Twig's Se Reflections

Play Episode 9 Here We'll spend hours a week sitting in similar positions to people who are actively seeking therapy because they're in distress. That means we'll spend hours a week in the postures of distress which are not otherwise our own. We need to remember to tell our bodies that we're not in that associated upset whenever we can. We've got to remember to move.

Play Episode 8 Here One focus of this project is to answer questions I receive from SE people about our work. This time I'm working off 3 questions: Why does it take so long to learn SE?Did I do something wrong if I lost a noncommittal client?What does it mean to talk to people in different ways depending on where they are in the stress response? Simple like that.

Play Episode 7 Here The architecture and design of our autonomic nervous system means that certain parts are going to work depending on the needs of the situations. We'll run for our lives if we have to and digest our food while chatting all night if we get to. The perception of what the situations demands or allows is made by our organism, at an involuntary level, and it centers around the question: how safe am I right now? "Is it okay for me to engage, or should I be fighting or fleeing or immobilizing like an ice cube?" They call that assessment process "neuroception" and in a word, it's: human. Here's a link to the recorded conversation that Irene Lyon and I had around Neuroception.

Play Episode 6 Here As we get better at Somatic Experiencing we're going to see a bunch of ways that we'd like to change what we do in our sessions. Here's one friendly pattern I use to change my own habits when I discover that I'm doing something that is unhelpful to the process. Funny, it's all about titration.

Play Episode 5 Here SE could be called a lot of things but one of them should be an "amalgamated practice." There are so many creative threads running through the corpus of the SE tradition that we're indebted to other modalities as much as our own. And we can also learn from them in helpful ways to increase our artfulness within our chosen area of focus as SE Practitioners. Here's a review of some of the adjunctive studies that I found particularly helpful (there are far more besides).

Play Episode 4 Here After nearly 18 months away from these podcasts I'm excited to have my free attention back so I can resume this project. Here's a brief hit on why I've been away with a little insight hidden between the lines about the cost of a neuroception of impending doom - like from the fire that became The Carlton Complex this Summer, 2014.

Play Episode 3 Here How do you get through sessions with people experiencing "freezy business"? That is, as a practitioner what do you do with your attention to not succumb to the freeze or interrupt it unnecessarily. Here are some tips. We have two things to consider here: Some people are dominated by freeze/immobility states which requires an SE practitioner to join with a slower pacing.During the renegotiation process of completing freeze/immobility practitioners can get "taken" into that state and have a difficult time keeping "awake and aware." What do to then? For now let's put aside questions like: When do you allow freeze? [check out the Needs for Successful Renegotiation of Freeze post ]How do you facilitate freeze when it's the right thing to do?How do you avoid it when the timing isn't right yet? In this podcast I look at various things a practitioner can do to keep their attention from becoming too frustrated, distant or intrusive with when working with freeze/immobility s

Play Episode 2 Here Tracking felt-sense experience isn't a "one size" fits all kind of thing. It has nuances that require discretion, particularly for clients with higher degrees of accumulate stress. One definition of "tracking" could be the "application of attention over time."  Since attention is both integrating and potentiating we need to watch for the balance of trying to maximize how much integration we facilitate while minimizing the likelihood that "things" will get potentiated beyond the range of "I Can" observation. Trying to maximize attention and failing because we try to do too much is no way to succeed. Yet we do want to maximize how much our clients are able to pay attention to things. One helpful solution to this challenge is to consider the roles of continuous or intermittent observation or "tracking" and the question of when, how and why we choose one over the other at various different times and for different people is what I review in this podcast. If you find that you're

Ask me a question I can say yes to! Play Episode 1 Here In this first podcast I look at the issue of spontaneity and its critical importance in Somatic Experiencing sessions. I take on 3 main ideas in this 20 minute episode: To start with we don't want profundity. We want brevity. Anything to get things started with a "back and forth" between us and our clients.Increased spontaneity is a key element to successful SE sessions and decreased spontaneity is a critical piece of feedback that says "Practitioner change what you're doing!"Asking people questions they can say "Yes" to makes things move forward (and more spontaneous). That's far better than asking questions that will very likely return a "No."