feelings, and movement impulses which emerge from the body when it is touched deeply in a highly charged area, in order to help the client know themselves better.   It is a way of dialoguing with the body which works well when the mind/body relationship is unclear, unconscious, or frozen with trauma.  It is sometimes a simple process of asking the client, “what does your leg say when you settle down and focus on it?”, and, listening for the answer.

More often it is a complex task which adheres to several principals. The first of these principles, borrowed from Buddhism, is non-judgment.  As a practitioner you shift into a state of non-judgment, letting go of outcome.  You teach your client how to feel into their bodies, focus deeply, and trust the information which emerges, allowing the unconscious to slowly unfold. Clients often discount the information which emerges because of their judgments.  They may feel pain and not want to, they may see the color black and decide they do not like black.  With ‘embodied dialogue’ you metaphorically hold your clients hand while inviting them to shift in to what ever is present, letting go of their judgments.  The deep touch acts as a focusing point and a portal into the unknown.  You are the guide; they do the journey, like Ariadne holding the golden thread while Theseus travels the maze in search of the Minotaur who is in fact his mirror reflection.

That brings us to the second principle, borrowed from Gestalt theory, working with what is present in the here-and-now.  If your client shifts into a memory and begins to narrate, you gently ask them how that feels in their body right now.  “Embodied dialogue” requires the client to stay in their body and not dissociate.  If the client moves into the past or present you help them notice how that shift feels in their body so that they begin to learn how to track their ability to be in their body and feel. 

The third principle is the ability to hang out in the unknown with your client.  Most people are resistant (clients and practitioners alike) to going into this unknown space.  Yet, as therapist Karl Rogers discovered, we all yearn for someone to hang out with us in our confusion and just listen.  I use Karl Rogers seminal technique of ‘reflective listening’, (doing nothing but listening and repeating back what you have heard), to frame “embodied dialogue” as a process of reflective listening to the body.  It is a process in which you help the client track their sensations and uses their own accessing systems to make meaning.  This means holding a space of open attention, quietly reflecting back the client’s words as they feel in to their body.  If you have ever practiced reflective listening you know that it is a pure state of presence.  At first, practicing reflective listening can trigger anxiety or uncertainty about whether you are doing enough.  You may feel almost like you have disappeared.  Those feelings often drive us into advice giving, explaining, and fixing even though deep listening is far more curative. 

The fourth principle of “embodied dialogue” is knowledge of accessing systems.  For years I used my basic knowledge of Neuro-linguistic programming learned on my Hellerwork training.  This helped me to understand that people access their interior through different means.  Some people are visual and see images, symbols etc, while others are auditory and connect to rhythm, pulse, sound and vibration, and so on.  A full explanation is not possible here, but the point is that you begin each time with the sensations which arise from our touch and then help people use their accessing systems to deepen into their bodies and move into meaning. 

The fifth principle is knowledge of working with trauma.  When you begin working deeply with sensation you can enter territory frozen by a fight/flight/freeze response to a traumatic experience.  Working with trauma is a highly skilled practice which you may or may not chose to pursue, but a basic knowledge of what to do if your client enters a trauma state is essential to this work.

The sixth principle is holism.  We use this word to encompass our work already.  I am applying to our psychic reality.  When you work from sensation amazing thoughts, memories, images, and feeling states may emerge.  You can break these down, pick them apart, analyze them or you can hold them in reverence and treat them as whole figures which emerge from the unconscious to expand and inform you.  This differs from the model in which we let go of issues, eradicate memories, and reduce images to a single meaning which we cling to as fact.  Rather than getting rid of our ‘stuff’ I would propose learning to relate to it and to the deeper aspects of our self which it reveals.  Jung once said, “In our symptoms lays our souls”.  Alfred Adler took this very literally and agreed that our physical weaknesses reveal our psychic strengths.  My chronic pain clients always begin wanting to get rid of their pain symptoms (who wouldn’t?).  Instead we use “embodied dialogue” to relate to their deeper aspects and most often the pain slowly goes away.

This and other dialogue tools I have been using during session work are all grounded in my take on holism.  It could be described as a belief that we do not need to change.  We do not need to cathart and rid ourselves of ‘evil’ or bad aspects. Sometimes the cathartic processes of the 70’s work, but often they disappoint us and the stuff we thought we let go of returns.  The idea that we need to get rid of our stuff harkens back to early Judeo-Christian beliefs that we are inherently bad, evil, or inadequate.  Similarly, we do not need to reduce everything we learn into a sound bite we can explain.  We can not grow past the limits of our acculturation unless we allow non-sense in.  We do not have to throw out our ability to analyze, reduce, reason, and explain.  These tools can support our process, as we develop the ability to trust our imagination, hear our inner voices, and know the language of the soul.

Part of our current attraction to Yoga, Buddhism, and eastern thought is the suggestion that we are whole, not part bad, part good, part missing.  This, in combination with the current wave of thought in analytic Psychology toward a ‘relational psychology” suggests a new way of using dialogue.  This is dialogue which is talking ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ our inner nature.  (Joseph Heller embraced Voice Dialogue as part of the Hellerwork tool bag for this reason). 

From this perspective dialogue follows the rules of relationship. We help our clients contact and learn how to relate to an ever expanding self.  Like all relationships, this takes time and a willingness to be in relationship. It means learning how to be quiet and listen. It means expanding our ability to tolerate difference, conflict, and multiplicity.  It shifts us from the ‘masculine’ goal of effecting change, and fixing problems to the feminine model of relating and expanding our ability to be intimate.

What I like best about working with “embodied dialogue” is that is educational.  It teaches our clients the same state of presence or awareness that they go to Yoga, Meditation or Ti Chi class for while teaching them about themselves on a deeper level.  I also love that it happens during the bodywork and makes the dialogue and organic extension of deep touch.  Finally, I like it because it works.  In the words of one of my clients, “What I get from this I could not get from therapy or massage; I truly feel the connection between my mind and body”. 

Linda McClure and I are beginning to put my ideas of dialogue together with her ideas around working with trauma.  We taught a workshop in Seattle this fall in which we used the pelvis as a territory and explored working with embodied dialogue, trauma theory, and very specific deep tissue techniques.  Linda brings in scientific information ( from trauma theory, Candice Pert’s ‘Molecules of Emotion’, and Michael Gershon’s ‘Second Brain’)  to substantiate our belief in working on both the emotional and physical plains at the same time.  What we discovered in this workshop was a great need to teach body mechanics, and some mind-body awareness to the practitioners to accompany the technique of embodied dialogue. 

Embodied dialogue is not something you need to use through out the session.  It is best used when you come across certain fascial intersections.  It takes some training to know where these spots are and how to use your body to provide a slow suspended touch so that your client can sink in to the area.  There is a certain finesse which comes from knowing how to use your own body as an energetic feedback loop which helps you know when and how to sink deep in to the tissue and use this dialogue.  Soon, we will teach this workshop again on the east coast.  Anyone interested in what I am talking about can contact me.