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This transcription is a conversation between two individuals discussing bioenergetic analysis and somatic therapy. The speaker shares their personal journey and interest in body psychotherapy, specifically the influence of Wilhelm Reich and his student, Lohan. They also mention their experience with a therapist and their involvement in the bioenergetic community. The speaker explains how bioenergetics emphasizes the importance of relationships in therapy, contrasting it with other somatic modalities. They discuss the role of the therapeutic relationship in healing and the formation of new neural pathways based on healthy relationships. The conversation ends with a discussion on the calming effects of being received and loved by a therapist. All right, so we are recording now. Excellent. All right. Hi, Haumayun. Thank you for being here. Hi, Andrea. Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. So this podcast is geared towards current therapists as well as people who are interested in learning about bioenergetic analysis or somatic therapy. In today's interview, we'll be referencing the article that you wrote titled, What Happens After Detachment from Relational Trauma? Right. Let's start with an introduction to who you are, how you came to know bio, and then how you're connected to the bio community now. Okay. So let me start from the very beginning. It was actually 1981, fall of 1981, and I was a senior in college, electrical engineering at Stony Brook University, and I was a professor in the psychology department. I was a progressive man, and my politics matched his. So I took a special studies course with him, and he had a bunch of books that he suggested for us to read. One of them was Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich. And it was right around a couple of years after the Iranian Revolution, and I was on the left side of the political spectrum, so I was quite interested in the notion of fascism, because there was something there in that regime. So that was the beginning of my interest in body psychotherapy, in Wilhelm Reich, and how all of these connect together. Then I read all of Reich's books, so I went, I guess, into some kind of a latency period until late in the 1990s, after my divorce, I got interested in psychology again. And I remember I was talking to someone, to a therapist, and I mentioned about Reich. And I was on a hike, actually, in Silicon Valley, where at the time I was an entrepreneur working in startups, and I was a co-founder of a startup back then, in 1998. And I mentioned about Reich, this person didn't know anything about Reich, so I was explaining who Reich was, and then there was somebody else who was following us. He said, you know about Reich? I said, yeah, I've read his books. He said, you know about Lohan? I said, no, who's Lohan? Oh, Lohan was Reich's student. And she said that she had attended Lohan's seminars in New York. And I said, well, do you have any, do you suggest any of his books? And she said, pleasure. So I got that book, and I started reading it. And I said, oh, my God, this speaks my language. This is just so wonderful. What a cool way to be introduced to biologists. Very interestingly. Eventually, after, as I said, I was in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, I found Eleanor Greenlee, who since has passed away, she passed away a couple of years ago, and worked with her for eight and a half years. One of the best body readers that I've ever seen. A wonderful, very gentle therapist, and I got so much from her. So that was kind of my introduction to bioenergetics. And in 2005, I believe it was, after visiting with Al Lohan a couple of times, and then attending a workshop by Eleanor and Lohan in Florida, I decided to join the training program, which I did. And somewhere along the line, I said, well, I should get my master's in psychology. So I was still a full-time, you know, engineer working in San Diego. So I decided, okay, I'm going to go and join the training program, which I did. And I also attended Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, which was one of the few, had a somatic program, as well as a pre- and perinatal program. I learned so much from that school. It was, you know, I got the best education, I think, I believe, that anybody could get in this field. It was wonderful. It was me taught by many of the founders of the field, of people who knew, including Michael Sieck, who was a bioenergetic therapist, who was one of my professors as well. And so that's kind of my introduction to, you know, how I got introduced to bioenergetics. There was a second part to your question. Yeah, how are you connected to the bio community now? Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So at various level, I'm on the editorial board of the IIBA Journal. I'm also a member of the SCIBA. I'm also in training to be a local faculty of the SCIBA. And so that's kind of how I'm plugged into the community. And I've been, of course, involved one way or another since 2000. So it's my 25th year of involvement and back into the community, with the community. Yeah, that's longer than I knew. 25 years, that's a good... 25 years, and being in bioenergetic therapy for 25 years. Hopefully I have dealt with most of my issues, hopefully. I'm not sure, but... So in the article that we're referencing, is this your theory that you're creating? Well, all of my articles, starting from the very first one that was published in 2014, the articles are about my own experience in therapy. So, yes, some of it is my theory, but it's mostly an integration of other existing theories. Reich, Lohan, object relations, mostly these three are the ones that I'm addressing, as well as neuroscience and the works of Alan Shore and a few others. So some of it is my theory, but I guess sort of looking at the existing theories with a different lens. I think that might be a good way of putting it. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things about you in the training program, is all of this theories and information that you bring. Thank you. So in the article that we're talking about today, you talk a lot about your relationship with your therapist, Bob Hilton, and then other therapists who have influenced your work and experience. Can you speak about how bioenergetics is unique in emphasizing the relational aspect of therapy? Well, it's a very good question. So I guess the traditional bioenergetics did not really explicitly refer to the importance of relationships in the therapeutic process. I mean, Lohan is playful with introducing the notion of the body and soma into the whole therapeutic process. So there wasn't a whole lot of room to introduce other things, although my experience of him privately was that he was very relational. In workshops, he was not. So I would call him a relational therapist as well. But it was all implicit. It was Bob Hilton who introduced the importance of relationships mostly to bioenergetics, bioenergetic therapy. I'm sure others have talked about it too, but I think Bob Hilton has a central role in that process. He introduced object relations to bioenergetics and developed his own thing, and that's what we know as the Hilton diagram, which is essentially a simplified version of the object relations process. And so right now, bioenergetics within most of somatic modalities, and there are about 40-some number of them, is fairly unique in that we emphasize the relationships. The others don't. For example, somatic experiencing, the therapist is completely out of the way. In various other fields, it's the same thing. In Hakumi, it's the same thing. The role of the relationship is not as emphasized as it is in bio. So right now, bioenergetics, I believe, is fairly unique in that the role of the therapeutic relationship is very much emphasized. Bob Hilton would always say that we were all harmed in relationships, therefore it takes a relationship to heal us. Or he frequently quoted, I think I've written it in the paper, Guntrip, and I'm paraphrasing Guntrip, if it was a bad relationship that made us ill, it can only be a good relationship that can make us well again. Yeah, I love this. Yeah, it's very good. And there's another one in general theory of love, which talks about the same exact idea, but the words are different. And it is very interesting and important that brain wires within relationships, within the experiences that we have. So, if neural networks formed based on the original traumatic relationships that we experienced, it can only be another relationship, this time an optimal one, a good one, in which we are seen as we are, that can result in formation of new neural pathways, this time based on a healthy relationship. Unfortunately, the old neural networks do not die away, they're there. And under stress, they get activated. But the hope is that as the newly formed neural pathways, based on the new relationship, get stronger, the old ones get weaker. And so, in that sense, we can be transformed and can enjoy life and can feel pleasure and joy in our lives, which is one of the tenets of, you know, bioenergetics, joy and pleasure. So, you talk about therapy involving someone who receives us, allows us to love them and expects nothing in return. Yes. What happens in the body or in the nervous system when exactly that happens, when someone who receives us allows us to love them? I think that that's the emphasis right there, is allowing us to love them. Allowing, yes, allowing us, the therapist, well, the love of the therapist for the client, without which basically nothing works, and everybody has written about this, but this is about loving the love of the client for the therapist, and for the therapist to be able to receive it if they've done their own work and not, you know, have gone beyond their own narcissism. What the client ends up with is a sense of calm, a sense of, you know, his nervous system will get quieter and calmer, and a sense of serenity, homeostasis will result in that kind of a situation. It's a process, though. It's not easy because there are many defenses that the client has against that. Many times they do, they may have, you know, feelings of love for the therapist, but due to many reasons they cannot express them. It's scary for them. But yeah, a sense of calm and sort of tranquility, homeostasis in their bodies. And I should mention that, you know, when a child is distressed and runs to the mother, far more important than wants to hug the mother and says, mommy, I love you, it's far more important for the mother to say, yes, I know, baby, I know, and I love you, too. Rather than if the baby is distressed, the mother running to the baby, oh, baby, I love you, I love you, I love you. That does not calm down the baby, but it's receiving the baby that calms the baby down. And so, I don't know if I answered your question, but... You did, you did, yeah. And in your experience as a therapist, have you worked with clients who have expressed those deep emotions like love and admiration? They have. Yeah, and how do you handle that? Do you have strategies that you found effective in maintaining that therapeutic relationship or addressing the love or admiration? Well, I feel it. And my body posture, my face, reflects that feeling. So they know that they're received. Right. There's a look in my face, there's a smile, perhaps. There's a sense that they're received by me. I see them. I see them as they are. And that's very important as well. Again, I'm going to quote Bob Hilton, who says, ultimately, our goal is to get our clients to see themselves the way we see them. So that's part of, in other words, we need to be a mirror to the client. So when the client sees us, communicates with us, they see a reflection of themselves through us. And that's part of that receiving. So when we receive the client, and they feel it also that we receive them, that's the beginning of the formation of that or the perception of that mirror that we provide to the client. And that's the role of a mother with a baby as well. So there's a quote from Winnicott that I sometimes talk about that you might have heard. I'm sure you've heard of it. I believe it says, I'm paraphrasing again, when a baby looks into her mother's eyes, she should see a reflection of herself. Frequently, she sees a projection of her mother's plans for her. And then she will look for that mirror throughout her life in vain. And it is through that mirroring process that the baby finds herself. And the same way, within the therapeutic relationship, it is us reflecting the client back to them so that they become a mirror as to their real self, that they can heal and they can go beyond what Bob Heston calls the adaptive self to become their true self. So the true self can be restored. I think that through the training, you have helped me really understand that mirroring experience and how we just weren't mirrored appropriately as children. And it's really helped me as a therapist in my practice just to be there. And with them and their experience as my clients and mirror them the way that they. So thank you for that. Yes. Of course. I just want to make one quick comment. I'm sure you've seen Ed Tronick's YouTube video on still face experience. Oh, yes. Uh-huh. And you notice that how quickly the infant responds to the mother. It actually takes about half a second for the baby to respond. And this is the baby. We forget about all that. But as adults, our brains work exactly the same way. So when we start reflecting the client back to them, it only takes a half a second for them to see it. A lot of times it's unconscious because they have numbed themselves. But over time, they feel it. They can sense it. So it's a very powerful. Eyes are so important. I think you talked about that and so on. Are so important in that process. That, you know, Bobby says that vision is of central importance in formation of attachment, primary attachment to the mother. And we also know that infants, when they are born, I mean from day one, they communicate with the mother. But generally from using some of their senses that are active and that is touch, that is smell, that is taste. But after a couple of months, when the baby is almost two months or eight weeks, the malignation of the visual nerves begin to form. And after that, the primary way of non-verbal communication is through the eyes. And the eyes become so important. And that's one of the reasons. I mean, I emphasize, I mean, unknowingly, what I just told you is from Alan Shore in his book, Affect, Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. But I just knew it intuitively that eyes are just so important. So I emphasize in many of the techniques that I have discussed in that paper and others before that, the importance of eye contact. And I asked, I don't have children, so I don't have any direct experience, but I asked one of my clients who recently gave birth. I said, and the infant is about four months old. I said, OK, so you and the infant have eye contact. And she said, yes. I said, OK, when she does that, which eye does she look at? She said, the left one. The left one. I said, geez. So it makes sense. That's how it works, the right brain to right brain communication through the eyes. Yeah. I mean, I don't know as much about the eye contact as you do. But I do notice that people close their eyes a lot when they're experiencing shame or embarrassment or when they're dysregulated and they're trying to regulate their nervous system. There's the eyes closing. And I know that this is sort of like totally off script, but what is happening there when people have to close their eyes to go in? Because at the conference, you did that exercise. I think it was more object relations, but about the eye contact. And we did those three different types of, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was looking into the left eye, closing, opening, and we wanted three different outcomes. But it was all through eye contact. I remember it being really powerful because both me and the person that I was doing the experiential activities with had a profound experience. Even though we were just doing an activity and not really in, like, our emotions, we both really felt the power of that eye contact. Right. Right. So the idea there is to or was to basically take in the connection with the therapist. So they connect with the therapist, and as they close their eyes and look inwardly, they sort of take in. So that was a way to, I mean, over time, in an iterative process, to achieve limbic revision. So that the limbic brain of the client begins to regulate itself with that of the therapist and to form neural pathways that are similar to those of the therapist. Which we know it does happen, that in therapeutic process, you know, one brain revises the other. In shame, however, you mentioned shame, in shame, you know, Wright called it an inner deadness kind of thing. So we close our eyes to avoid contact, any contact with the outside world. So it's a disconnection in a way. It's loss of contact. And even in therapy, when the client looks away or looks down, usually we know that this is an indication of shame. That they are experiencing shame, and we can call them on that. Yeah, in the article you do say that the contact is laying at the core of shame. Yes, the loss of contact. The loss of contact, sorry. And how do you work through that when shame arises? Well, very good point. I'm actually working on a different paper right now. So in the paper that you refer to, I'm going top down. So I talked about, in a previous paper, Attachment to Relational Trauma, I talked about derelational trauma and the formation of these endogenous psychic structures, or endo-psychic structures, which I called, well, subject relations actually, libidinal ego, anti-libidinal ego, and of course then there is the central ego, the remainder of the original ego itself. And I talk about sort of releasing those endo-psychic structures. And then in the paper that you refer to, I talk about what happens after they're released. So after they're released, there is, and this is what Wilhelm Wright called contactlessness. He observed, and he talked about this in his character structure, character analysis book, he said that, you know, after you do therapy with a client for a long time, you hit an energy, a residual energy that seems to be beyond penetration, that you can't go beyond that. You get stuck, kind of. He called it contactlessness. And that, Bob Hilton has an article about that. So I'm expanding on that idea. So this is from the bottom up that I'm approaching this, and I'm going to talk about shame in a moment. So as the original pristine ego... Before you move forward, because the contactlessness, is that like when somebody is completely dissociated and sort of like in that numb? Like when they're completely withdrawn and sort of in... Yes, that's exactly what it is, but that's where all the psychological nomads land, and I'll talk about it in a moment. It's a very important concept. Even emotional plague is related to that, and I'll talk about it in a moment. So when the original pristine ego faces environmental negativity, this is when the environmental negativity is not too bad. So what happens is that the ego, instead of reaching its goals, the pristine ego, it moves in a different direction. And then it eventually forms the endo-psychic structures. But before that, what happens is that that pristine ego does not die away. Not all the energy gets redirected in a different direction. Some of it goes into regression and forms what Winnicott calls true self, or sometimes Harry Gunship calls the regressed ego, and it goes into hiding. Right above that, a layer of contactlessness, a layer of a buffer forms, whose job it is to keep that regressed ego, the leftover of that pristine ego, safe. Out of danger. Out of danger. Lohan also referred to this in his article, The Wish to Die and the Will to Live. So right at the time that that ego goes into regression, there is the wish to die that forms. And then, above the buffer, is the will to live, is the adaptive self, is what results into those endogenous psychic structures, or endo-psychic structures, depending on the ego and so on. So there is, right above that buffer, sort of the first line of defense against reaching the regressed ego is shame. Because we have not seen why our primary caretakers. Shame develops. And that's one of the ways we avoid it. And then there are many other, Donald Kalsche talks about these elaborate psychological defenses, you call them protector-persecutors, to keep that regressed ego out of danger. That we defend against it. Our psyche defends against reaching it vehemently. So now, how do we go through that? I started talking about this in the paper you're referring to, but hopefully I'll complete it in my next paper. That is the importance of the therapist. The therapist as being a guide, someone with whom we are connected, that we feel protected to go through that contactlessness. It is not possible to go there alone. It's just not possible. Kalsche refers to a metaphor, Dante's Inferno, in which Dante, with the help of his guide Virgil, goes through all the steps of reaching hell, basically, the purgatory, the limbo, and all of that, until you get to hell, and then you come up on the other side. And you need a guide. We need a guide to go through that process. And that's the role of the relationship. So, unless we fully trust the therapist, the psyche will not allow us to go there. It protects against reaching the regressed ego with all the power it has. So, only when we feel safe, absolutely safe, that there is someone with us that can guide us, that can protect us, that can provide the container, the facilitating environment, as Virgil calls it, can we go through that layer. Which, as I said, there are, you know, for certain personalities, that area of contactlessness is full of monsters and demons. For some other personalities who are later developed, that area is a source of existential loneliness and existential anxiety, therefore. And, I want to say one or two words about the emotional plague, which is something that Rice talks about, and we see it in our political scene these days, and, you know, on earth. And that is, if the trauma is strong, some of the energy of the regressed ego, instead of all being regressed, some of it forms these secondary drives. As those drives hit the contactlessness, they turn into secondary drives. They turn into what Rice calls emotional plague, which is the sum total of all the irrational behavior of human beings. Is this the chart that you created, that you're speaking of in this? I haven't talked about emotional plague, I'm just getting, given the political scene, I'm getting more interested in emotional plague and how it's dominating the world. The violence, the destruction of the planet, the lack of empathy, these are all parts of emotional plague. So, it is related, it's related, but I don't want to diverge because that's a completely different subject. Yeah, and it sounds like there's a lot for you to write about, so many different... There's a lot. Before we can restore the true self, there's a lot to be done. My question was, how might you work through that when shame arises? Go ahead. Oh, okay. So, shame can arise at many different times or stages of therapy. Usually, when I see the client looking down or turning away or closing their eyes, and I feel that there's shame involved, I gently ask them to, if they're in office, sometimes I get closer to them, I may touch their shoulders or their arms or something, or even their knees, to make contact. Because the antidote to shame is contact, physical or visual. And then I ask them to open their eyes if they can, and maintain eye contact with me. Initially, it's very difficult for them, but as they do, the shame goes away. There is a book, but it's actually somebody's dissertation in Pacifica, it's called The Eyes of Shame. I forgot the author's name. But that one talks about exactly the role of eyes in shame. But also touch and contact is very effective. So, that's when I observe shame in the client. But there is a more fundamental shame, and that is the shame of not being seen by the original caretakers, primary caretakers. And that is the layer, as I said, above the contactlessness. I think because, you know, I just want to kind of circle back to bioenergetic analysis, and I think that one of the unique things about being a bioenergetic therapist is that we are allowed to touch. And that can be helpful in situations like what you're talking about now, where you can move forward and allow contact, whether that be through eye contact, or maybe just, you know, helping somebody ground by placing your feet on their feet, or your hands on their knees, or things that are, I think, unique to bioenergetics. I know that there are other Reiki and lineages that also include touch, but specifically to what we're talking about here, I like. You are absolutely correct, and bioenergetics is unique in that way, that the touch at the right time, and the important thing is at the right time. And this is the intuition of us as bioenergetic therapists, to determine when the right time is to touch the client. And everything you said, like, for example, if the client is in shame, if you put your feet over their feet, so that we provide the contact, we provide the grounding, because in shame, people are ungrounded. And so the touch and the contact provide, again, the contact being either physical, tactile in that way, or even visual, can ground the client and actually help them with the shame, reduce the shame. So we are unique, you're totally right. We are unique in that way. Yeah. I have a really memorable moment in the SCIBA training with you, when I found myself dissociating. I can't remember exactly what I was working on at the time, but as you know, a common experience for me is dissociating, or even going numb. And during that experience, you were able to guide me back to my body and help me regulate my nervous system. And I remember feeling myself relaxed and connect with you. And it wasn't the first time that we had done work together. There was some sort of like built in trust and sort of the nature of the training can kind of speed that process up. But this experience really highlighted for me the power of somatic awareness and that therapeutic connection through eye contact specifically. Yes. And then in your article, you also discuss techniques similar to the moment I just shared. Can you expand on how you approach clients, like you help clients like reconnect with their bodies and regulate their emotions in your practice? And sort of what specific techniques or principles have you found are most effective in fostering this kind of deeper therapeutic connection? Right, right. So when I wrote about those techniques, I sort of discovered them independent of the knowledge that I have now that this is how babies regulate themselves. It's exactly that. The mother-infant communication happens exactly that way. The limbic regulation of the baby happens precisely through the vision or the visual communication with the mother. So yes, so when you, like I said, the babies can regulate their affects by, what's the word, gazing into mother's eyes and feeling or sensing the mother's, trying to ground themselves through the mother. So if the mother is grounded and the baby looks into the mother's face and senses that the mother is grounded, she grounds herself. So they use that as a pillar, the mother's face, for grounding. So the therapist really needs to be grounded and regulated in their own nervous system. Absolutely. Thank you for saying it. That's exactly right. So if you're not grounded ourselves, these techniques will not work. And I think I emphasized that in that paper and also whenever I talked about these techniques. And like I said, you know, when I wrote about these papers, I didn't know that infant research projects that were done by many, many authors. But now that I'm aware of that, I see, oh, okay, these techniques actually are grounded in the same fundamental, you know, ways that the infant grounds itself, regulates itself, resonates with the mother. And so through the eye contact, through the feeling their own bodies, but that's, as you said, it's when there is a relationship. So when we work together, I can't quite remember exactly the moment that you're talking about, but as you and I trust each other, then you can take in the contact. You're not afraid of the contact, just like a baby. You know, there's that aspect of us that we are working with. Because as you and I both know, most of the traumas that we encounter really go back to our early childhood. So the approaches are essentially the same, that we need to have the trust, we need to feel the safety, have the safety. And then as we maintain the eye contact and also feel our bodies, we regulate our limbic systems. The same calmness in the beginning of this interview I talked about, this is what happens when you do that. Yes, it's that sense of serenity, tranquility, and homeostasis, biological and psychological homeostasis. In this article, you mentioned that the therapist's indispensable tools are a strong sense of self, self-knowing, and self-relatedness. Yes. That is exactly what you're talking about now, that a therapist needs to do their own personal growth and work. Absolutely. In fact, as I'm preparing my next paper, I was reading in Alan Shore's Affect Regulation and Repair of the Self, in which he says, of course, it is important for the mother to be attuned to the baby's affects and feelings and emotions. But it's even more important for the mother to be aware of her own affects, what is going on within herself. Right. And what ways do you believe that bioenergetics or bioenergetic therapists can be beneficial for therapists in developing and strengthening these essential tools? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because, you know, the training program to become a CBT, you go through a very rigorous training process. I believe more rigorous than any other modality that I know of within somatic psychotherapy. And that's so essential in us connecting to ourselves, grounding ourselves, being grounded, and providing or developing exactly what you said. Those indispensable tools. Yeah. When we say grounded as a bioenergetic therapist, what do we mean? Because it's different sometimes when people think of grounding from a bioenergetic perspective, it's different than other ideas of what grounding is. So if you're the client and I'm the therapist, bioenergetic therapist, when I sit with you, I'm in my body, fully attuned to my body. I'm fully attuned to you. I'm aware of what is going on within me. I'm aware of what is going on within you. Those are what I call it. I might have missed one or two things. But those are the things that I believe are essential in being grounded as a bioenergetic therapist. And grounded means, like, present in your body, regulated? Do we mean, like, present? Or in our bodies? Yes. Present with ourselves and present with the client. Attuned to ourselves and attuned to the client. So these are very, very important. So if you're not, Alan Shore's comment is very interesting, that the mother should be attuned to herself. I need to be attuned to myself to know what I'm projecting back to the baby, back to the client. I need to be connected to me. And that is a groundedness. So I'm not simply, as Venekat says, a reaction to impingements in the absence of good contact and good mothering. Otherwise, that's who we become. A reaction to impingements. To how the client impinges on our psyche. So in order to do that, then we have to do the work ourselves, on ourselves. I guess what I'm thinking of or what I'm trying to get at is sometimes we have clients come in and they say that they're grounded, but they're not. And helping them understand what grounded is in their own body, I feel is unique in bioenergetics. Because for me, that can look like doing some bioenergetics exercises together to get the client more present and with me and able to co-regulate. Yes. To be fully grounded, I believe, is a very long process. We have all these series of bioenergetic exercises that are so important to help the ground, to help the client ground. And they do. They get grounded in the session, but soon after that, it goes away. They go back in their heads and disconnect. So the idea behind the bioenergetic grounding exercises is to bring awareness to the body. Through stretching the muscles, we increase the blood flow. There is more nerve transmission, sensory nerve transmission, back to the brain. So the client, therefore, becomes more aware. I'm a firm believer that any modality must be grounded in science, in neuroscience, in biology, if it is to be accepted. And I believe bioenergetics is. Anything we do today, we know is grounded in all of these fields, the scientific fields. And so, yes, bioenergetics is unique in that. But grounding is a word that is used everywhere these days. But we have a unique way of understanding what grounding is in bioenergetics. Thank you. One of the concepts that I really wanted, like the idea that I really wanted to talk about with you, is limbic attractors and limbic revision. Can you just tell me what limbic attractors and limbic revision are for people that are listening? Yeah, both of these concepts are explained in a general theory of love. Limbic attractors are these recurrent networks, that is, networks with feedback, that get activated. And that's part of the neural networks in the brain. And they form a set of connections that react in a certain way to stimuli. So, given a stimuli, it activates, it helps the formation of the neural attractors. Next time you're facing a similar stimulus, the same attractor may get activated again. So, this is an organized neural network that responds to a situation. Now, limbic revision is how the limbic system or certain neural pathways within the limbic system can be revised, can change. So, the attractors can get weaker, and they can change, slightly. But they will always remain, even in weak forms, they won't completely go away. So, the idea of limbic revision is, therefore, to achieve revising, and by revising I mean formation of new neural networks in the limbic system, based on the new experience that the client has. And then there are the techniques that I talk about. So, we can repeat things up, but limbic revision happens all completely naturally, within the therapeutic relationship. And we see that, and an example of it is, sometimes even with your friends, your very close friends, you see that after knowing them for a while, you unconsciously repeat certain phrases that they use, or repeat certain behavior that they have. So, that's limbic revision. So, the role of the limbic system is to organize this kind of behavior. It's all unconscious, basically. So, the same happens in therapy. So, the techniques that I talk about is really related to speeding the process up. So, it's of great importance for the therapist to have done their own work. Otherwise, we revise our limbic systems with someone who's not exactly grounded himself or herself. Yeah, I see that. I think I see that a lot with different healing professionals. So, it is so important, and again, bioenergetics is so unique in that way, that we do so much work on ourselves. We deal with our stuff. And therefore, when the client's limbic system rewires, similar to ours in certain aspects, they will be more grounded, just as we are. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my sense, and I've been exposed to many modalities, I believe we talk about it in much more detail. And the field itself sort of emphasizes that, compared to other modalities of somatic psychotherapy. So, in that way, I believe, yes, we are unique, in terms of the emphasis that we put on this. Yeah. I love the idea of the limbic attractors and limbic revision. So, this is the second part of the three-part series, the third in which you're working on now. And I did read the first one as well. Oh, okay, thank you. And regarding that, I just remember an anecdote. I remember one time I was discussing something with Bob Hilton in my 10 and a half years, 11 years of therapy with him. And I said, you know, this is what happened, and this is what I did. And Bob Hilton said, well, I would have done exactly the same thing. I would have done exactly the same thing. I said, oh, my God, Bob, I've become like you. He said, well, sorry. So, it happens. And they say it, and they say, you know, that's exactly correct. This is my way of kind of measuring and determining how they are progressing in that way. So, it happens automatically, just like a child whose brain wires through their relationship with the parents. The same exact thing happens, you know, in therapy. It's very powerful, actually. It's a very powerful thing that, you know, is not talked about as much. For example, other modalities, one of the biggest ones being somatic experiencing these days, doesn't address any of these. These are not addressed at all. The polyvagal? Well, I mean, they may talk about the polyvagal theory, but they don't speak about these deep changes that happen within the client. The polyvagal theory, you know, is a good explanation of, you know, traumatic response and how we want to engage the social engagement system, the ventral branch of the vagus nerve. But they don't, you know, Porges has a few techniques that he uses. Safe and sound protocol is one of them. The tapping of the face is another. He has a few things that he talks about. But they don't generally achieve any of this. Because, again, they don't emphasize the role of their relationship. Yeah. I've been trained in some of those things, and I agree. Even with EMDR, you know, I have people ask me, and I feel it's the same thing. It's keeping us separate. You know, the tapping is about you and your nervous system. EMDR is about you. It's not about, like, what's happening here. Exactly. And I'll tell you one little secret. Almost all EMDR practitioners that I have met, and I don't want to make a general statement, are schizoid. Because it gives them a perfect way of staying out of contact, out of reach. I just laugh because I feel like that makes a lot of sense. Yes. It's unbelievable. But, yeah, I agree with you that EMDR is exactly that way. Yeah. There's that separation. I feel like just as we're talking, I'm noticing that there's some sort of theme. I don't know if you came to object relations and sort of made that connection or, I don't know. It's like you utilize bioenergetics and object relations together. And it sounds like Bob Hilton did as well. And I know that Steven Johnson also talks about object relations. Steve Johnson did talk about it a little bit. Not in great detail, though. Yeah. But whatever I've done in this field is Bob Hilton's fault. Oh, okay. So he introduced you to sort of the object relations. You know, the story is kind of funny. Because Eleanor Greenlee was a client of Bob Hilton. They're both of the same age. Bob is going to be 92 years old this month. And he's still quite sharp. I go and discuss things with him every once in a while. And I had these ideas. I had in my graduate studies, I put together a very elementary version of the diagram I have in the paper. And I started reading Bob Hilton's book. And I said, my God, Hilton's diagram is just like this. I mean, he discovered it right before me. Or put it together right before me. And I got interested. And I said to Eleanor, I said, I want to work with Bob. At the time, I had moved to Southern California. And at the time, Bob was only working with therapists. And I wasn't a therapist. And she put in a good word. And I was just starting my graduate school. And I started working with Bob. And the more and more I understood his work and I read his work and papers, the more I realized the importance of this. And he introduced me to a book by Gunship on object relations. He actually loaned me the book. And I read it. I said, oh, my God, it makes perfect sense. And then I started reading more and more and connecting the two together. And so that was kind of the inception of this sort of marrying the two fields in a way. And one of the SCBC conferences, I remember Scott Baum saying that our two friends are the object relations theorists. They are the closest ones to us. Oh, OK. Which makes perfect sense. Yeah. It is making more and more sense to me as well. And so we're almost done here. I wanted just to clarify. So you worked with Bob Hilton, who is one of your therapists. I love how close you are to the lineage. And then you also did you just do workshops with Alexander Loewen or were you also one of his clients? Well, I traveled a few times to Connecticut to work with him. So I did probably six or seven hours. I mean, I had idealized him so much. He was my idealized father in a way. So I wanted to see him. So I went and worked with him. And I also did a workshop that he and Eleanor did together, Eleanor Greenlee in Florida. OK. But yeah, both actually. But, you know, I wasn't, you know, a regular client of his. But you worked with him, so, you know, his style as well. Because I like that about bioenergetics that because we bring ourselves into the community, into like a therapy session, into groups that each and every individual that you work with as a bioenergetic therapist is going to have their own personality and their own way of being. And so I was just curious, like, if you worked with him. Yes. Yes, I did. And I did. You know, very interestingly, I remember the first time I worked with him, I was a transformed person for a few weeks. And after that, I went back to my original self. But it's the effect of the relationship again. Right. Somehow, because of that trust that I had, and because he received me, he and I talked about Reich. And he loved it. I mean, you talk about Reich at the time, you know. He, in the first session that we had, he spent two hours with me. I said, Dr. Lohan, don't you want to end the session? He just did. We were just talking and talking and talking. He loved to talk about Reich. And so that form of connection, it just grounded, I don't know how many billions of new pathways formed in my limbic system. Of course, because it wasn't recurring, it didn't happen again. They eventually got weaker and weaker and, you know, sort of perhaps went away, perhaps didn't. But I was so grounded for like three weeks. It was unbelievable. Oh, wow. And I know one of my friends, colleagues who's in New York who worked with Bob Hilton and who really admires the work of Bob Hilton, she had a similar thing when she met. Bob didn't have time, so I asked her, I gave my session to her, and she felt the same way. She felt exactly the same way, that she was grounded. It was very transformative for her for a while. So that's what happens. And so it's the recurrence of the contact of these kinds of encounters that helps us heal through this process. So it's exactly the connection and the relationship. Sorry, I'm interrupting you. No, no, you're fine. I was going to say that that whole concept of neurons that fire together, wire together. Yep, yep. That's the Hebbian axiom. Donald helped with this. Yes, that's exactly right. And I just have a curiosity. Do all of the training programs, at least within the United States or maybe even beyond that, use the Hilton diagram? I don't believe so. We didn't use it in Florida. I was trained in Florida. Okay. So that's Southern California. Because I love that. I feel like it helps me visualize what's happening for each character structure. So I'm just curious if that was all the training programs or if we're lucky over here. I want to say that perhaps we emphasize the therapeutic relationship more than other societies. I think that's perhaps true. But don't quote me on this, please, but I believe that's how it is. I know at least a couple of other societies who do not emphasize it as much. But then again, the whole thing was born out of the schema, basically, with Bob Hilton and Bill White and so on. But, yeah, I don't believe that the rest of the societies are emphasizing it as much. I'm sure these days they do. I'm sure they do. But to what extent, I'm not 100% sure. Okay. Just curious. Yeah. But then again, I don't know a lot about other societies except for a few. Is there anything else that you feel you want to share with us today before we end? Well, I just have to say thank you very much for doing this. I think it's very helpful to the community at large. Thank you, Hamayoun, for sharing your insights. My pleasure. My pleasure. You're welcome. Yeah. Great. Very good.