When I first went to see my T, he asked me questions about where I felt things in my body. He called it somatic experiencing and the first book he asked me to read was Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine. We were going to do trauma work and he wanted me to understand how trauma is about getting stuck and we can hold that stuckness not only in our brain but in parts of our body. My T and I did EMDR for trauma work. T mixed in the SE with the EMDR as well as our regular talk therapy.

For those interested, you can read more about SE and Levine here:
http://www.traumahealing.com/

In general, we didn't do too much of the SE. I didn't respond well to it. I didn't know what to say when he would ask me those questions, and it distracted me from our forward motion. We would be doing well, going down a certain track in recalling/recounting/processing the trauma and then T would ask me where I felt it in my body and this would pull me up short. It was like a therapy progress killer! It's not that I felt yucky about it, as you mentioned, Rainbow, but that I didn't feel anything really in my body that seemed relevant to our discussion, and T would wait expectantly and I would feel this pressure to feel something in my body so I could tell him something and not "fail" his question. Pressure! The SE stuff seemed to distract from our trauma work. I think T realized the SE was actually impeding our progress more than helping. We were on the "fast track" since I had pressing outside concerns that made doing the trauma work sooner rather than later very important. So he tried to facilitate that and go with what was working best for me. I seemed to do pretty well with the EMDR so I don't think de-emphasizing the SE caused problems. I preferred the conceptualization of EMDR, that the trauma memories didn't get processed correctly and became stuck in your brain. The alternating stimuli of the EMDR help shake those stuck memories loose and let them be processed normally. I didn't need to bring the body into things in order to profit from that brain explanation.

There was this other time early in therapy when T asked me to punch a pillow and sometimes hug pillows. I was especially not good at punching a pillow. It made me feel silly. I would gamely try it and be looking at T with an "am I doing this right?" look on my face. At some point, T said he could tell this was not going to work for me, and he abandoned the punching the pillow approach. (I never had any idea what it was for.)

In the Mindsight book by Daniel Siegel, the author talks about helping people who are highly analytical and ultra rational get more in touch with the other parts of their brain by doing SE-type exercises, practicing sensing feelings in their body and connecting them to emotions. I wonder now if my T tried to get me to do those SE exercises because he felt I was too analytical/rational?? I will have to ask him that sometime.

My T gets excited about various types of therapy and approaches but not all of them seem to "stick", or so it seems. He goes to a workshop, gets jazzed about something, and is big on it for a while, then goes back to a more even approach. I don't know how he decides who should do EMDR, who should do SE, who should do psychodrama, Lifespan Integration, Ego State therapy, etc. I guess it is good for the T to have a big box of tools so he can pull out just the right thing for the unique client in front of him. Anyway, Rainbow, your T is probably super excited about SE right now because of the workshop, but she may tone it down as time passes.