Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing: A Guide for Patients and Therapists - Tapa dura

Weisz, Robert; Blackwood, Daniel

 
9798888503669: Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing: A Guide for Patients and Therapists
Tapa dura
ISBN 13: 9798888503669
Editorial: Healing Arts Press, 2026

Sinopsis

A guide for working with emotions and unprocessed traumas

• Explains the simple yet transformative protocols and techniques of Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP)

• Describes how to work with specific emotional states, such as anxiety, grief and anger, and how to integrate MBSEP with other healing modalities

• Demonstrates concepts and practices in detail through dozens of case studies from the authors’ decades of therapy practice

Developed by Robert Weisz, PhD, the practice of Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP) combines mindfulness and somatic perception to help regulate emotions and process traumas that are stored in the body. The authors demonstrate these concepts and methods through decades of case studies and practical, accessible, step-by-step exercises.

Humans are emotional beings who feel and experience emotions in their bodies. Weisz and Blackwood explore the contrast between somatic, body-based emotions and the mental, cognitively-based stories, explanations, and judgments of the thinking mind.

The authors describe the “struggle factor” and why it is futile to resist having negative emotions. They demonstrate how to be mindfully present with emotional states like anxiety, anger, and grief, and they detail the healing influence of compassionate attention. Their methods foster neuroplasticity to create and expand neuronal linkages in the brain and nervous system.

By encouraging acceptance, compassion, and the experiential truth of our embodied emotions, Weisz and Blackwood have created a practical and flexible protocol for processing and regulating emotions. They also show how MBSEP is easily integrated with other healing modalities, making it a valuable resource for home practitioners and therapists alike.

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Acerca de los autores

Robert Weisz, PhD, is the developer of MBSEP and a retired clinical psychologist with more than 50 years of experience as a psychotherapist. His deep interest in the healing process and states of consciousness led to three decades of learning and healing work with shamans in Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. He lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a beautiful mountain home with his partner Diane, two cats, and many tree and rock friends.

Daniel Blackwood, MA, is the founder and director of the Evolution Group, Inc., a behavioral health organization that began in 1998. A practitioner of MBSEP for more than 10 years, Daniel is as passionate about "the work" as when he began as an intern 40 years ago. He is the author of Integrity Recovery, and he and his wife, Shawn, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Together they share three children and four dogs.

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1

What Is Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing?

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and

are to be honored. They are the authentic expression

of who you are at your deepest place.

JUDITH WRIGHT

Your feelings are your god.

CHANAKYA

THE CASE OF JULIA

Case Study from Robert Weisz

Julia was a forty-one-year-old client whose brother had committed suicide ten days before her psychotherapy session with me. She was overwhelmed with grief, and many other emotions. She felt guilty that she had not made a more concerted effort to save her brother and angry at herself for not calling him on the day he took his life. She was very angry and frustrated with her sisters and her brothers for their apparent indifference around her dead brother’s gradual descent into his depression. Julia was also afraid about her ability to function at her job as a surgical nurse in the local hospital. She had only allowed herself to take one week off her work schedule and had forced herself to return to work, even though she was barely able to maintain her focus and concentration during the surgeries where she had to play a critical role.

Julia was also struggling intensely as she tried to understand why her brother had chosen to take his life. She anxiously reviewed and reexamined every memory of her recent history with him to extract any information that would help her to identify how she had not been a good enough, caring sister and how she might have failed to support him. Julia hated the way she felt. She wanted desperately to push away and eliminate the overwhelming emotions that consumed most of her energy and her time. She feared she was losing her mind and that she had lost her capacity to function in her life.

Our work focused on helping Julia to accept and process her profound grief. We identified how and where in her body she was experiencing the intense emotional activation generated by the range of her strong emotions. For the first three sessions, I supported her and coached her to simply feel and acknowledge the indescribable pain and loss she felt in her body about her brother’s shocking demise. My role was to help her stay focused on how she was physically feeling her grief, which at this point encompassed many different, yet related, emotional issues. We had to steer clear of the whys and wherefores, the blaming and the speculation, and the search for answers that could divert Julia from being present with, and processing, her deep and painful loss.

In this way, Julia began the process of gradually being able to accept and process what felt to her to be the impossible and unacceptable—the loss of her brother. My priority in our work together was to support Julia’s grieving process so it could begin to move through her life and her mind-body system with the least amount of interference or struggle.

After the first three sessions, Julia was able to accept and to recognize that she needed and wanted to make room in her daily life for her grieving. Julia was learning that she had access to the basic tools for acknowledging, accepting, and being present with her grief. She was learning to mindfully and compassionately witness the emotional manifestations of her grief in her body. Julia realized that she could choose to just notice her feelings as they were present in her body and allow the emotional energy of her grief and pain to move through her body, instead of struggling with, or against, her emotions.

We continued this work for another three months of biweekly telephone sessions, during which Julia received careful instruction and emotional support so she could honor and process her grief. She was steadily learning how to acknowledge and move through the deep pain and sadness she felt, and would continue to feel, for the foreseeable future. As our work together continued for another six months, Julia was able to more consistently engage in her own emotional self-care. An important element of that self-care consisted of taking time each day to bring compassionate attention to her emotions as they arose and manifested in her body. She was able to develop better boundaries with her family, and she found a more rewarding and less stressful work situation with a medical group practice.

During our last session about ten months after her brother’s suicide, Julia reported that she was no longer feeling overwhelmed in her grief. She was able to allow, to honor, and to accept her feelings of deep loss, even as she admitted that she could not—and might never—understand why her brother took his own life. Julia no longer needed to know when her grief and sadness would end, and she understood that her feelings of grief and sadness were an authentic expression of her undying love for her brother.

THE GIFT OF HUMAN EMOTIONS

We humans are fundamentally emotional, and we function principally as emotional beings. Our emotions move us. Emotions enliven our experiences with energy, flavor, texture, depth, and engagement. Emotions warn us of danger and give us the feeling of safety. Emotions give us love and longing, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, fear and wonder, anger and avoidance, guilt and shame, envy and betrayal, joy and grief, awe and revulsion, intimacy and abandonment. Emotions shape and energize our behaviors and our thoughts; they can also inhibit or paralyze them.

Emotions create art; they activate our imagination and direct our dreams. They color our perceptions, drive our choices, create our attractions, sculpt our relationships, and mobilize our suffering. Emotions energize, animate, color, and enliven our experiences, and give them their potency, their substance, and their significance.

In short, emotions play an integral part in every human experience, whether internal or external, even when we are not aware of their presence or their influence. Emotions even shape culture and become a means through which culture shapes human consciousness and commands behaviors. The neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, summed up the primacy of emotions in human life, saying: “I Feel, therefore I am.”

In their 2021 book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven present a neuroscientific framework for the evolution and function of seven intrinsic emotional systems that humans share with many other mammalian species: seeking (expectancy), fear (anxiety), rage (anger), lust (sexual excitement), care (nurturance), grief (sadness), and play (social joy). These seven emotional systems, which are present in most mammalian brains and nervous systems, are the primary sources of our basic, raw emotions. The activation and the interaction of these seven fundamental systems creates the full range of our emotions and is engaged in shaping how those feelings are experienced.

In her 2021 book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, best-selling author and emotions researcher Brené Brown elaborates on this emotional range by identifying eighty-seven distinct emotions that can be named and described within the human emotional repertoire. These range from excitement to resignation, anguish to love, heartbreak to empathy; from compassion to contempt, and awe to disgust. This full and varied palette of emotions creates and expresses the richness, intensity, complexity, potency, and subtlety of our human experience, which is energized and enlivened by our emotional capacity to feel and experience ourselves as unique, multifaceted, relational, interdependent, and complex beings.

EMOTIONS AS EMBODIED EXPERIENCES

The actual, real, and tangible experience of emotions is not a mental event; we feel our feelings in our bodies, even if we are not aware of them. Emotions, in humans (and in many other animals), are made of the emotional energies that are generated in, and move through, our bodies in response to internally or externally experienced events. These emotional energies are a felt, sensorially experienced, and somatic expression of the essential life energy that animates our bodies and enlivens our consciousness.

The challenge inherent to our emotional nature is to develop a way of relating to our very emotional experience with a respectful awareness of how that experience is happening, as it happens, and where it happens. An essential fact about our emotions: They are tangible, psychophysiological events and phenomena that take place within our bodies as physical, energetic experiences that we can identify with our body’s sensory abilities. Since emotions happen and are experienced in the body, we are therefore compelled to acknowledge them and to relate with them, as body-based, physically discernible phenomena. If we want to have a realistic, respectful, and effective relationship with our emotions, we must meet them, witness them, acknowledge them, and work with them when and where they are actually manifesting.

However, we rarely, if ever, recognize that our emotional experiences are distinctly different from the thoughts, stories, or explanations created by the thinking mind. When we speak of our feelings, we are literally referring to the fact, and the reality, that we feel our emotions in our bodies.

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Editorial
Healing Arts Press
Año de publicación
2026
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 13 
9798888503669
Encuadernación
Tapa dura
Número de páginas
272
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

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