Supportive and Nourishing Physical Contact

 

In holotropic breathwork, we also use a different form of physical intervention, one that is designed to provide support on a deep preverbal level. This is based on the observation that there exist two fundamentally different forms of trauma that require diametrically different approaches. The first of these can be referred to as trauma by commission. It is the result of external intrusions that had damaging impact on the future development of the individual. Here belong such insults as physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, frightening situations, destructive criticism, or ridicule. These traumas represent foreign elements in the unconscious that can be brought into consciousness, energetically discharged, and resolved.

 

Although this distinction is not recognized in conventional psychotherapy, the second form of trauma, trauma by omission, is radically different. It actually involves the opposite mechanism - lack of positive experiences that are essential for a healthy emotional development. The infant, as well as an older child, have strong primitive needs for instinctual satisfaction and security that pediatricians and child psychiatrists call anaclitic (from the Greek anaklinein meaning to lean upon). These involve the need to be held and experience skin contact, be caressed, comforted, played with, and be the center of human attention. When these needs are not met, it has serious consequences for the future of the individual.

 

Many people have a history of emotional deprivation, abandonment, and neglect in infancy and childhood that resulted in serious frustration of the anaclitic needs. The only way to heal this type of trauma is to offer a corrective experience in the form of supportive physical contact in a holotropic state of consciousness. For this approach to be effective, the individual has to be deeply regressed to the infantile stage of development, otherwise the corrective measure would not reach the developmental level on which the trauma occurred. Depending on circumstances and on previous agreement, this physical support can range from simple holding of the hand or touching the forehead to full body contact.

 

Use of nourishing physical contact is a very effective way of healing early emotional trauma. However, it requires following strict ethical rules. We have to explain to the breathers before the session the rationale of this technique and get their approval to use it. Under no circumstances can this approach be practiced without previous consent and no pressures can be used to obtain this permission. For many people with a history of sexual abuse, physical contact is a very sensitive and charged issue. Very often those who most need such healing touch have the strongest resistance against it. It can sometimes take a long time before a person develops enough trust toward the facilitators and the group to be able to accept this technique and benefit from it.

 

Supportive physical contact has to be used exclusively to satisfy the needs of the breathers and not those of the sitters or facilitators. By this I do not mean only sexual needs or needs for intimacy which, of course, are the most obvious issues. Equally problematic can be the sitter’s strong need to be needed, loved, or appreciated, unfulfilled maternal need, and other less extreme forms of emotional wants and desires. An incident from one of our workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, can serve here as a good example.

 

At the beginning of our five-day seminar, one of the participants, a postmenopausal woman, shared with the group how much she had always wanted to have children and how much she suffered because this had not happened. In the middle of the holotropic breathwork session, in which she was the sitter for a young man, she suddenly pulled the upper part of her partner's body into her lap and started to rock and comfort him.

 

Her timing could not have been worse; as we found out later during the sharing, he was at the time in the middle of a past-life experience that featured him as a powerful Viking warrior on a military expedition. He described with a great sense of humor how he initially tried to experience her rocking as the movement of the boat on the ocean; however, when she added comforting babytalk, that made it impossible for him to continue and brought him back to reality.

 

It is usually quite easy to recognize when a breather is regressed to early infancy. In a really deep age regression, all the wrinkles in the face tend to disappear and the individual can actually look and behave like an infant. This can involve various infantile postures and gestures, as well as copious salivation and intense thumb-sucking. Other times, the appropriateness of offering physical contact is obvious from the context, for example, when the breather just finished reliving biological birth and looks lost and forlorn. The maternal needs of the woman in the Esalen workshop were so strong that they took over and she was unable to objectively assess the situation and act appropriately.

 

The use of nourishing physical contact in holotropic states to heal traumas caused by abandonment, rejection, and emotional deprivation was developed by two London psychoanalysts, Pauline McCririck and Joyce Martin; they used this method with their LSD patients under the name of fusion therapy. During their sessions, their clients spent several hours in a deep age regression, lying on a couch covered with a blanket, while Joyce or Pauline lay by their side, holding them in close embrace, as a good mother would do to comfort her child (Martin 1965, Martin 1966).

 

Their revolutionary method effectively divided and polarized the community of LSD therapists. Some of the practitioners realized that this was a very powerful and logical way to heal “traumas by omission,” emotional problems caused by emotional deprivation and bad mothering. Others were horrified by this radical “anaclitic* therapy;” they warned that close physical contact between therapist and client in a non-ordinary state of consciousness would cause irreversible damage to the transference/ countertransference relationship.

 

At the Second International Conference on the use of LSD in psychotherapy held in May 1965 in Amityville, Long Island, Joyce and Pauline showed their fascinating film on the use of the fusion technique in psychedelic therapy. In a heated discussion that followed, most of the questions revolved around the transference/ countertransference issues. Pauline provided a very interesting and convincing explanation why this approach presented less problems in this regard than orthodox Freudian approach. She pointed out that most patients who come to therapy experienced in their infancy and childhood lack of affection from their parents. The cold attitude of the Freudian analyst tends to reactivate the resulting emotional wounds and triggers desperate attempts on part of the patients to get the attention and satisfaction that had been denied to them (Martin 1965).

 

By contrast, according to Pauline, fusion therapy provided a corrective experience by satisfying the old anaclitic cravings. Having their emotional wounds healed, the patients recognized that the therapist was not an appropriate sexual object and were able to find suitable partners outside of the therapeutic relationship. Pauline explained that this paralleled the situation in the early development of object relationships. Individuals, who receive adequate mothering in infancy and childhood, are able to emotionally detach from their mothers and find mature relationships. By contrast, those who experienced emotional deprivation remain pathologically attached and go through life craving and seeking satisfaction of primitive infantile needs. We used occasionally fusion therapy in the psychedelic research program at the Maryland Research Center, particularly in the work with terminal cancer patients (Grof 2006 b). In mid-1970s, when we developed holotropic breathwork, anaclitic support became an integral part of our workshops and training.

 

Before closing this section on bodywork, I would like to address one question that often comes up in the context of holotropic workshops or lectures on experiential work: "Why should reliving of traumatic memories be therapeutic rather than represent a retraumatization?" The best answer can be found in the article “Unexperienced Experience” by the Irish psychiatrist Ivor Browne (Browne 1990). He suggested that we are not dealing here with an exact replay or repetition of the original traumatic situation, but with the first full experience of the appropriate emotional and physical reaction to it. This means that, at the time when they happen, the traumatic events are recorded in the organism, but not fully consciously experienced, processed, and integrated.

 

In addition, the person who is confronted with the previously repressed traumatic memory is not any more the helpless and vitally dependent child or infant that he or she was in the original situation, but a grown-up adult. The holotropic state induced in powerful experiential forms of psychotherapy thus allows the individual to be present and operate simultaneously in two different sets of space-time coordinates. Full age regression makes it possible to experience all the emotions and physical sensations of the original traumatic situation from the perspective of the child, but at the same time analyze and evaluate the memory in the therapeutic situation from a mature adult perspective. It is also interesting to mention that breathers reliving various traumatic memories who, for an outside observer, appear to be in a lot of pain and suffer immensely, have actually typically a subjective feeling of purging pain from their bodies and experience relief rather than emotional and physical pain.