Reprint from- New Therapist, September/October Edition 2012
An Interview with Lisa Loustaunau, Frederick Lowen and Jack Lee Rosenberg
New Therapist: Mainstream psychology relies principally on verbal communication. In what ways does your work with the body supplement or extend this?
Lisa Loustaunau: Working with the body opens an entirely new dimension in the treatment room, providing a wealth of material that could take months or years to access through verbal therapy alone. Words just as easily hide or alter the truth as reveal it, and, as we know, most communication is non-verbal. I am always struck by the depth of feelings and experiences that my work with the body elicits, which the client could not previously verbally or consciously communicate. This is beyond reading body language, which reveals the truth of the moment. The body also communicates the story of a lifetime and offers a direct channel to experience, past and present.
When I look at a client’s body, I see the story of a life journey. It is a moving and vulnerable experience to receive the uniqueness of a human being in this way. The body speaks to me about an individual’s history, patterns of relating, gifts, strengths, and innate potential. It also reveals their primary defenses, coping mechanisms, and repetitive limiting life patterns—which will be important to challenge in therapy. The body gives me the direction of the work. Working physically opens deeply repressed or denied feelings, whose energy, when integrated, expands the individuals’ awareness of who they really are.
The body tells the truth without the embellishments and smoke screens that the ego mind constructs. Bodywork offers a way to open the door to new or different energetic and emotional experiences. They happen right there in session. We aren’t figuring out what they feel or what they should do about this or that. The feelings emerge from within the body. It is immediate and powerful when clients experience feelings they didn’t know they had or believed they couldn’t tolerate—and do so freely and honestly. It is liberating.
New Therapist: What, in your opinion, can we not access through verbal communication?
Lisa Loustaunau: We cannot access verbally what the unconscious intends to disown. Engaging the client’s body initiates a transformation that affects every level of being—psychological, energetic, emotional, mental, and spiritual, in a powerfully healing expansion. Core Energetics views the unconscious not as a vague psychological sphere but as located in areas of the body where energy is being managed or blocked. Core Energetics also sees energy and consciousness as unified—so if you repress energy, you repress consciousness. If you block your pain, you also block your ability to experience pleasure.
How this happens in the body is through the formation of what is known as armoring—the term coined by Wilhelm Reich, which refers to a set of muscular holding patterns. A tight jaw prevents us from crying or expressing our anger. Hard or vacant eyes caused by chronic tension in the intraocular muscles protect us from the intimacy of contact. These are examples of how unique patterns of armor in the body protect us from particular feelings and experiences. Our armoring, or blocks, as these are often called, develop over time as a result of repetitive significant experiences during critical formative periods in early life that the psyche was not able to handle. Better said, the armor in the body is the way the psyche handled developmental frustrations.
What is significant is that the same armoring, which originally served an adaptive purpose—protecting us from knowing and feeling what would have been too painful to fully experience at the time —keeps us living and acting as if those early realities continue. And thus we find ourselves repeating certain patterns over and over. These patterns also contain fixed beliefs, or what in Core Energetics we call images.
Let me give you an example of an “image.” Someone who was deeply frustrated around needs may develop an image that goes “if I allow myself to need, then I will be disappointed, if I don’t need, then I can’t be disappointed.” In this case, closing off awareness of real needs became the solution to the frustration. This may never have been formulated as a distinct thought, the wound having been experienced before this thinking was possible. It would, however, be revealed in the body. You can see it in a sunken chest that takes in little breath (in essence, refusing to receive energy and sustenance), and in de-energized arms that have difficulty reaching out toward what is wanted or needed. The body has formed itself in such a way as to literally close itself off from needing too much by a contraction in what are the receptive centers at the front of the body.
The experience of embodiment, the way a person feels and breathes, and inhabits their body, needs to be sensed, understood, and worked with in order to transform a life issue. It is not possible to challenge the physical component of a defense with words alone.
