Chapter summary: shows how improvements in physiological and energetic regulation that continuously accrue from a greater embodiment of emotion can be used to stabilize the practice of embodying emotion, if needed, in different places in a session.
Integration usually refers to bringing things together. In general, therapists understand integration as things that happen after a session, on their own, to further the process. For example, integration could occur in the form of a dream that works through another aspect of the problem situation, a change in the person’s symptom, or a change in the person’s thinking that is helpful for healing. In emotional embodiment work, integration is defined as spontaneous positive developments that occur as a consequence of developing a greater capacity for emotional experience. Such integration can happen even during the session. The creation of a greater capacity for an emotional experience through its expansion can yield tangible improvements in one’s physiological and energetic regulation. It can make the brain and body physiology more available for optimal changes in cognition and behavior. It can facilitate greater access to collective resources.
Integration is a continuous process. It can be likened to the process of recovering from an illness such as the flu. As we heal gradually, our body, energy, cognition, behavior, and ability to engage our animate and inanimate environment improve steadily. In the step of integration, we exploit such favorable consequences from embodying emotion as resources for facilitating further embodiment of emotions and resolution of symptoms.
When we start to work with a problem situation, we are starting a cycle of embodying emotion. After we have identified an emotion, supported it, and expanded it to the extent possible, we might just end the cycle there, without much attention to integration. A session of emotional embodiment work can have one or many cycles of processing an emotion or different emotions. Integration can be used as the final step in a cycle of processing emotion, or it can come at the end of a session consisting of many cycles, to bring more stability or change at the end of a cycle or a session. However, integration can also be used at other times. It can be used within a cycle to support and stabilize the brain and body physiology. It can also be brought in to keep the emotional experience within a person’s window of tolerance.
In embodying an emotion, we might have to take a break from the emotion from time to time so we can process the emotion in many short cycles as opposed to one long cycle, to keep the experience bearable. In such instances, integration can help in breaking up the process into shorter cycles in a stable manner. Please note that conscious use of integration is an optional step in emotional embodiment work. That is, it is not always necessary within a session.
Because integration is always happening, it might become conscious in a client on its own. Here, we are talking about making a conscious use of it. Let us now look at different positive developments that embodying emotion can bring in its wake, how they come about, how they appear, how to look for them, and different ways in which they can be used as resources for improving embodiment of emotions and resolution of symptoms.
Improvement in physiological and energetic regulation: An unpleasant emotional experience is a state of stress and dysregulation. As we saw in chapter 8 on affect tolerance, the level of stress and dysregulation in the body during an unpleasant emotional experience increases with the engagement of physiological and energetic defenses when we are actively trying to access the emotional experience to resolve it. A pleasant emotional experience is a state characterized by increasing regulation and decreasing stress. If the pleasant emotional experience, such as sexuality, is inhibited through physiological and energetic defenses, the level of stress and dysregulation in the body also increases. When we ease physiological and energetic defenses against the emotional experience to expand an emotional experience and support the person to experience more of the emotion, our body and energy move in the direction of greater regulation or lesser dysregulation, even as we are experiencing unpleasant emotions. In fact, it is this relative improvement in the regulation of body and energy in the process of embodying emotion that plays a major role in making us experience the unpleasant emotion as less painful or more tolerable.
As physical and energetic defenses are undone to expand the brain and body physiology to expand the emotional experience, blood, nervous system, interstitial, lymphatic, and energy flows that regulate the body improve, increasing regulation and well-being in the physiology, even as we are processing an unpleasant emotional experience. In general, in integration we are looking for shifts in the body and energy experienced as increases in well-being or decreases in stress and distress.
One can experience this aspect of integration in the body in many ways: less inhibition, less constriction, more freedom, more space, more comfort, less discomfort, less pain, easier breath, relief, ease, and so on, even as one might be processing a terrible emotion such as the fear of dying. In terms of energy, one might experience integration as reduction in unease or discomfort in one’s experience of energy, more positive energy, less energy with greater comfort, more flow, expansion, balance in the distribution of energy in the body, and so on.
Paying attention to shifts in the underlying body and energy experience toward less discomfort or more comfort can be helpful in making the emotional experience more regulated, stable, and tolerable during a cycle, at the end of a cycle, or at the end of a session. One can go back and forth in one’s attention from improvements in the body and energy experience to the emotional experience, or one can hold them both in the awareness at the same time.
The increase in stability, regulation, and tolerance of the emotional experience can come about in at least three ways. One, sensing the increase of regulation beneath the unpleasant emotion can make the unpleasant emotion more tolerable, as the swallowing of bitter medicine is made easier with a bit of sugar mixed in. Two, paying attention to regulation supports its growth. When we do that in the same physiology in which we are working with an unpleasant emotional experience, it can counter the unpleasant experience and reduce the level and intensity of it, making it more stable and bearable. Three, the more attention we pay to an experience, the more intense it can get, as we are adding more energy to the experience by paying attention to it, in accordance with the first principle of energy. So when we split the brain’s attention between the unpleasant emotional experience and the underlying improvement in body and energy, we dilute the attention we are paying to the unpleasant emotional experience, distracting ourselves from it, and that can reduce the suffering from it, making it more stable and bearable.
Potential for improvement in cognition and behavior: As we saw in chapter 6, cognition, emotion, and behavior depend not only on the brain but also on the body and the environment. And as we saw in chapter 8, defenses formed to cope with overwhelming emotions render our body less available for cognition and behavior, compromising both in a situation and hampering our ability to cope with the situation effectively. When we create a greater capacity to tolerate emotions by expanding the body, both the body and its connection to the environment are more available for optimal cognitive and behavioral shifts. As cognition and behavior become more optimal in relation to a situation, our ability to cope with the situation through cognition and behavior improves.
There are situations where changes in cognition or behavior can lead to the resolution of an emotional difficulty. For example, while processing the hurt I felt from an instance when I felt rejected by my wife and the subsequent difficulty I have had in reaching out to her when I am in need, both my hurt and my disconnection from my wife could be resolved by realizing that the hurt I feel around my wife might have to do with my mother (cognition); or it could be resolved by feeling an impulse to reach out to my wife again (behavior). There are also situations where changes in cognition or behavior can help in tolerating the emotion. For example, realizing that the hurt I feel might have more to do with my mother than with my wife (cognition) can help in making the hurt more tolerable to process. As another example, the recognition that the fear of dying from a childhood trauma is mixed up with the fear of dying during the pandemic can render both fears more tolerable to process to completion. Just naming a feeling (cognition) can sometimes help make the experience more tolerable. Realizing that one has more options for responding to a situation (behavior) can make one’s emotions in the situation, such as fear and frustration, more tolerable to process.
In integration, we can look for helpful cognitive and behavioral shifts that happen during emotional embodiment work—whether during a cycle, at the end of a cycle, at the end of a session of many cycles, or between sessions—that can make the emotional experience more tolerable, stable, and resolvable. These shifts often emerge on their own as part of the process. If not, we can facilitate them by asking questions such as “What do you think about the situation now?” or “What do you think you can do differently in the situation?” Engaging a person in cognitive and behavioral aspects of the experience in the midst of an overwhelming emotional experience by splitting the person’s attention among the different aspects of experience can help to reduce the intensity of the emotional aspect of the experience, making the emotional experience more tolerable and stable in the middle or at the end of a cycle.
You can ask, “Now that you have developed some ability to tolerate, regulate, and be with your emotions, I wonder how your thinking about the situation, your memory of the details of the situation, and your ideas about what you can and cannot do (or what you could have done and what you could not have done) in this situation may have shifted.” You can ask them to engage in such a process with you during the session, or you can have them do such self-inquiry in between sessions.
Integration of the work of emotional embodiment, like any other psychological work, is likely to continue in waking life as well as in dream states. Keeping this in mind, we can also suggest the following to our clients: “You have done an important and hard piece of work successfully. The process is likely to continue for some time when you are awake as well as when you are asleep. Please keep track of changes in your thinking and your memory of the situation; your emotions about the situation, including the ones we worked on today; and what you think you can or cannot do about the situation. Please also keep track of your dreams, and reflect on how your dreams in the aftermath of the session might reflect changes in your cognition, emotion, and behavior in relation to the situation you worked with.”
Improvement in collective resources: When a greater capacity for an unbearable emotion is generated, the mind and the body can be more open to the environment, which allows them to be better connected with the collective energies of the universe. For example, when I am able to connect more with people in my environment after working with my fear of making eye contact with others, a fear that goes back to my childhood, the extra support I can now take in from others in my collective can help me process deeper levels of my fear of making contact, with greater affect tolerance. We can use this interpersonal resource during a cycle, or at the end of a cycle or a session, to make the emotional experience more stable, regulated, and tolerable, and to resolve symptoms.
Paying attention to positive shifts in energy (whether from the inside or the outside, because we cannot always distinguish between the two in the body) at any stage during emotional embodiment work—but especially at the end of a session, when we can expect the collective energies to be more available after several cycles of embodying emotion—can help in making the emotional experience more stable, regulated, and tolerable, and in reorganizing persistent long-term body and energy patterns to resolve symptoms. I remember sitting with a woman after she had worked with embodying her sadness in her chest, resonating with the swirls of energy that came into her lungs, and expanding them in slow motion from the inside, the kind of deep integration that I have seen precede symptom resolution. That particular client reported that soon afterward she gained major relief from her long-term symptom of frequent episodes of breathing difficulty.
Within a cycle: A cycle of embodying emotion consists of the four steps of situation, emotion, expansion, and integration. At any point in the cycle, especially in the first three steps, there are times when emotion can become too much to bear, and defenses become stronger. There can be an increase in stress, dysregulation, and instability in body and energy. One can then use physiological and energetic phenomena of integration to manage the process to keep the experience within the window of tolerance.
You can do this by making statements such as “You are really doing a great job, working hard to embody your grief. It looks like it is becoming too much for you, for now. Grief is hard. I know from my own experience how hard it can be. Shift your awareness a bit to notice how your body and energy might feel a bit better than before, from the hard work you did to expand your grief. Specifically, your breath might be just a little bit easier. The body might feel less constricted somewhere, especially in places you have expanded the grief to. You might even feel more energized in a good way in some places or throughout your body. Your brain might feel less stressed. Please place your awareness on such tiny improvements in your body and energy, for a little while, from time to time, as you continue to pay attention to your expanding grief. You can go back and forth between your grief and the small improvements in your body and energy, or you can hold them both in your awareness at the same time. Notice how that makes you feel better in being with your grief, and continue expanding it further in your body.”
When things get hard within the cycle, we can also bring in cognitive and behavioral aspects of integration to ease the suffering and decrease stress, dysregulation, and instability. As we saw earlier, it might make it easier to be with the grief because one’s attention is taken away from emotional experience or divided between emotional experience and cognitive and behavioral aspects of the experience. Or we might be able to tap into the potential for improvement in cognition and behavior, to help ease the pain and reduce the instability in the process.
We can make statements such as “It is great that you have managed to grasp your grief to this extent. It is not the easiest thing in the world to do, to be with an emotion as difficult as grief. When we develop a greater capacity to tolerate an emotion by expanding it in the body, research shows that it can change what we think about the situation and what we can do in the situation, for the better. Let us now take a moment to assess how the work you have done so far might have changed what you think or recall about the situation—and your ideas about what you can or could have done differently in the situation—for the better. For example, you could have said or not said something. You could have done or not done something, things that are more feasible to you now than before. Also, does the grief you are feeling now in this situation remind you of other situations in your life, especially from your childhood?” The last sentence taps into the possibility that cognitive insight about the influence of the past on the present can be helpful in tolerating the emotion in the present.
During the cycle, we can also use an increase in a person’s ability to make contact and take in support from you or from the group if you happen to be working with the person in a group, to help bring more stability, containment, and capacity to the emotional experience. You can facilitate such contact by saying, “Please look at me or the group, and see if you notice a difference in your ability to make contact with me or the group, and take in my or the group’s support. It is okay if you can do that only to a limited extent. Even a little can go a long way. Take in as much support as you can. Does it help you become more stable, your physiology or energy get more regulated, and your grief feel more tolerable?”
At the end of a cycle: A person can be with a difficult emotion only for so long. Either the cycle leads to the resolution of the emotion, or of the physical, energetic, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or relational symptoms; or, more likely, the emotion goes away because the person can no longer stand it or has done enough for now, and needs a break before engaging the emotion again in another cycle. It is also possible that the psyche is pausing to integrate the cognitive and behavioral implications of embodying an emotion.
In such instances, we can shift to the integration mode and bring in physiological, energetic, cognitive, behavioral, and environmental aspects of integration with statements similar to the ones we saw earlier in this chapter, in the section about integration within a cycle, with one difference. The opening statement could be, “Now that you have successfully completed one cycle of processing a difficult emotion, let us turn to the benefits you have accrued from the hard work you did. Please do not think of it as failure if you could not hold onto the emotion longer. It is natural for emotion to come and go. We can stay with an emotion for only so long. Your body, your energy, how you look at the situation, and your perception of what you can do or could have done in the situation are all likely to be different, if not better.”
When we are trying to integrate the benefits or stabilize the process at the end of a cycle, it would not generally be productive to continue reminding the person of the details of the situation that evoked the emotion or to continue to refer to the emotion and support it. For example, we would not go back and forth between the emotion and the physiological and energetic improvements from embodying emotion. We might, however, hold both at the same time, to stabilize the person in the emotion before shifting to the cognitive and behavioral aspects of integration. The end of a cycle is also a good place to bring in the potential improvement in a person’s ability to connect with others and take in their support, using statements we have mentioned earlier, as a resource for consolidating the work done and for the work ahead.
For shortening or ending cycles: There are times when we need to keep the cycles short because the affect tolerance level is so low that a person might not be able to handle longer cycles. There are other times when the emotional experience is simply so overwhelming, the stress, dysregulation, and distress so high, the process so unstable, that we need to end a cycle as an emergency measure. In such instances, we can use integration deliberately to shorten or end the cycle. To do this, we as therapists need to shift our focus away from the situation and the emotion for the time being and toward physiological and energetic benefits that have accrued from whatever emotion has been embodied. Integration of cognitive and behavioral shifts is less likely to be beneficial after a short cycle; it is likely to be more beneficial after a number of short cycles or after a long cycle or at the end of a session, but it should not be ruled out altogether. Having the client make contact with you or the group in ways we have seen earlier can be helpful in distracting them from their process so you can end a cycle. This can also be helpful for obtaining support from others for stabilizing the process if the cycle ended on shaky ground, or for use as a resource for the next cycle.
Managing extreme emotional states: When an emotional experience becomes too dysregulated, or when it regresses into unbearable childhood states, integration as we have suggested so far might be inadequate to end the cycle, manage the emotion, and stabilize the physiology. In such instances, we need measures for managing such overwhelm to bring a cycle to an end. Let us look at some simple things we can do to manage extreme activation. As therapists, we need to stop referring to the situation and supporting the emotion, as that can continue to fuel the emotion. We also need not to show excess concern; instead, we need to reassure the client that the overwhelming experience can be managed. We can make statements such as “You have really gotten into the emotion, and it appears that your brain and body are having a hard time dealing with it. It would be good to get out of it altogether now, for the time being. We can go back to it later. This happens to everyone from time to time, especially to those who are really willing to dig deeper into their suffering for healing.
“Please open your eyes [if the client’s eyes are closed] and put all of your attention on the outside, or as much attention on the outside as you need to make your experience more manageable. Please move your head and neck in different directions to help you orient to the present. Please let go of thinking about the situation and what you did or could not do in the situation. Please stop paying attention to the emotion now. We will get back to it later. To help yourself orient more to the present, please pay attention to the environment through your five senses. What do you see? What colors do you see? What do you smell here? What do you hear? Do you hear the wind in the trees or the traffic? What taste do you have on your tongue? How does your clothing feel on your skin now? If it is helpful to stand up from sitting in the chair, please do.
“Please move your body. Please move your arms, legs, torso, head, and neck, so you start to feel them more. Coming more into your muscles through awareness and movement can help you combat excess emotion, especially in child ego states. Please hold back the crying, because it can keep you regressed in child ego states and leave you helpless. Please look at me. See if that contact helps you contain your emotional experience and make it more manageable.
“There are specific things we can do together to make the emotional experience more manageable. While sitting in a chair, bring your legs together, put your hands on the sides of your knees, and then try to open your thighs while resisting that action by pressing your knees together with your hands. This will activate the fascia on the outsides of the thighs, which has the function of containing one’s experiences, especially difficult ones. You can also do this in the standing position. Please stand up and try to imagine lifting both legs to the side while at the same time resisting the movement of the legs by pressing your feet into the ground. This will activate the fascia on the sides of your thighs, to contain your experience. Do you feel more together and less helpless when you do that? Lift your chest by pushing from the middle of your back to experience more containment. Play with pulling your chest in or lifting it in the opposite direction to get a sense that you can open and close your chest to manage vulnerable emotions there. Raise your arms to the sides, and bring them together over your head. Please do that a few times to see if you feel that you have more space around you that feels protective, and observe how that might make your experience easier to be with.”
At the end of a session: The end of a session of one or more cycles of embodying emotion is a really good time for integration. It can help in stabilizing the process and the client’s physiology before they go out into the world. It can also help in making the emotional experience more contained and tolerable if the client is still in the thick of the emotional experience at the end of the session. And it can help in exploiting the gains of various forms of integration from many cycles of embodying emotions (increase in physiological and energetic regulation, greater potential for cognitive and emotional change, and increase in access to collective resources) for resolving symptoms. Many of the statements we have offered earlier for use in integration at the end of the cycle can also be used at the end of a session.
In addition, when exploiting physiological, energetic, and collective aspects of integration at the end of the session, one can encourage a person to pay more attention to global or overall improvements in their body, energy, and collective resources, as opposed to local or specific improvements. Paying attention to global changes in body, energy, and collective resources has the advantage of bringing more stability to the process before the session ends. It can also offer more support and deeper resources for quicker symptom resolution. We can make statements such as “Now that we have done some really hard work, let us pay attention to how your whole body and energy might feel better, as opposed to paying attention to improvements in specific locations such as arms or legs. Notice how your whole body or energy might feel more regulated, changed for the better, freer, more pleasurable, less pained, and so on. If you are still with the emotion we worked with, please notice whether it is easier to be with the emotion now than it was before, as you notice these global shifts in your body and energy.”
To exploit improved connection to the collective, which can be expected to be there to a greater extent in a more noticeable way after several cycles of emotion, we can make statements such as “Now that you have worked very hard with the really difficult emotion of shame, let us see how it might have helped you to connect more to the world. Please look at me or the group [if you happen to be working in front of a group] and see whether it is easier to make contact with others. Do you feel more connected and supported than before? Do the fear and shame that inhibit you from making contact have the same grip on you?”
We can also say, “When it is tolerable to be with a difficult emotion such as fear or shame connected with making contact, the body does not have to defend against it. The body is then more connected to the environment and to the primal energies of creation. When your body and energy are more open to the collective energies of the environment and the primal energies of creation, they can come in and work on your body and energy to change your long-term patterns and symptoms. These energies are experienced in the body in different ways. They can feel like some new energy is coming in. They can feel like they are filling up parts of the body or the whole body. They can feel like they are expanding parts of the body or the whole body. Their flow can be experienced in different ways. They can be moving from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top. They can appear in spiral patterns, with the spirals going from the left to the right or from the right to the left, or spiraling from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top. They can feel like they have qualities and dynamics of movement of air or water. It is important that we support these healing energies with our awareness so they can transform us. We do not have to do anything other than to observe them and support them in doing their work.”
Between sessions: After the session, the psyche will continue to heal. All aspects of integration will continue. It is said that when we take one conscious step on the path of healing, the unconscious will help us by taking several more steps toward our goal. A number of elements can come up to be processed between sessions in both waking states and dream states, such as other aspects of the situation, other emotions that have to do with them, deeper levels of the same emotion, other situations that are related to the situation worked with, and emotions that have to do with them. All aspects of integration we have discussed (physiological, energetic, cognitive, behavioral, and collective) can be expected to continue as well. And symptoms can resolve.
Most systems of psychotherapy understand all of the above phenomena as integration, as opposed to our more limited definition of it. It is a good practice to educate clients to expect all of these possibilities between sessions and teach them how to work with these occurrences on their own, to the extent that they are able. In Integral Somatic Psychology, we expect clients to learn the skills of embodying emotions so that they can use them throughout their lives, to help themselves and others. It is always good to review the session with clients at the end so they can remember the attitudes, self-touch positions, and other skills, including how to notice and use different aspects of integration—all the things that worked well for them in the session. This way, they will remember to use them to the extent that they are able, to work with themselves between sessions. It is also a good practice at the beginning of the next session to ask them about things that have happened since the last session, to quickly orient to the work to be done and to gather the new resources that have accrued from integration since the last session.
Use and misuse of integration: Working with integration is an optional step in a cycle of embodying emotion. Cognitive and behavioral aspects of integration usually happen naturally during the session or afterward to stabilize the process, contribute to the healing, or bring up new situations to work on for symptom resolution. However, one might have to work on generating cognitive and behavioral aspects of integration deliberately if they do not occur on their own and if they appear to be necessary for stabilizing the process and making the experience tolerable, or for ideas for further work to be done for symptom resolution. Conscious work with other aspects of integration, such as improvements in body, energy, and access to collective resources, might not be always necessary. These aspects of integration usually happen in the background, stabilizing the process, making the experience bearable, and contributing to symptom resolution. We do not have to make them conscious and use them as long as the emotional experience continues to be stable and the experience tolerable.
As we have seen, conscious use of all aspects of integration can be of considerable help in regulating overwhelming experiences during emotional embodiment work. However, caution is in order, especially in relation to the use of positive developments in body, energy, and access to collective resources. Because these aspects of integration tend to counteract the stress and dysregulation that are inherent in unpleasant emotional experiences, excess attention to them at the expense of the emotion could regulate the emotion away. It could become a learned defense against the experience of unpleasant emotions because of the brain’s innate resistance to pain and suffering. So we should be careful in using positive developments to manage overwhelming unpleasant emotional experiences. It would be better to manage the intensity of the emotional experience by manipulating the level of emotional support, the level of emotion, the depth and width of body expansion, and the length of the cycle. If we fail, we can always fall back on integration to save the day. However, it is important to remember an exception to the general rule that the use of integration, especially with respect to improvements in access to collective resources, can contribute significantly to symptom resolution at the end of the session.
People like step-by step protocols. Here is one for one cycle of embodying emotion in seven steps, with integration included. It is especially useful for working with those who have very low levels of affect tolerance because it limits the time a person spends with an unpleasant experience between periods of integration.
People often ask in which order one should conduct the process of emotional embodiment. Because an emotion is always tied to a situation, it is best to start with the first step of finding the situation to work with. Most of the time, people come to us to sort out difficulties in specific situations. Therefore, it is relatively easy to zero in on a specific situation to focus on. However, there are times when the situation might not be clear. People might come in with a physical or energy symptom they are suffering from even though they are more likely to see a medical or bodywork practitioner than a psychotherapist first when they suffer from physical or energy symptoms. Or they might come with an emotional symptom, such as depression or anxiety, with no idea of what situations are causing it. When people come in with an emotional symptom, one can help them to explore what situations might be causing their emotional suffering. One can also work with the emotion to expand and support it, with the expectation that the situation will reveal itself if necessary as their capacity for suffering is enhanced.
The four steps of emotional embodiment are ordered in a logical sequence. However, the order should not be viewed as a rigid component of the protocol. One does not move from one step to the next while leaving the previous steps behind. In order to keep the emotion alive and relevant to the situation, one has to cycle back to the details of the situation as often as necessary to keep the fire of emotion burning. Also, in order to keep the emotion alive, one has to continually provide the necessary support for it and work with the innate and psychological defenses as they crop up. As we saw earlier, the optional fourth step of integration—in its physical, energetic, and collective aspects, as well as its cognitive and behavioral dimensions—can be done during a cycle, at the end of a cycle or session, or between sessions. There are times when, even as the situation and the emotion are clear and there is adequate support for the emotion and for dismantling the innate and psychological defenses against emotion, the unconscious physical and energetic defenses are so strong that it is hard to access the emotion, let alone expand its capacity in the body. In such situations, a therapist might work with a client’s physical and energetic defenses for a while, first in a session or for a whole session, to loosen them as a preparation before focusing on a specific situation.
So, the four steps should be viewed more as different sets of tools or ingredients that the therapist can draw upon throughout a session of emotional embodiment work, rather than as a rigid sequence to be followed in every session. Often, the therapist engages the client with more than one step at the same time. The therapist has to continually support the client through empathy and other forms of emotional support; refer to the situation that the emotion has to do with often enough to keep the emotion alive and relevant; work with the innate, psychological, physical, and energetic defenses as and when they show up; and bring in the step of integration in its physical, energetic, collective, cognitive, or behavioral aspects when necessary for the different purposes for which they can be used.
Therapists who have conducted a detailed intake of a client might have strong hypotheses about past situations that might be contributing to the present emotional difficulty and might wish to focus on a past situation. A question that is often asked in supervision is whether one should work with the emotion in relation to the original situation or in relation to the current situation to which the emotion has been transferred. My preference is to work with the current situation that has triggered the old emotional response, with the thinking that creating a greater capacity for the emotion through its embodiment will eventually evoke the cognition that the emotion has to do with a past situation, if such a cognition is necessary for therapeutic change. This works most of the time. One then works with the past situation, if it is necessary to resolve the symptom.
But the spontaneous connection to a past situation that is necessary for healing does not always show up, for the following reasons. One, even though the creation of greater capacity for the emotion through its embodiment in relation to the current situation theoretically increases the possibility of cognitive grasp of its link to a relevant past situation, psychological defenses might still remain strong enough to prevent the cognitive insight from emerging. Two, some people might have an undeveloped capacity for psychological insight in relation to the past that might get in the way of the resolution to their suffering. Three, the memory of the relevant past situation might be from an early stage of childhood for which explicit memory is not available for recall. Four, when we build capacity for the emotion in relation to the present situation without an accompanying link to the past, due to strong psychological defenses, undeveloped capacity for psychological insight, or lack of explicit memory, we might erroneously and convincingly fix the blame for the emotional suffering on the present situation. This conclusion can get in the way of resolution of the present situation.
In each of these situations, it might be better for the therapist to work with a past situation than with the present situation, even if the client is insistent that their suffering has to do with the current situation. After all, interpreting the unconscious roots of a conscious problem with the help of known but not personally remembered history is one of the most important elements of the practice of psychotherapy.