Working with Sub-Personalities in and through the Body

Saturday 26 June
& Sunday 27 June 2010

10am - 5pm

"But the practice of psychosynthesis very soon revealed the necessity of including the body, that is to say, of recognizing and making use of the close ties that knit body and psyche, and the reciprocal actions and reactions between them."
In: Roberto Assagioli, M.D. Psychosomatic Medicine and Bio-Psychosynthesis

Sub-personalities are a central concept for all psychosynthesis therapists, and an important part of our everyday work. It's a powerful idea which can make a profound contribution to the therapeutic process. But can a deeper understanding and engagement with the bodily aspects of sub-personalities, along the lines of Assagioli's statement, help your work further?
For example, could attention to non-verbal communication, body language and spontaneous somatic processes...
- deepen your sub-personality work and allow it to become more transformative
- support your client in experiencing the real impact which a sub-personality has on their life more directly, maybe in the 'here & now'
- enable your client to connect more fully or more emotionally with a particular sub-personality

Attention to both the client's and the therapist's body experience can also significantly help us address the following challenges in working with sub-personalities:
- the client resists, refuses or dismisses the idea of working with sub-personalities generally or insists on disowning a particular sub-personality
- the various sub-personalities get confused with each other or conflicts between them remain repetitive, stuck and unresolved
- sub-personalities are being projected onto you as the therapist, thus complicating the transference

Sub-personalities are an inherently holistic concept: each sub-personality has its respective sensations, feelings, states of mind, imagery and associated patterns and behaviours. Whilst theoretically recognised, however, the often neglected somatic aspects of sub-personalities deserve more attention, so we can learn to access their full therapeutic potential.

In this weekend we will be drawing on the theories and methods of various body-oriented schools of psychotherapy to enhance both our perception and engagement with the bodily aspects of sub-personalities. This involves complementing imagery and visualisation with attention to sensations, gestures, posture and a whole range of other bodymind processes.
Building on recent neuroscientific insights regarding the importance of right-brain-to-right-brain communication between client and therapist, we will emphasise the body's role in the therapeutic relationship.

The weekend will give you tools and techniques designed to support your client in embodying their various sub-personalities both in their therapy and in their life. It will also help to clarify some recurring transference issues and therapeutic impasses, as well as offering a wide spectrum of additional creative possibilities in working with the body.

Some specific learning objectives:
- finding a sub-personality's somatic anchors
- engaging with a sub-personality's preferred communication channels and styles of relating
- learning and practicing some body-oriented techniques of intervention, to access the client's spontaneous experience
- strengthening imagery by developing embodied visualisation
- addressing body-mind conflicts in working with sub-personalities
- becoming confident in working with tensions, raw feelings and primitive processes locked into the body
- making links between sub-personalities and developmental trauma
- recognising and engaging with the conflicts between sub-personalities
- working with the overlaps and differences between sub-personalities and 'internal objects'
- addressing dissociative mechanisms through the body
- noticing when sub-personalities enter the transference

The Psychosynthesis & Education Trust,
92-94 Tooley Street, London Bridge,
London SE1 2TH

There are often limited spaces - so book early to avoid disappointment.