Insidious Emotional Trauma: The Body Remembers …1

Abstract

This article continues my journey into the clinical usefulness of bodily emotion and extends my earlier formulation of core affective experience (Cates, 2011)to a consideration of what I call insidious emotional trauma, a concept that is defined as the repetitive demonization of emotionality during development and beyond. The analytic treatment centers on the phenomenological investigation of bodily emotion, which is viewed as having mutative power when called into the service of development. Clinical vignettes highlight salient theoretical points: (a) the influence of mutual engagement in capturing the emotional moment from which traumatic memory materializes, (b) the shame of being as the most radical of the injurious consequences of emotional demonization, and (c) dissociation as a flight from traumatic emotional vulnerability to disembodied cognition. The closing discussion integrates the article as a whole with consideration of therapeutic change.