Getting grounded when the ground is shaky
An intro to the basis of Somatic Therapy
This week, I’m sharing some writing I did not long after my certification, explaining the approach we take as Somatic Therapists using the acronym GROUND. It’s an introduction to an important set of—forgive me—ground rules around how we approach a client: not principles of the method (I’ll repost those another time!), nor even techniques per se. Rather, these are basic qualities we seek to bring whenever we are working with someone. It strikes me as a good follow-up to last week’s newsletter, where I talked about what basic things I believe any therapist should bring to their interactions with clients. But it’s also an instructive story about what I had to look at deeply in myself before I could help others.
I was extremely suspicious when I started the training program in 2008. Though I didn’t know it then, I was entering a territory intimately linked to my own trauma, and I would come to understand that slowly over the course of the four years. Some of it, I’m still unpacking today. But the gist of it was another topic I plan to visit in this space soon: when something seemed sincere, kind, helpful, or soft, my hackles would go up immediately. To my nervous system the thing was instead corny, sentimental, condescending, and—though this was the part I couldn’t name—profoundly unsafe.
Instead of textbooks, lectures, and seminars, this training started with flowery altars, crayons, and construction paper. The trainers had put official-looking binders on each of our chairs, but the binders were empty. Everyone seemed to me to be talking like Mister Rogers. Now granted, I adored Mister Rogers when I was five, and consider him a modern-day saint now. But right about then I was looking for a professional context, and this felt more like an encounter group or a cult meeting.
For most of the first week of training, I couldn’t settle down. I wasn’t sure I was in the right place, or if these people were for real. I didn’t think people could be so nice and mean it. I associated softness with weakness, kindness with stupidity. I judged any poems or writings that were shared as literature rather than as offerings, and I found them all lacking in seriousness and edge. It was all pabulum, I thought, meant for children or for the “ignorant masses.” I was scrabbling, in essence, for some kind of legitimacy, and my family’s voices in my head were trying to tell me that this kind of thing wasn’t serious enough, appropriate enough, elite enough.
Had I known what I know now, I would have recognized a lot of this chatter in my head as a sign that much younger parts of me were getting activated. And those younger parts didn’t have a lot of experience with softness, kindness, or dwelling in the realms of emotion rather than intellect. Doing so, in fact, had been dangerous for me. And over the years I saw different forms of this repeatedly, not just in myself but in clients: a belief, deeply held in the body, that if something feels good, it must be a trap.
Eventually, I was able to get less activated and internalize some of the messages the training was giving me, and to this day, I try and check in on whether I’m living up to these GROUND rules in my sessions. It’s no wonder, though, that they were so triggering: Gentleness, Respect, Openness, Understanding, Noticing, and Discovery were in short supply for me growing up, and I know they were for a lot of us.
Here, then, are links to each of those ideas, as I wrote about them around ten years ago in my blog at Power In Your Hands (where I refer to the work I do as Rubenfeld Synergy or Synergy). I invite you to notice what happens in your body as you contemplate each one, and—if you can—be kind to yourself if your immediate response is to think it’s a load of crap. Those kinds of defenses are hard-earned, and recognizing when it’s safe to lower them can take a lot of work.
Gentleness: the first word in our work. “To me, gentleness implied condescension. I wasn’t used to receiving it, and had a hard shell that needed cracking. Ultimately it was gentleness that melted it, so that it didn’t have to break.”
Respect: honoring where you end and I begin. “Respect is perhaps the most important tool we can use to help restore integrity to our clients: to help them feel again that their bodies, minds, emotions and spirits belong to them.”
Openness: the dance of receiving and relating. “Being open is not about being a giant, undifferentiating receptor, taking in everything that comes at it like an omnidirectional microphone…Openness is about passing through a door into a space where the light is better, the perspective is slightly different, and a client can share the things that are important without fear of judgment or overwhelm.”
Understanding: getting literal with it. “If you can’t feel your feet, don’t want to be in your body, or would always rather be running than standing still, it is difficult to under-stand or to support anything: a heavy box, a friend in need, a difficult concept, or a difficult emotional experience.”
Noticing: Everything waits to be noticed. “Noticing is about more than simple observation, although that is the beginning of it. Noticing is part of the quality of attention [that] involves not just seeing, hearing or sensing something, but being able to point it out with sensitivity and care.”
Discovery, curiosity, and the dangers of labeling. “But if I approach with an attitude of discovery, I may find something more interesting – and ultimately more healing – than ‘I’d better loosen up these shoulders,’ or ‘I need to help this client feel less anxious.’ In fact, I will probably discover that until I look at what is present in the here and now more deeply, that I will not be able to affect any kind of lasting change in the client.”