Relational Somatic Psychotherapy

Cockburn, W. H. (2014). The body in relationship: Self-other-society. In C. Young (Ed.), Relational somatic psychotherapy(pp. 53-62). Galashiels, Scotland: Body Psychotherapy Publications. 

Relational Somatic Psychotherapy(RSP) is a method of psychotherapy that was developed by Robert Hilton, PhD through his ownership of his severe developmental traumas and the path that he found to heal his own psyche. Developed out of his study of Lowenian Bioenergetics, RSP provides a practical somatic release technique from trauma that Hilton has graciously passed on to the rest of us. Human beings are a relational species(Mitchell, 1998) and RSP provided Dr. Hilton with a relationally-based therapeutic system to remove the armoring surrounding his heart, formed from early and sustained relational issues, and to open himself up to a new relationship with first himself and then others (Hilton, 2012).
We, in the somatic field, have probably heard traditional psychotherapy called the “talking cure,” (Kurtz, 1988) a nickname purportedly coined by one of Freud’s early patients, “Anna O.” (Gay, 1998) back when Freud was trying to differentiate a mental cure from a physical one(Kramer, 2006). Earlier in his career, however, Freud (1924/1960, p. 26) acknowledged the function of the body in psychotherapy, stating, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.” Almaas(2000) concurred with this assessment, “The ego is first and foremost a body-ego, in the sense that the self-demarcations that form in our consciousness during infancy are based on our sensory experience of our bodies as distinct from other objects.” (p. 104).
Somatic Psychology derives its name from the Greek word ‘soma’meaning body and psychology from the Greek ‘psyche’, or soul. Further, ancient Greeks, while they acknowledged the soul was immortal, thought the soul and the mind, with its consciousness, were one and the same(Fowler, 1966). While it can be argued, with a few notable exceptions, that mainstream psychology never really took the client’s soul into consideration(Hulnick & Hulnick, 2010), Somatic Psychology (or Body Psychotherapy) considers the client’s body-mind as a holistic system: including the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual(Boadella, 1987).
The “talking cure” indulges the mind in its propensity to time travel. A recent article (Stocker, 2012), regarding the mind as a time machine, explored the, “external versus internal viewing of time” and “watching” time contrasted with “projective travel” through time. The article also discussed optional versus obligatory mental time travel, mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority, and differentiated between “single” mental time travels versus “dual” mental time travels. Finally, episodic memory time travel versus semantic memory time travel and how the mind is “seeing” rather than “sensing” mental imagery.”
If the body and mind are truly not separate (Lowen, 1975; Aposhyan, 2004; Barratt, 2010), the process or state of embodiment can be thought of as the antithesis of just mental activity. And if embodiment is the opposite of mental activity, it is therefore the opposite of time travel: it stays ‘in-the-present-moment’. Wilber(1979) states, “Whereas the ego lives in time, with its neck outstretched to future games and his heart lamenting past losses, the [body] alwayslives in the‘nunc fluens’, the passing and concrete present, the lively present which neither clings to yesterday nor screens for tomorrow, but finds its fulfillment in the bounties of this moment.” (p. 118)
Contrasting the mind as being able to live in the past or future with the sensing of the body or being embodied, with physical and psychological healing, and with relationships, which always take place in the present moment, Aposhyan(2004) stated, “To the extent that healing involves a relationship between two people, there has to be a moment of meeting.” (p. 54) Being embodied forces a person to be in the present moment, allowing for the possibility of having an open mind. Wilde (1999) wrote, “Embodiment is not a theory, or a group of theories, but a different way of thinking about and knowing human beings, one that is in contrast to our usual Western thinking of mind and body as separate.” (p. 25)
Somatic Psychologists put forward the theory that, when an infant or a child encounters a “No” of any kind, and this “No” always occurs within some relationship, and if it is not resolved then and there, then it can result in a physical and emotional block — what Hilton (2007, p. 52) labeled an “environmental negativity” and Aposhyan (2004, p. 118) called a “developmental deficiency” — and then the child pulls back from the painful experience. The cause of the block can range from simply not getting a new toy, through many levels of active abuse, to abandonment: again, all these occur in relational settings.
Depending on when, and the extent to which, the developmental blocks occur (and are reinforced over time), the resulting contraction (or contractions) leads to the formation of particular adaptive selves, or what Wilhelm Reich (1990) called “character structures”(see also Johnson, 1994). These, in turn, become a defense mechanism that the child replays every time he or she encounters another real or perceived block of the same nature. Object Relations Theory (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) also explains that every dysfunctional relationship mimics the initial traumatic relationship until the internalized painful representation is repaired (see also Totton, 2002).
RSP proposes that we all operate out of deep core organizing systems, usually unconsciously, that we call the “adaptive selves.” We typically do not realize that these systems and beliefs even exist, let alone that they control and limit us in predictable ways. Our core organizing themes are somatically, developmentally, and non-verbally based as they start forming very early in our lives, occurring even in the womb! (Emerson, 1995) These defensive mechanisms are not so much an avoidance of pain as they are the organism’s attempt to be safe (Ogden, 2006).
Adaptive selves consist of three underlying dynamics: reification, agency, and coherence. Reification is to “make real” and is a variably operating mental dynamic that ascribes, attributes, or links coherent, meaningful qualities to disparate phenomena. It is a mental process that occurs inside our heads that utilizes representations (symbols, images, words, etc.) to stand for events and circumstances elsewhere. As such, it’s a computational process whereby an inner, virtual reality is created that’s populated by a “me” who relates in various ways to other representations,  “you” and/or other “objects,” by utilizing various complex brain mechanisms of perception, emotion, memory, and sensory-motor information. 
To be an agent is to be a separate bounded entity of some sort who acts or can act on the world to change or influence a relationship. Psychologically, the agent, again typically perceived as “me,” acts or can act upon a “you” or “it” typically perceived as outside, over there and, hence, separate. The final underlying dynamic of our adaptive selves is coherence, which refers to the manner and degree to which our various self sub-systems operate together to create multi-faceted, integrated connections between internal and external senses, various types of memory, genetically determined, and learned emotional responses. Highly coherent systems make sense of activities and are often characterized by experiences of confidence, knowing what-to-do, predictability, and/or appropriate emotional arousal. From the outside, individuals demonstrating high coherence appear to “know” what is going on, present as secure (or at least predictably stable), and are able to deal with particular conditions reliably.
Over time, we imagine our selves to “become” this ever increasing core set of beliefs, perceptions, feelings, and actions which develops and operates to sustain our everyday self-in-the-world; something which we then spend most of our remaining life trying to improve or overcome! Krishnamurti(1948), a great spiritual guide of the twentieth century, spoke often of this identification. “… each one tries to immortalize the product of environment. … That is, the various fears, hopes, longings, prejudices, likes, and personal views which we glorify as our temperament are, after all, the result, the product, of environment; and this bundle of memories, …the product of the reactions to environment, becomes that consciousness which we call the ‘I’.” Is that not so? Unfortunately, as Einstein states, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."(de Geus, 1997)
The principles of RSP include “Spirit,” one of those words that mean a lot of different things to different people, but for RSP purposes, spirit is ‘just’ that ‘thing’ that experiences. Given its ineffable quality, it cannot actually be defined, since definition by its nature circumscribes and limits something – makes it a separate entity: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”(Lao Tse, 2006)
At a non-verbal level, spirit has a sense of here-and-now, a sense of ‘felt’ (but not named, nor clearly defined) presence, centered in and around “my” particular body. A moment’s exploration reveals that this is also an experience, rather than spirit itself, since vague but evident limits (here-and-now) are part of it. That said, to become increasingly capable of experiencing spacious, unnamed presence in this way, provides an important and accessible doorway to deep inner work and transformation, and is thus an important part of RSP work. 
In practice, we very quickly and thoroughly confuse (or equate) the content and activity of the experience with the ‘experiencer’, and we thus lose any sense of spirit, of pure presence itself. Starting quite early in our development, this includes an increasingly complex, unconscious separation of experience into ‘halves’: viz, observer and observed, subject and object, me and you. Therefore, as Object Relations Theory explains, the ‘experiencer’ is always contained within the experience and the observer is the observed.
Another RSP principal is the “Mind,” the level at which most of us live all the time and where all the mischief occurs. RSP’s definition of the mind is the content and the flow of experience. Anything channeled in space or time is identified with the mental process, so it has places, times, and outcomes qualities to it. It has memory and controls the operations or the machinery of life. Mind is the intermediary part of mind, body, spirit, which joins spirit with the body.
The mind’s function is essentially pattern-making; it is always going to try to make meaning, and the meaning prescribed linking separate experiences into something that we call a whole. A core belief is, “I’ve had these various experiences as a child: I’ve felt this, I’ve done that: Mom did this, Dad did that.” and this is the whole meaning. If the experience was of being abandoned, the whole that the mind’s meaning attaches to that experience may be, “I am worthless. Life is unsafe. I must do this to survive.” Mind is now trying to make sense of all of those processes, all of those experiences, making a big pattern that we now call a “core belief,” and that core belief now becomes the operational basis of the Self. We live at the level of the mind, and that is why the spirit is needed, otherwise, all individuals will stay at the level of the mind and attempt mental things to get out of mental things.
The third principal in RSP is, if the mind is the process level, the body is the physical manifestation of the meanings made in the mind. The body is another level of consciousness, albeit a very dense consciousness, but in a very phenomenological sensory way. The body is always in the “here-and-now.” It does not partake of the mind’s fancy movements through time; it plays them out. It is precisely this “here-and-now” quality of the body that makes everything below the skin invisible to most of humanity. According to Wilber, problems have arisen in our psyche because “few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies”(Knaster, 1996, p. 23).
The mind says, “Be afraid that something might happen,”due to a traumatic experience that happened in the past, and then the body replicates that fear. However, it does it in the present moment. The mind then uses this “here-and-now” replication as proof that its time travel picture is actually real, as Katie (2014) states, “The mind’s job is to validate what it thinks!” 
This is a closed system feedback loop that locks the individual into their adaptive selves. All the stuff of the mind’s machinery is what makes us able to talk to others in a certain way, stand in a certain posture, be in relationship with others, but somebody in a primordial relationship built that machinery which acts through the physical body in the present moment.
To these staples of Somatic Psychotherapy, RSP adds “Relationship” and emphasizes this principle. Every experience has to be relational, everything, whether it is with our developing body or an experience with another person. The adaptive self is a relational vehicle within our body-mind system that confronts new issues with the defenses learned from old, similar issues. Relationships are this constant interplay of feedback loops between two or more people that continuously transform the spirit, mind, and body.
Relationship is a co-creative process, hence, so is the adaptive self, character structures, and armoring. Staunton (2002) stated, “We have to remember that character structure is a defense—a defense against contact and relationship now as much as a defense against experiencing a past injury.” (p. 64) These defensive mechanisms limit certain expressions and ways of relating to simultaneously avoid predicted pain and yet still retain some connection with the other (Hilton, 2007).
To the degree that individuals are both open to new ideas and stepping out of their closed system adaptive selves, changes can occur within a relationship at significantly deeper levels. To the degree that individuals remain closed, locked into their adaptive selves, any relationship with them is very fixed and the ‘object relation’ gestalt that occurs between them is very predictable. This rigid relationship has more to do with each individual defending their closed system, but they are still co-creating that relationship.
Evidence of relational somatic psychotherapeutic healing is also supported by recent developments in neuroscience and other related fields (Rothschild, 2000; van der Kolk, 1994). Many modern post-Freudian psychoanalysts and other therapists are beginning to recognize that psychotherapy is both somatic and relational. Psycho-analysts (Schore, 1994; Vaughan, 1998), psychiatrists (Siegel, 1996; van der Kolk, 1994; van der Kolk, et al., 1996), and neuropsychologists (Cozolino, 2002; LeDoux, 2003) make the case that psychotherapy changes the way neurons fire, connecting the psychological with the biological, and altering our relationships, both with others and ourselves.
Our practical work, both individually and as therapists is, “How do we identify, work with, and possibly transcend the automatic core dynamics that unconsciously create and sustain the meaning, direction, and operation of everyday life?”Implied in this question is a tacit recognition of the pain and suffering engendered by confusing beliefs about how we present to others with our underlying spirit due to a dim sense that a key to greater freedom and release lies within a therapeutic endeavor. Such an exploration is the “work” of RSP.
Sieck(2009-2014), a long time student and biographer of Robert Hilton has expanded RSP in several ways. Terming it the “The Threefold Way,” the importance of spirituality and mindfulness were enhanced as ways to explore and understand the adaptive self.The adaptive self as a set of processes in the body-mind was identified, clarified, and expanded with the inclusion of Object Relations Theory and the insights of Krishnaumurti and, later, Almaas. Ways to work with RSP to deepen the exploration and transformation of the adaptive self followed. Through a mindful approach, all aspects of the presenting self, e.g., character themes, symptoms, everyday attitudes, and expectations, etc., become "grist for the mill" in an open, engaging, non-judgmental and compassionate relationship.
On the latter point, Sieckhas expanded the use and value of group dynamics in working with, and supporting, personal growth and transformation in all the participants. He realized that groups often and typically provide a richer, deeper, and more profound avenue or vehicle for personal growth and he has developed a curriculum for groups to follow. He found that a well-organized group provides the context for approaching, amplifying, and transforming the interpersonal and broader social (e.g., relational) dynamics than is possible in typical dyadic relationships.
As described and emphasized by Sieck, the self-transcendence of our adaptive selves and the overcoming of any problem or “symptom” requires a deep understanding and ownership of the content and dynamic organization of what is being explored: “The way out is through’ summarizes RSP succinctly”.


Author
Wade H. Cockburn, Ph.D., received his degree in Clinical Psychology, Concentration in Somatic Psychology last year, continuing his late career change from corporate executive to psychotherapist. After running a family business for 30 years, a series of business lawsuits filed by family members brought to light judgments, developmental blocks, and psychological armoring. Using somatic relational clues, he confronted his defenses as they arose, rendering relationships more authentic. After working as a child and family therapist and clinical supervisor at a children’s day treatment center, he and his wife recently moved to Texas where he is pursuing licensure and lecturing on authentic communication, somatic, and pre- and peri-natal parenting issues.


Appreciations
A personal thanks and debt of gratitude goes to my mentor Michael Sieck, PhD, whose lectures, presentations, and the personal notes that he shared with me make up the bulk this contribution to this Body Psychotherapy Congress book.

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