Editor’s Note: The Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor* was discovered/founded by Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso in 1961. This, then, represents one of the earliest "second generation" systems in somatic psychology. They started as dancers interested in the way movement and the psyche related, both within an individual and within groups. Since that time they have devoted their energy to refining their process and improving and expanding long-term certification training programs in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and in many cities throughout the United States.
Their careful and thorough articulation of how we come to feel ill and how we can move into health has been a standard for others to follow. The Pessos specialize in creating experiential "structures" or activities that remediate past developmental deficits that are dysfunctionally driving one’s current life. Through enacting need satisfaction in a supportive, coaching environment, we can truly come into the present moment.
I once had the pleasure of watching Al demonstrate his work with a workshop participant. I was moved by the power of his presence and vulnerability to create an invitation for another to heal. He is a perfect example of the art of practicing psychotherapy, and this chapter illustrates the dynamic blend of Al and Diane’s two powerful minds and two compassionate hearts.
I write this from the perspective of thirty-five years of exploration and experience using Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP®) procedures with thousands of group members, trainees – and more recently – managers and top industry executives.
More than ever, I am impressed with the long-lasting influence that memories of early-life events have on people’s experience and understanding of present-day events, and further, how memories of those early-life events limit the range and quality of options available to people as they prepare for, and anticipate, future events. I am equally impressed with the general lack of attention given to understanding and working with this phenomenon.
It should be more widely recognized that:
·the experience of the present is always seen through the “lens” of memories of the past.
·an appreciable portion of what appears to be transpiring in the present is actually a recollection and re-experience of the past.
·memories of the past directly influence and modify present day actions and interactions.
·anticipations (expectations) regarding the future are largely based on assumptions formed on experiences in the past.
Simply put, the past is deeply embedded in the experience of the present and woven into anticipations of the future.
Without awareness of these phenomena and – more importantly – without techniques which allow control and modification of the storage, retrieval and influence of memories, people are not likely to escape the “fate” predicated on – and predicted by – their early history.
The common wisdom is that the past is over and done with and has little to do with one’s present life. Further, that all one can do about the past is realistically accept its “facts”; and as to the future – that is in the hands of the gods.
The past is neither such a permanently fixed constant, nor is the seemingly inevitable unfolding of the future so shrouded in mystery. Memories of the past are not absolute facts, but are subjective emotional experiences, combined with cognitive assessments of interpersonal events, which are encoded in our nervous systems in ways that affect the appearance of present events and influence future plans and interactions.
A memory is not a mere copy or a simple internalization of interactive events, but more accurately, a translation of those events. Thus, a memory is not a “fixed thing”, it is a “neural record” about many things. People “digest” events in their minds and convert them into “meaning” stored in neural patterns. We are a living record of the past. Each moment of the present, we tap into the “data base” or “library” of living knowledge that memories of past events have deposited in our beings, to determine how we should respond to the latest challenge/opportunity presented from the outside world.
One might conclude, from my remarks, that I think there is no intrinsic meaning in life and that meaning is only formed individually and subjectively – that individuals only create meaning for themselves as they face an essentially unknowable, booming, buzzing, meaningless, external world. That would not be an accurate conclusion.
A person is not born into the world tabula rasa. Indeed, by being born, we inherit a virtual treasure trove of meaning that is packed into our genes. This meaning can be externally observed in the determined-to-live, purposefulness of our biological organization. It can be internally experienced in the not-to-be-ignored, felt presence of our deepest emotional needs, longings and tendencies. We have in every cell, “maps”, “blueprints” and inclinations that can lead to a life of pleasure and fulfillment. Our living flesh and nervous system – born of our genes – is a virtual “database” and “library” which “knows” beforehand – in that it is able to recognize when it is present – those experiences and interactions which will result in the continuity of our individual life and the continuity of the human species.
This genetic “information” stored everywhere, inside every part of us, knows – and has successfully played – “the game of life” from the beginning of time. We call that gene-carried information pool – that “living record” which “knows” how to successfully keep life going – “evolutionary memory”. It is not memory in the sense that we have personally lived its history. But it is memory in the sense that our genes contain the record of successful living organisms from the beginning of time. We human beings are the living-generation-stewards of this precious, time-tested “life-knowing” and should be conscious of that awesome responsibility.
This adds a new wrinkle to the understanding of the part memory plays in every moment of our lives. From this standpoint, the “now” of a present-moment is not only filled with the “then” of our personal memory of past-events, it is also full of the “way-back-then” evolutionary memory of gene-captured, life-enhancing, ways of perceiving and acting. Seen this way, a moment in time is quite a dynamic thing.
Like all memory, evolutionary memory influences our experience of the present and our anticipations of the future. Evolutionary memory is not value-free. It is “invested” in – and indeed, it is literally “responsible” for – the continuity of generations to come. It has “knowledge” of all that has lived successfully for eons before us. It contains information about the “yet-to-be-fulfilled” yearnings and present requirements of our “evolutionary past”. Evolutionary memory is alive in us and can supply us with the basic materials and information needed to meet and create our personal and evolutionary future.
Memories should help us cope successfully with the present and guide us to a happy-outcome future. For what good is memory if it does not hold a promise that it will help us handle the present and improve the future? Then what about personal memories that do not support the goals of evolutionary memory? Many remembered past events result in attitudes that are antagonistic to the fulfillment of life. Remembered negative life lessons promote dreadful experiences in the present and prepare the mind and body for wretched events in the future. Why do we experience such life-denying and future-killing events and what can we do to keep those memories from wreaking their havoc inside and outside us?
Why indeed? Those questions are the stimulus behind the creation/discovery and evolution of PBSP®.
Not every individual encounters conditions that sufficiently satisfy the developmental needs and longings of life. There are wars, famines, natural and social disasters, all of which make it impossible for parents to provide their children with what their impressionable young beings are genetically primed to anticipate. Memories of need frustrating events encountered in difficult times inevitably leave their negative imprint and prepare people for more of the same in the present and in the future. People with unsatisfying early histories are less inclined to provide their offspring (should they even conceive them) with what they themselves never experienced. They then likely pass on to the next generation a taste of their own personal culture of diminished hope in life (with perhaps a compensating belief in perfect satisfaction in the afterlife – gene expectations for satisfaction have to show up somewhere).
Though these event-injured people do manage to exist (albeit while suffering greatly) in the world as they find it, all people are genetically prepared to be able to more than simply exist. People can flourish (flower, mature and metaphorically bear fruit) when provided with conditions that fulfill their innate, geared-for-satisfaction, genetic requirements.
By the very nature of existence, people long to have pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness in their lives. When genetic requirements for maturation are satisfied at the right age, by the right providers, those happy states are the natural outcome of existence. When they are not, the opposites are experienced: not pleasure but pain; not satisfaction, but frustration; not meaning, but despair; and not connectedness, but alienation.
No doubt, you, the reader, noted that I underline the conditions required for appropriate satisfaction of genetic maturational needs. Am I saying that once the appropriate time is gone by that those genetic maturational needs are never rightfully satisfied? Practically speaking, yes, and moreover, though frustrated, the search and longing for fulfillment of those requirements does not go away nor appreciably diminish over time.
Though we are no longer children and our parents may be long dead, those genetic “aches” tirelessly seek relief and lead us to desperately search for (and sometimes seem to find in our spouses, friends, mentors, and others) those necessary, soul-satisfying interactions that would provide the “click” that our evolutionary memory has prepared us to “wait” for. We justifiably hunger for that glorious sense of relief, that “finally felt rightness”, that would let us move more joyfully in the world and be more able to confidently face the next stage of our development.
If we, metaphorically speaking, “missed the boat”, what can we do to alleviate the discomfort that negative history produces? And how can we finally get a taste of – and a ticket to – that heaven on earth our brain/body organization is prepared to encounter? We do not believe it is possible to literally satisfy developmental deficits in “real-time”, in one’s present age, with people in one’s present life – nor do we attempt to do so.
We have developed a technology in Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor that enables people to experience the symbolic satisfaction of genetic requirements for maturation in a precisely designed event that we call a “structure” – a highly organized and client-controlled activity. In a structure, the client remembers, and simultaneously re-experiences, the emotional/body state when those needs should have been met in their actual past. In that sense, they are at the right age. Then client-selected group members role play “Ideal Mother”, “Ideal Father”, “Ideal Grandmother” etc., who – had they been back there in the client’s “personal memory” of the past – would have responded in ways their “evolutionary memory” had anticipated they would. In that way, they become the right providers, for they move, interact and speak with the client in ways, that provide the “click” of long awaited and internally anticipated satisfaction and relief.
These Ideal figures are not constructed out of elements of clients’ real parents, they are wholly fabricated, new parents who are designed to behave in ways that are most consistent with the client’s “evolutionary memory” expectations. We have learned to gather information about those expectations from clients’ emotional reactions, facial expressions, posture, body sensations and also from their more conscious thoughts and ideas about what would be best.
The kinesthetic, sensory motor, cognitive recording of this symbolic, counter-event is then designated and stored as if it had actually been experienced in a more distant past. These new-map, “virtual memories” serve as alternatives – not replacements – of their negative, present-and-future-disturbing, “actual memories”. Thus, structures can be transformational experiences which free people from the prison of their past and help them escape the fate of a lifetime of pain, frustration, despair, and alienation.
Later in the chapter I shall give a description of an actual structure, but first I will outline the basic theories and techniques of PBSP® so that you will readily understand the technical steps taken in the procedure.
The work of building life-enhancing structures is based on four important concepts:
1. The longing for fulfillment of the basic, genetic developmental requirements are experienced bodily and emotionally and incline us to look and move toward the outer world in specific, need-based ways.
· Each need has its own “shape”
2. The interactions which optimally fulfill these longings for satisfaction must precisely meet and match the interiorly driven longings, and include sensori-motor, kinesthetic, verbal and conceptual, need-specific responses.
· Each need satisfaction has its own “countershape”
3. These needs are most fully satisfied when provided by the most appropriate kinship relationships.
· Each need satisfaction has its own “satisfier(s)”.
4. There are specific age levels that must be recalled and re-connected to when virtual memories are constructed.
· Each need fulfillment has its own “time frame”.
To sum up, our genes dispose us to anticipate the satisfaction of basic developmental needs necessary for personal development and maturation. They also provide us with hard-wired, sensory-motor “templates” that enable us to recognize and pleasurably respond to those outer conditions, people, shapes and interactions that most optimally meet those inner requirements. We also have stored within our nervous systems the categories of basic kinship relationships, such as mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother and grandfather, aunt and uncle. Further, we have the innate capacity to register and respond with different kinds of behaviors and expectations at different ages to those in different categories of kinship relationship.
What exactly are those genetic maturational needs that we are so internally driven to satisfy? These are the five that we attend to in Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor.
We need to:
1. Satisfy the basic developmental needs for:
· Place
· Nurture
· Support
· Protection
· Limits
2. Integrate and unify the polarities of our biological and psychological being:
· Sperm/Egg – own and comfortably identify with mother’s and father’s antecedents and gene pool.
· Neurological – integrate and have good communication between left hemisphere and right hemisphere.
· Sensori-Motor – be comfortable and skillful in all combinations of perception and action.
· Behavioral - have an easy acceptance and comfortable use of all body apertures involved in “putting-out” and “taking-in”.
· Symbolic - at ease with one’s metaphoric androgyny of combined “maleness/femaleness”(Animus and Anima) while able to identify with one’s biological gender.
3. Develop our consciousness – increase subjectivity/objectivity, with a well developed interior world of images and concepts combined with a strong sense of individual identity and ego.
4. Develop our “pilot” – have a strong, active, self-organizing, self initiating center. Akin to taking our rightful place as the “president” of our own “united states of consciousness”.
5. Realize our personal uniqueness and potentiality - come to maturity, ripen and bring the precious fruit of our existence to the world.
1. Satisfy the basic developmental needs.
The basic developmental needs for Place, Nurture, Support, Protection and Limits must be met in three stages.
· First, in a concrete, literal way by the appropriate satisfiers
· Second, in a metaphoric or symbolic way by the appropriate satisfiers
· And finally, by ourselves
I will use Place – the most fundamental need – as an example to illustrate these stages. In the first stage, we need to experience being literally inside a safe place that communicates to us that we are loved, wanted, and where we are provided with the room/space to exist, protected by the ones whose stuff we are made of. Before birth, we have a place inside the uterus and after we are born we have a place inside the loving embrace of our parents.
In the second stage, we need to experience being metaphorically or symbolically inside such a loving, life-sustaining place. After our birth, we can feel the pleasure of living inside the metaphoric place of our parents’ hearts, lives, gazes, and most importantly, their minds. We can experience – by how they look at us – that we exist in their image of us, inside their minds, surrounded by love. Their consciousness of us enables us to be conscious of ourselves.
After the successful completion of the first two stages, we can model/internalize the place-giving behavior and attitudes of our parents and feel literally “at home” inside our own bodies. We can feel metaphorically “at home” inside our own minds where we have created an image of ourselves, surrounded by the remembered love of our parents, supplemented by our own appropriate love for ourselves. In this final stage, we have gained a firm sense of belonging, so we can feel “at home” in the world, anywhere, with full rights to existence.
In this chapter, I will not go into detail regarding the other basic needs except to say that these same three stages must be completed for them as well. In brief, we must first be literally nurtured, supported, protected and limited and then metaphorically nurtured, supported, protected and limited in order for us to be able to confidently do those tasks for ourselves.
If there are major flaws in the provision of the literal and metaphoric satisfaction of those needs, one’s capacity to be comfortably self-reliant is damaged. Further, memories of need-frustrating interactions distort the way people experience the present in predictable ways and diminish hope for fulfillment of future life-goals.
2. Integrate and unify the polarities of our biological and psychological being:
We are genetically drawn to take full and conscious ownership of the entire range of our bodily and mental capacities. To be true to our organismic integrity, we must explore, discover and “own” the living being that we are and learn to take pride and mastery in all of our natural functions. In an optimal upbringing our parents would support this endeavor and not prohibit us from awareness and ownership of any parts of ourselves.
· Sperm/Egg – own and comfortably identify with mother’s and father’s antecedents and gene pool.
In an optimum upbringing, we would not be given any reason to make us want to tear out, discard, or not love those parts of ourselves that remind us of our parents or their antecedents.
However, there are many, not-so-optimal families where the mother or father derides or despises their spouse to the dismay of their children who identify and look like that spouse. There are many maternal or paternal grandparents who make disparaging remarks about the “other side of the family”. Children who hear these criticism are inclined to disown that part of themselves that is descended from the “wrong” part of the family.
· Neurological – integrate and have good communication between left hemisphere and right hemisphere.
Although the brain functions as a single unit, each hemisphere has its own special features and functions. We need to be raised in an environment that licenses the fullest use of both hemispheres – generally regarded as emotional/spatial and intellectual/linear. Neither hemisphere should be characterized as “male” or “female”. Children, regardless of their gender should not feel that use of any part of their cortical capacities is “off limits”.
Some families and cultures teach children that being emotional or artistic is not “masculine” and discourage boys from expanding or exploring those capabilities. Even in recent times, girls have been discouraged from being too “intelligent” as it would hinder them from getting a good partner. Such cultural and familial restraints result in a psychological numbing of capacities and restrict the fullest use and experience of mental and emotional faculties.
· Sensori-Motor – be comfortable and skillful in all combinations of perception and action.
We should be brought up in an environment which encourages us to explore moving in all the ways our nervous systems are designed to allow. We can move reflexively, we can move volitionally, and we can move emotionally. While children are growing up, they experiment, in play and other interactions, with the entire range their systems allow. Some parents get annoyed or irritated with elements of such play. They might not like to see certain behaviors and find them unacceptable, crude, frightening or what you will. Such messages or non-verbal signals will result in children inhibiting those “unacceptable” forms of behavior. In the extreme case, parents may be saying to children in indirect ways, “Parts of you are unacceptable, I will kill all those forms of action and being in your body.”
Children are naturally curious and want to use and “play” with all their senses. They touch, everything, smell everything, taste everything and want to see and hear everything. How often are children told, “Keep your hands off that” , “You poke your nose into everything”, “Get that out of your mouth”, and so on. It may be done in the interest of safety or order, but in extreme cases there may be underlying messages: “I can’t stand you being a living, sensing, being – stop being a curious, reacting living creature.”
· Behavioral - have an easy acceptance and comfortable use of all body apertures involved in “putting-out” and “taking-in”.
We have many different kinds of fluids that that come out of the openings of our bodies. These have an organismic and life-maintaining function and should be accepted as a natural part of the rhythm and beauty of life. But in many cultures and family settings, they are not. Children are significantly influenced by how they are responded to, and described when they sweat, salivate, have mucous coming from their nostrils; when they have tears coming from their eyes, when they urinate and defecate.
When children reach puberty, parts of their bodies start to change, grow hair or enlarge. These events must be normalized and accepted without humiliation or derision, or it has a detrimental effect on their future capacity to accept and enjoy these parts of their nature. When they experience they have fluids like semen, lubricants and menstrual blood flowing from them, they must be told honestly and respectfully about the place of sexuality in life. Then, as they mature, they can freely and joyously take part in the continuity of the human species.
Women have breasts which produce milk after they give birth to children. Breast feeding should be a normal, accepted activity, but only today I read in the International Herald Tribune in Basel, Switzerland, that a woman in Philadelphia was arrested for disorderly conduct for nursing her baby in a food court. Clearly, we also need to develop a society that appreciates and supports our genetic nature.
We also have apertures for “intake” that are necessary for the maintenance of the individual self and the species. Our noses breathe in air, our mouths take in sustenance – activities essential for the continuation of our individual lives. When children make the movements and sounds connected with those life-fulfilling functions, they should be normalized and not made to seem strange or ridiculous.
Women have vaginas, that are designed for the “intake” of a penis and its sperm. It should not be seen as a “one down” position (as in the aggressive epithet, “Fuck you!”) They should be honored and respected for this species-sustaining capacity and not be seen as less worthy than men because they have an organ that is made to “take in” sperm and to “output” a baby.
· Symbolic - at ease with one’s metaphoric androgyny of combined “maleness/femaleness”(Animus and Anima) while able to identify with one’s biological gender.
We are born as either biologically male or female (with some mixtures occasionally occurring, recent research tells us), but we all have “male” and “female” hormones. This may explain why we all have “male” and “female” characteristics regardless of our gender. Whatever our sex, we live best when we live what we are genetically organized to be. But what if we are born a girl and our parents wanted a boy – or vice-versa? And what if our culture has very limited ideas about what is “natural” for boys to do and “natural” for girls to do?
And what happens to our understanding and integration of our maleness and femaleness when one parent is not sufficiently in our lives before we can successfully model and internalize their care-taking? We have found that the death or early disappearance of either parent has a profound effect on our behavior in this dimension.
When a parent dies, other outside figures tend to fill in for them, but a less observed phenomenon is that a part of our own psyches tends to take over the place and function of that missing parent. Regardless of our biological gender, we become our own “magical, omnipotent interior father” or our own “magical omnipotent interior mother”, depending on which parent is gone. This has a profound effect on our psychological orientation and outer behavior changes accordingly.
Further, children tend to form a “magical marriage” with the surviving parent, which produces behaviors that reflect cultural, mate-differentiated roles. Put simply, the “magical husband” child tends to be “harder”, more protective and assertive with his/her surviving mother, and the “magical wife” child tends to be “softer” more nurturing and care-taking with his/her surviving father. “Magical marriages” tend to interfere with literal mate-choosing and commitment to marriage later in life. This may explain why some wives and husbands bitterly complain that their spouses are far more “connected” to their own mothers or fathers than they are to them.
3. Develop our consciousness – increase subjectivity/objectivity, with a well developed interior world of images and concepts combined with a strong sense of individual identity and ego.
We are able to exist in the world and also able to know that we exist in the world. We have the nervous system capacity to subjectively stand in the center of our experience, and to also stand back and “look” at ourselves as objects in the world. This kind of self consciousness can enhance living and should not result in the inhibition of the fluid experience of “being in the world”. Although we have glass mirrors to see our selves with, the real mirrors of the self are the people who are around us as our personalities are being formed – our parents and family at large. It is their “image” (and treatment) of us that gives us the materials to make our own “self image”. We become “self conscious” in the negative sense – paralyzed and unable to be “in the flow of life” – whenever we become aware that our present behavior is akin to those behaviors we exhibited in the past that were “unacceptable” and brought shame and humiliation.
In an optimal upbringing, our parents would nurture an image of ourselves that was core-validating so that our developing consciousness would contribute to our capacity to live in the world with more pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness.
Further, our nervous system is organized so that we can construct a micro universe in our minds that is an inner “sensory” equivalent of the outer, macro universe. As we live in and experience the world, we “see” it as it “actually” is in our brains, and we simultaneously make a “mental image” of it for later use when we want to “recall” it and “see it” in our “mind’s-eye”. Now, there are two universes: one, the outer world “as it is” that we see with our “actual” eyes; and two, the outer world (which includes ourselves) constructed in our minds that we “see” with our “mind’s-eye”. (When people have a “far-away” look, they may have stopped “seeing” with their “actual” eyes and may be absorbed, “seeing” with their “mind’s-eye” what is “on their minds”.)
Not only can we “see” the outer world, as we have “remembered” it, in our minds. We can also “fantasize” and make those images in our minds do things in our “mind’s-eye” that we may never have seen done in the “outer” world. Thus, by using the pictures we have created in past events as the raw materials for our creativity, we are able to “play” with the world in our minds and construct imaginary events. Since we have our bodies represented in our minds, we can also “feel” and “react” to those remembered or imaginary events in our “mind’s-body”. (We use this faculty to good advantage when we construct new, “virtual memories” in structures.)
Consciousness includes a third element. We have the brain supported ability to apply verbal symbols (names) to all that we see in the outer world and in our “mind’s-eye”; and further, to all that we feel in our actual body and in our “mind’s-body”. We can then remember the linkage between the name of the thing, the thing itself and our image of it in our “mind’s-eye”. Putting it all together, we can remember the linkage between the name of the actual feeling, the feeling itself, and the feeling in our “mind’s-body”.
Thus we have a “verbally represented universe” in our minds that we can manipulate, using words, just as we have a “visually represented universe” in our minds that we can manipulate, using visual images. It is important that our parents assist us in our drive to accurately portray the world in our minds.
4. Develop our “pilot” – have a strong, active, self-organizing, self initiating center. This is akin to taking our rightful place as the president of our own “united states of consciousness”.
We have the neural capacity and right to self regulate and self-organize. All that we “see” and “feel” in the outer and inner world arrives at a point of reference that we call the “pilot” aspect of ourselves. It is the place where “the buck stops”. It is not another term for the observing ego, for it includes the executive aspect of the self. The fully developed “pilot”, can, see, feel and understand all that is happening and endeavors to choose the optimal course in each circumstance. The “pilot” then implements its choices in the best interest of the self and the species. Thus the “pilot” is not only influenced by “personal memory” but also by “evolutionary memory”.
Parents should cultivate and support the “pilot” capacity in their children as they are developing. However, some families, institutions and cultures suppress self initiated behavior. Children may be discouraged from thinking and deciding for themselves. They may be told, “I know what is going on in your mind better than you do and I know what is best for you.” Some institutions and cultures teach that simple obedience and suppression of the self is the highest value, placing the “pilot” function out of reach of the individual and in the hands of some selected few.
A child who grows up in a family that supports the development of the “pilot” will develop competence and confidence in their own decisions and actions. When such children grow up, they are more able to cope successfully with difficulties they encounter in the real world.
The “pilot” aspect of the client is constantly addressed in the therapy, so that control of the structure is always in the hands of the client and not in the hands of the “expert who knows best”. An important function of the PBSP® therapist is to enrich the client’s “pilot” with information arising from their “evolutionary memory” that can be seen from the outside as behavior, posture and facial expression or heard from the outside as emotional tone.
5. Realize our personal uniqueness and potentiality - come to maturity, ripen and bring the precious fruit of our existence to the world.
Each of us is conceived with a unique set of coiled genes “primed” for realization. We are born with a desire to develop our resources and contribute our matured talents to the pool of human resources. This unfolding and becoming of an individual self is not only a biological activity, it is also a spiritual one. When we bring to life our unique personal contribution, we are active, local participants in the endless cosmic drama of the creation of ultimate meaning as the universe, itself divine, “becomes”.
If we do not find “our calling” or determine “what we were meant to do” in this world, we are left with the bitter taste of meaninglessness and despair. It is the greatest misery imaginable to find, as we near the end of our days, that we have missed being active, meaningful participants on this – one and only – stage of life because we had neither found, nor developed our special part to play in the extraordinary drama of physical existence.
Parents should always treat their children with the full knowledge that they are the carriers of the treasure of existence. They should provide opportunities for their children to explore all their native capabilities so that they can discover for themselves what it is within them that they most love to do.
Parents who dampen children’s natural enthusiasm and curiosity about themselves and their lives imprison their spirits and virtually prohibit them from stepping on the grand stage of life where they can proudly and confidently “strut their stuff”.
This completes the short survey of what people need to have experienced in their past in order for them to live a life of pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness.
Obviously, there are few people who have had the good fortune to have had all those elements successfully attended to in their pasts. It is our belief that the unmet requirements of our genetic nature and the painful memories of their frustration underlies – and is interwoven with – the suffering and desperation that people experience in the present. This is not to say that people who have had histories of “evolutionary memory” satisfactions, or who have successfully undergone a therapy which attends to that, do not experience troubling times – certainly they do, but they are in a much better position and condition to effectively cope with life’s difficulties.
Most importantly, they are much more ready and able to respond to other’s feelings and needs, to enjoy living with other people, love and be loved – and if they choose – much more prepared to naturally and joyfully be a parent.
Now we shall turn to describe the technology, concepts and practices we use to help people contact what is going on inside their bodies, emotions and thoughts as they face the issues that concern them in their immediate present.
These are the procedures that are typically followed in a PBSP® session called a “structure”:
1. Offering the “possibility sphere”.
2. Helping the client be in the “center of truth”.
3. Developing the “true scene”.
4. Developing the “historical scene”.
5. Developing the “healing scene” (“antidote”).
A structure is typically done in a group with the understanding that other group members (clients or trainees) will play the necessary roles. Clients in Individual therapy sessions designate objects in the room to represent the various roles and figures that are relevant to the work.
The goals of a structure are to help the client discover and attend to:
· the memories, emotions and attitudes of the past that are embedded in their experience of the present that prevent them from successfully coping with what is going on in their lives.
· the expression of buried emotions connected to those past events.
· the satisfaction of needs that were originally not met in those past events.
· establishing and experiencing the appropriate age level when those needs should have been met.
· the satisfaction of those needs with the, gene-anticipated appropriate satisfiers of those needs.
· the construction and accurate storage of the “virtual memory” (new-map) in association with the literal memory.
I will now elaborate on those five steps.
1. Offering the “possibility sphere”.
The “possibility sphere” is the name given to the literal and metaphoric space that the therapist extends to the client in PBSP®. It is called the “possibility sphere” because it proffers the non-verbal message that life is possible and that the unfulfilled possibilities of the client will be allowed to emerge and find what is necessary for their fullest expression in this setting. It provides a safe, respectful, highly structured environment where clients can consciously attend to the meaning of verbal, nonverbal, cognitive and emotional information as it rises to the surface of their minds and bodies.
Before the session begins, the therapist connects with his/her therapeutic center – out of which all therapeutic moves and interventions will arise. The “possibility sphere” is empty of the therapists needs, hopes or expectations and only filled with his/her consciousness and awareness of the client. The PBSP® therapist has trust in the self-organizing power in the client as well as in him/herself and depends on the inner, motive force of “evolutionary memory” to provide the impetus and pathways to healing.
This attitude defines the client-therapist relationship. The therapist, recognizes that the client is most knowledgeable about what they feel, think and long for and only takes responsibility for providing:
·the capacity to understand and decode literal and symbolic body expression.
·technical interventions based on knowledge of human interactive processes and psychological theory.
·mature, non-needing caring.
The therapist is not the healer but uses his/her caring to sustain the belief and trust in the “possibility sphere”.
Although the “possibility sphere” is empty, the therapist is certainly not idle. Even before the client begins to talk about whatever s/he might have on his/her mind the PBSP® therapist has taken a “snapshot” of his/her appearance in the moment to get a picture of what might be forthcoming. The client’s posture, gestures, facial expressions, facial color, gaze and voice are assessed to get a clue as to what kinds of feeling states, situations, needs and ages might be present or on the threshold of emergence. The therapist runs this data past his/her “grid” of theory regarding evolutionary requirements to prepare possible future frames and figures.
2. Helping the client be in the “center of truth”.
This simply means directing clients to attend to their centers of information about how to live life – namely, their emotions and their thoughts. The question, “What are you feeling in your body and what are you thinking in your mind?” is typically asked to elicit this information. The idea behind that instruction is to help clients attend to the two vast data bases of information within them that they can tap into for guidance in making decisions as they face the world and its opportunities and frustrations, moment to moment. What is felt in the body is connected to both “personal memory” and “evolutionary memory”.
“Personal memory” has an emotional aspect, because we have emotional, body-felt reactions associated with pleasurable or painful events in our past; and “evolutionary memory” has an emotional aspect because the “as yet unfulfilled longings” of the unborn self will show up as emotional drives and longings as we talk about events in the present which have evoked genetic “unfinished business”.
“Personal memory” has a cognitive, verbal side, because our thoughts are the constituent parts of the verbally based interior world we have constructed out of the values, ideas, beliefs and injunctions that we have gleaned from our personal experience with life. As far as I understand it, “evolutionary memory” has left no cognitive traces in individuals. However, individuals may consciously construct scenarios of what they think would have been an optimal upbringing and use their cognitive functions in the service of their “evolutionary memory” which “communicates” with us primarily through “body language”.
3. Developing the “true scene”.
The “true scene” is constructed for an audience of one, the client, who is directed to begin the session by talking about what is on their mind or what they are feeling (emotions, body sensations, and impulses) about people and events in their lives that are disturbing them. The “true scene” provides them with a unique perspective that illuminates the architecture and organization of their psychological and physical processes in the immediate present – moment to moment. Remember, the fabric of the present is woven mostly from threads spun out of “personal memory” and “evolutionary memory”.
The presenting symptoms of clients who come to Psychomotor therapy for help and relief are always observed against the background of the life of the client. PBSP® therapy seeks to relieve the symptoms by releasing their energy as behavior and changing the history which caused them to emerge.
In the “true scene” we isolate those threads by “micro-tracking” the ebb and flow of, and between, clients’ emotional states and cognitive stance, their personal memories and their evolutionary longings. We trace the strands of “personal memory” back to the events, emotions, thoughts and life-rules clients encountered in the past; and we follow the subtler fibers of “evolutionary memory” to determine what interactions are still longed for in the client’s life-journey toward self fulfillment and maturation.
We employ two types of role-played hypothetical figures to facilitate this process. The therapist listens carefully to what they are saying and tries to take in their overall state of being from their posture, gestures and facial expressions in order to be prepared to use the appropriate figures. We use a “witness figure” to track clients’ emotions as they become evident in changes in gaze, facial expressions, and vocal tones. We use several different “voice figures” who are called by a variety of descriptive names including, the “voice of truth”, the “voice of negative prediction” the “voice of warning”, the “voice of judgment”, and so forth, to track clients’ thoughts, attitudes, and injunctions. The title given each voice is dependent on the type of message it delivers.
We posit the “witness” as a caring, compassionate figure who sees, names and implicitly licenses (just as our parents should have done when we first learned that everything has a name) whatever emotion the client is feeling. People have emotions which have never been accurately named or sanctioned and therefore do not exist in the client’s verbally represented universe. The witnessing process provides the client’s “pilot” with a model/template for seeing, naming and licensing their own emotions and thus facilitates the entrance of those “stateless” emotions into verbal consciousness.
The formula statement by a “witness figure” runs like this: “I see how (affective word) you feel as you (context – using the words describing the situation that the client is talking about).” For example, if the client looks pained as she speaks about her father not having come to see her school graduation, the therapist might say, “If there were a witness present, the witness might say, ‘I see how hurt you feel when you remember that your father did not come to your school graduation.’ Would that be correct?” The therapist always checks whether the affective term used is accurate and strikes a chord of recognition and receptivity in the client.
The “witness figure” is posited in the present and does not speak as if he/she had seen what had happened in the past. That is why the figure says, “….as you remember…” making it clear that the client is having a memory and has not “drifted” out of the present time frame and “landed” somehow in the past. This helps anchor the client’s “pilot” in the present.
Though the therapist is the source of the words given to the witness to say, the therapist is not the witness nor does the therapist role-play the witness. Through extensive testing we have found that the client experiences less dependency and more autonomy and inclination to master their own inner process when the “witness figure” is either posited “in the air” or role-played by another group member.
The witnessing procedure tracks both “personal memory” and “evolutionary memory”. The witness, noting the client’s hurt about the absence of her
