Complexity Theory – INTEGRA CPD

Bodymind and Parallel Processes in Supervision (CONFER 2013)

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This presentation was prepared as an introduction to a supervision masterclass organised by CONFER in January 2013. Here I spell out how bodymind principles might be applied to supervision, bringing attention to the actual non-verbal messages by which parallel process is communicated and carried from the client-therapist system into the therapist-supervisor system. It is a more elaborated form of the presentations I had given over the years at UKCP and BASPR supervision conferences on the 'Fractal Self' - an extended model of parallel process.

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The Therapist’s Embodied Presence in the Transformative Repair of Relational Breakdowns (CONFER 2012)

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Enactments seem to occur suddenly, when we are caught unawares and plunged into them. But from outside the intersubjective entanglement it is apparent that they build up slowly, increasingly, over time. Before we become implicated in an obvious, explicit rupture, there have been implicit, unspoken, subliminal versions of the enactment which have passed unnoticed. Importantly, as we recognise with hindsight, our supposedly therapeutic responses have fed into and contributed to this build-up all along. Based on a multi-layered model of enactments, Michael will explore how the therapist's embodied presence, perception and self-awareness can make the difference between transformative repair of a rupture, or a destructive breakdown of the relationship.

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‘Using’ the Body or Engaging with Bodymind? (CAPPP 2012)

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Embodiment as a paradoxical relational process Since its origins in Freud and the zeitgeist of the late 19th century, psychotherapy has struggled with and against the limitations arising from a mind-over-body paradigm and its traditional bias towards the verbal-reflective mind. The recent fashion in neuroscience and embodiment has spawned a wave of new approaches which attempt to graft the body onto established therapeutic practice. But how can we seriously imagine that bringing the body back into psychotherapy after 100 years of disembodied 'talking therapies' is just a question of a few new techniques? Many of the new body-based techniques and strategies, for example, fail to sufficiently engage the therapist's own bodymind, or re-introduce the reduction of therapy to simplistic reparative or medical model interventions, or exacerbate the client's disembodiment through the use of the body as an objectifying therapeutic tool. Other problems include the attempt to reverse disembodiment without addressing the underlying conflicts between body and mind, a solipsistic notion of the bodymind as bounded by one's skin, and the attempt to use mindfulness via a structurally disembodied and controlling mind. Without a more fundamental re-visioning of the body-mind relationship throughout our profession, potentially affecting all areas of theory and practice, many of these well-intentioned attempts to work with the body are bound to back-fire and remain ineffectual. Michael will try to address these problems by working towards a bodymind phenomenology of the therapeutic relationship that includes holistic, integral, systemic and relational perspectives and attends both to the possible integrations between spontaneous and reflective forces within the complex system of the bodymind, as well as their dis-integrations.

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