Your own body of wisdom: Recognizing and working with somatic countertransference with dissociative and traumatized patients

Abstract

This paper is intended as a contribution to the dialogue between body-orientated and psychoanalytic approaches to the psychotherapy of trauma. Therapists’ use of their own body awareness and somatic countertransference is central to body and movement psychotherapy but is rarely discussed in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy literature. Both phenomena have crucial roles in facilitating therapy, particularly with patients who have been traumatized. Both can provide critical windows into patients’ material and dynamics; similarly, the neglect of attention to either can lead to clinical ignorance and errors, no matter what the diagnosis of the patient in treatment. In work with traumatized or dissociative patients however the risks of not attending to somatic countertransference and body awareness include the vicarious traumatization of the therapist. Examples of body awareness and somatic countertransference are given, and their use is addressed. A model for the transmission of vicarious traumatization is briefly described that relates to dissociated kinesthetic mimesis.