What is Somatic Therapy? A look into Core Energetics
Introduction
There are many somatic modalities available to us. My training is in Core Energetics, a blend of somatic psychotherapy and spiritual development.
I used to believe all of our suffering was due to our identification with our thoughts and letting the mind run the show. I believed that rewiring our mental patterns was the way to heal and transform our lives. However, our mental patterns are only one level of our being and our belief systems are formed on all 5 levels of our being: mental, physical, emotional, will/behavioral and spiritual. For lasting transformation to take place, we must work on all 5 levels of our being.
As human beings, we tend to search externally for fulfillment, for the answer to our deepest longings. The answers, of course, are within us. But because of all the different layers of conditioning we’ve picked up, which are stored on all 5 levels of our being, accessing our core, our higher self, is not a simple task. This is the work of Core Energetics: to help shed light on not only our unwanted patterns and conditioning, but our identification with them. And, over time, remember who we really are and learn to live life true to our essence.
The belief systems that are blocking a person from living from their core essence are formed in early development. Therefore, Core Energetics explores early childhood memories, images and experiences for information about early unmet needs. We can then examine how we have adapted in our adult lives in order to survive and how our early unmet needs are still unconsciously driving our lives.
Core Energetics has fundamentally impacted my life and healing journey, and I am honored to now offer sessions to clients. To learn more, reach out at marissanicolesomatics.com
Below is a deeper overview of the basic foundations of this life-changing modality.
Overview of Core Energetics
Core Energetics is a holistic psycho-somatic approach to healing based on the work of Wilheim Reich, Bioenergetics and The Pathwork. Reich, a student of Freud, was a psychoanalyst whose work laid the foundation for much of body-psychotherapy today. Reich studied how life force energy in the body could become blocked and impact our health and optimal functioning. John Pierrakos and Alexander Lowen, students of Reich, continued his work and created Bioenergetics, a way of understanding personality through the body and its energetics processes. Pierrakos later met Eva Broch, who channeled the Pathwork lectures, a series of spiritual lectures. Together Eva and John Pierrakos reformulated the work and called it Core Energetics.
One of Core Energetics’s foundational principles is that we are part of an ever-expanding universe. Everything around us including ourselves is energy vibrating at different frequencies. We each have a ‘center of right energy’ or ‘core’ that is universal life energy individuated in each of us. We use the terms ‘core’ and ‘higher self’ interchangeably. This energy moves out from the center of our being into the peripheries of our body and out into the world. Naturally, this energy would flow unimpeded. During our early development, however, the energy gets blocked, blocking us from our very essence, our core. Our work in Core Energetics is to explore how and where our energy is blocked and work to have it flow more freely on all 5 levels of our being: the physical, emotional, mental, will and spiritual levels. Our suffering is directly tied to how we are blocking our energy on any of these 5 levels.
The 5 levels of our being
The 5 levels of our being are a functional unity meaning they are completely separate systems that work together and affect each other, much like the 4 elements in nature. In talk therapy we tend to just focus on the mental, emotional and behavioral levels without fully integrating the whole being and thus may never become aware of blockages on other levels that are still causing us suffering. In order to make lasting change, Core Energetics works with our energy blockages on all 5 levels.
The physical level is the muscular-skeleton body structure of a person. Our energy gets blocked on the physical level through chronic muscular tension in the body that begins to form in early development. For example, imagine if someone yells at you or startles you in some way — you probably contract physically, stopping your flow of energy. When this happens chronically in early development, muscular armoring forms, impeding your impulse and stopping a more natural, flowing pattern of movement. In order to loosen this muscular armoring and begin to return the involuntary impulses to the body, Core Energetics incorporates bioenergetic movements, expressive exercises and gentle bodywork. Each person is unique and will have different muscular armoring, which can tell us a lot about how they structure their energy, and therefore inform their treatment. While we encourage our clients to move at home, the exercises themselves are not enough to change the conditions embedded in our entire system: for lasting change, we must work on all 5 levels of the system.
The emotional level is the chemical level of the body. An external stimuli will evoke an emotion, a chemical reaction in the endocrine system, such as anger, disgust, shame, etc. that affects all other levels of our being. For example, if an infant hears a terribly scary, loud sound, they will contract through their connective tissue, followed by a strong hormonal reaction that puts them, most often, in “freeze” of the fight/flight/ freeze pattern of the parasympathetic nervous system. If their caretaker is able to hold them and reassure them, they will learn they are safe, release any contraction and come back to their natural state. However, if a chaotic environment continues to surround the infant and the caretaker is not able to help regulate them, the child may end up staying in that withdrawn state and never return to homeostasis. The emotion of terror becomes an energetic block held through nervous system disregulation.
The mental level is made up of our thoughts and how we make sense of the information we receive from our emotions. When we are young and our thinking is more concrete, our thoughts label experiences good or bad, unacceptable or not, and these may become our mental patterns. Neural pathways, our mental patterns, refer to the connections between neurons in the brain. They are the highways for electrochemical signals that contain information. Every time we learn or do something new, our brain changes and forms new neural pathways. Core Energetics seeks to bring awareness to our thought patterns and over time, rewire our neural pathways to form new mental patterns and a new way of thinking about the world.
The will level is our behavior in the world. It is the actions and responses we choose to do. Behind these actions, there is always an intention. Yet this intention may be hidden. For example, consciously, we may believe we desire something yet our actions may tell a different story. Negative intention is created from early experiences and suppressed emotions that are buried so deep within us that we are not even aware of it. The first step in our work is to observe our behavioral patterns and make our resistances conscious. Then we can begin working to free the energy.
Finally, the spiritual level is our belief system: what we believe about the world and how we fit into it. As we are able to free our energy on the other 4 levels, our spiritual level will begin to open and integrate across all the levels. This will allow us to connect to the world around us from a new, more accurate reality.
We must work on all 5 levels because they all affect and depend on each other. For example, if we are emotionally unhappy in our job, but we continue believing our thoughts telling us we need to stay, we will probably have a hard time finding the will to create a change. This can then reinforce our belief system that we can’t have an emotionally fulfilling job and be financially secure at the same time.
From stimulus to belief system
We are born with free flowing energy in our system. However, by the age of 6, the energy blockages on our 5 levels of being define the main patterns and belief systems that we will recreate in our adult lives.
Let’s say a young girl lives with her parents in a small cottage up in the mountains. They don’t get visitors very often, but one day her aunt comes to visit. While the adults are talking, the young girl sees her aunt’s purse on the couch and starts to play with it. When the aunt, who isn’t used to being around children, turns around and sees the girl playing with her purse, she yells at her ‘hey give me that! didn’t they teach you not to touch other people’s things?!’ This startles the girl as she isn’t used to being yelled at. The aunt begins to come over more often and almost every time, the young girl is yelled at about something. As an adult, the girl grows up feeling fearful of when others come over to her house because unconsciously, it reminds her of the fear she would feel when her aunt would come over. This is how belief systems form: over time, we internalize a stimulus that once activated within us a high level of arousal. This creates an image in our system, which binds our energy. Now, every time we are reminded of the original stimulus our system responds the same way.
The original stimulus in this example is the aunt yelling at her. The stimulus leads her to experience fear, a chemical reaction within her system, as well as a physical contraction. The intense reaction in her system leads her memory to create an image, an imprint or mental representation, of her aunt coming over and yelling at her. As she continues to experience the chemical reaction of fear over and over again by the multiple instances of being yelled at each time her aunt comes over, the image becomes even more deeply embedded in her system. Eventually, this image becomes a mass image in her system of anybody coming over to her house signaling to her system that she is in potential danger. From all of this tension she forms a belief system that she isn’t safe when anybody comes over to her house, which will in turn inform how she perceives her experience in the world.
In order to change our belief systems, Core Energetics works on all 5 levels of being to find the image and unbind the energy.
Formation of the mask & lower self
Our ‘center of right energy’ or ‘core’ is our essence. This is our life force. It can never die or be damaged, it is pure love and consciousness. It is from our core that we express ourselves authentically. Naturally, the flow of energy would move unimpeded from our core out to the periphery of our bodies and then out into the world. However, the core gets cut off or blocked or squeezed off from flowing unobstructed through our system during our early development. This directly impacts our functioning in the world.
Let’s say a very young girl discovered drawing on her bedroom wall with her brand new markers and is really enjoying herself. When her mother turns around and sees the markings on the wall, she yells at her daughter very harshly. The child is startled and feels angry because she was getting pleasure from drawing on the wall and wants to continue. She yells at her mother “No! I hate you!” and her mother angrily responds “good daughters don’t get angry at their mothers, they listen!” In this example, the mother’s reaction of anger at finding her daughter’s mess is the stimulus that sets off the chemical reaction of fear and then anger in the daughter. If the young girls’ anger had been met with love and acceptance, for example the mother responding with “honey, it’s ok, I understand that you are disappointed” and immediately reassuring her, the energy flow would have been reinstated. Because the daughter was met with anger instead, she suppresses her own natural impulse of anger and disappointment and the expression gets trapped in her system. Over time, she continues to learn that her anger is not welcome and will continue to hide her anger in order to be the ‘good daughter.’ Being a ‘good daughter’ that is never angry has now become her ‘mask’ or the part of herself that she shows to the world. The mask is the outer layer of our personality. The masks’ main purpose is to hide our negativity, which we believe to be unacceptable and ‘bad.’ The negativity that we are hiding under the mask, is called the ‘lower self.’ In this example, the young girl learns her anger is not acceptable and hides it: the anger is now trapped in her system and has become part of her lower self.
As you can see in the image above, originally from Aylee Welch, LICSW, the mask and lower self hide our core essence. In order to free our core energy, we must first work on the outermost layer of the personality, the mask, before we can begin to release our negativity, our lower self. According to The Pathwork, “In order to face the lower self, you must at all costs tear down the pretenses of the mask self.” [ The Pathwork, Eva Pierrakos, Lecture 14]
We create our lives around hiding our ‘unacceptable’ impulses, which are hidden in our lower self. Because our impulses are tied to images of the past, we cannot fully live in the present until we find the images and release the energy that is blocked.
The mask is a survival strategy and can take many forms. Core Energetics works with 5 different masks, also referred to as character structures. While we tend to deeply identify with them, they are not who we really are; they are how we structure our energy on all 5 levels of our being. Using the character structures as maps to help us become aware of our own defensive patterns and physical armoring is the first step of Core Energetics treatment.
Character structures vary due to the child’s experiences during the 5 main developmental stages, resulting in different ways of protection and physical armoring. They are common patterns of deviation from ideal body alignment [Bent Out Of Shape, Elizabeth Michel, “Introduction to Anatomy & Alignment”]. When we hide our negative emotions, our muscles will instinctively work to suppress them. Over time, muscular armor is created throughout our body to help us continue to suppress and hide our natural impulses. Therefore, our body is a response to our early life experiences.
The 5 character structures are: Splitting, Reaching, Upholding, Inholding and Rigid; each is formed during a different developmental stage and has a different energy holding pattern. The splitting structure is formed from pre-natal to 6 months of age. This structure is formed from very early wounding and is fragmented energetically. They experience deep terror and rage and tend to be narrow with brittle muscles. The reaching structure is formed from 6 months to 18 months of age. This structure usually has anxious attachment issues and high anxiety when it comes to relationships; they tend to hold on to others and attune completely to other people’s needs while ignoring their own; they tend to have drooping shoulders and longing eyes. The upholding structure is formed from 2–4 years of age. This structure pulls their energy up in an attempt to not fall into collapse around helplessness and needs. They control and manipulate rather than be controlled; they tend to have broad shoulders and a small waist. The inholding structure is formed from ages 3–5. This structure holds their energy in, suffocating the core, and tends to collapse into hopelessness; they tend to have a thick layer of muscle and fat around them that developed to hold their energy in. Finally, the rigid structure is formed from ages 4–6. This structure holds their energy back, and while this structure appears successful in our modern world and is the mask of competence, they are cut off from their heart and have strong muscle armoring all over their bodies; they tend to have a well proportioned body.
Our masks are our protective mechanisms. They originated in childhood because they are the defenses we used in order to survive back then. However, we are still using these same defenses in our adult lives. Our reaction patterns from childhood became internalized and are now our life patterns. Because our masks are a reflection of our interpretation of our earliest experiences, they hold us back; they keep us re-creating the early images we formed in childhood. They helped us survive as children, but in many ways are detrimental to our adult lives. As children, we have real needs that need to be met. These needs change throughout each developmental stage, and throughout the rest of our lives. The splitting structure’s need is to belong; the reaching structure’s need is for attunement from their caretakers; the upholder structure’s need is to trust they are supported as they begin to develop their own identity; the inholding structure’s need is to have autonomy to express and explore; the rigid structure’s need is to be able to simultaneously have loving and sexual feelings. However, the real needs we had as children we can now meet by ourselves; real needs don’t require anybody or anything external to meet them. To the degree that our real needs as children were not met in the proper developmental stage, is the degree that we will still be trying to get those same needs met in our adult life. Therefore, to the degree that our real needs were not met at the appropriate time in our development, is the degree to which we develop a mask and hide our negative emotions.
As adults, the real needs we had as children are now false needs because they are not appropriate anymore. We are adults now with adult needs. However, because we did not get those real needs met enough as children, we continue to try to get them met now. We justify, hurt, punish and blame people or situations when they don’t meet our real needs from childhood. We channel our negative emotions into actions and behaviors that we justify. This is our lower self. It is our NO to life, it is our secret attachment to negativity that we have kept hidden under our mask. It is trapped energy that didn’t get processed in the moment and blocks us from living from our core. Because the lower self is distorted core energy, when we suppress it, we are also suppressing our creativity and vitality. Additionally, the more we deny the existence of our negative intentionality and therefore, our responsibility in creating our suffering, the more we will feel powerless over our circumstances. One caveat to this is that there are systems of oppression, marginalization and injustice that are out of our control; we did not negatively attract these situations into our lives and they are not our fault.
The first step of Core Energetics treatment is penetrating the mask because it is much easier to track our reaction patterns than our core energy. Developing an observer’s mind is key in order to begin to notice what goes on for us on each of the 5 levels of our being at any given time and begin to become aware of our reaction patterns with which we navigate the world. We also want to form a healthy degree of separation between who we really are and our reaction patterns as just something we do. The second step of Core Energetics treatment is exposing the lower self. As we begin to release our suppressed emotions, we will begin to integrate our experience on the 5 levels and have more access to our core energy. This will allow us to have a more accurate experience of the world, without projecting our childhood needs on our adult lives. We will be able to focus on meeting our actual adult needs for connection and creativity. We will experience more joy and spontaneity.
Although we use terms such as ‘penetrating the mask’ and ‘exposing the lower self’, we will never fully rid ourselves of these parts of ourselves. The mask, lower self and core energy all coexist within each of us, all of the time. Our job in Core Energetics is to gradually become aware of these different parts of ourselves without judgment, and work to unblock our energy. Over time, we can then learn to identify more and more with our core essence and live in alignment with our higher self. As Susan Thesenga says in The Undefended Self, “the path to the real self includes learning to shed our mask, accepting our ‘lower’ imperfect human nature and embracing our ‘higher’ perfect spiritual nature.”
If interested in Core Energetics sessions in Seattle, WA or virtually, please reach out at marissanicolesomatics.com
