Learn the power of Attachment Therapy and Somatics
Starting in February 2023, we’re bringing together some of the world’s most esteemed teachers on Somatics and Attachment Therapy for our unique, 60-hr Somatic Attachment Therapy Certificate Program. We recently caught up with Co-Directors Kai Cheng Thom and Dr Scott Lyons to talk a little bit more about the program, who it’s for and what an attachment informed world might look like. Here’s what we asked them:
What are you excited about for this program?
Kai:
I get excited thinking about an attachment-informed world because I really think that if we are able to have deeper and better attachments within ourselves, with other people, and between social groups, we have a really essential building block towards a better world. Now that's totally cheesy, and I'm super for cheese. But I also think it's super real. Like how different could my experiences as an activist have been if I had known about attachment? How different could my experiences as a consultant, as a therapist, as a coach, as a sister, as a friend? I think that there's something in this program for everyone who is interested in learning about how to build a better relationship to self and other in the world.
Scott:
One of the things that I'm really excited about with this program is that it deviates from classical attachment style, which just looks at how we heal and mend a relationship with other, but really reaffirms the importance and significance of how we mend and heal the relationship with ourself first, and how that embodied experience of connection actually bridges us more deeply into relationships with other people, the environment communities, culture, and the world.
Kai:
Scott and I both have experience in the world of clinical psychotherapy, clinical social work in my case, but what really excites me about this program is that it reaches beyond some of those traditional clinical frameworks. We are looking at how attachment informs our relationships with everyone everywhere, including outside of the therapy office. We get excited about thinking about how attachment can inform our relationships with whole groups of people, about the attachments between people in different communities. What is the attachment experience like between queer people, trans people, trans people, cis people? We want to look at how attachment informs the experiences of racialized bodies, bodies of culture, BIPOC individuals, and we really want to get political about that as well. I remember that when I was first getting trained in attachment-based or attachment-focused therapies, we talked basically not at all about how attachment is informed by lived experience or social location. And we're going to do our best in this program to weave that in, not just as an equity and diversity add-on, but as an essential component of how we understand attachment and how we develop relationships with the world.
Scott:
One of the things that we're also bridging in this program is really looking at how is the body, how is this style of relating the coping mechanisms, the way of being in relation held in the body. And how do we start to utilize the skills of somatics or embodied practices to release, heal, amend the bridges that have been broken within relationship structures, and how do we identify all the very nuanced ways in which we have been compensating for the obstruction of those aspects of relationship?
“I get excited thinking about an attachment-informed world because I really think that if we are able to have deeper and better attachments within ourselves, with other people, and between social groups, we have a really essential building block towards a better world.”
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Why Somatics?
Scott:
If we look at the somatics as our primal language, it's our primal language of our felt experience as it manifests through sensation, imagery, movement emotion. And long before we have, let's say, a secondary language like English or Spanish, we have this felt experience of how we integrate and absorb and process the world so long before we can articulate it through that secondary language. We are experiencing it through our body and expressing it through our body. And that's also where our relational patterns get wired in the same wiring that then manifests in our adulthood, that manifest in our relationships at work, manifest in our relationships with other people, our relationships with spirit, our relationships with any other force, even with ourselves. It's all going to be reflected from the inside out and the outside end. And so the most incredibly potent way to rewire, to heal, emerges from doing the work of somatics.
Kai:
Somatics is learning by doing. It's not learning by talking about something. It's not trying to talk ourselves out of our feelings or trying to insert a better way of thinking over top of our old felt sense patterns. Somatics is really about changing the experience we have in our bodies by being intentional about what we practice. There's a saying that I think comes from the Strozzi lineage of somatics, that we become what we practice. And in somatic attachment therapy and many other forms of somatics, what we're doing is practicing right relationship with ourselves and others in small incremental experimental ways that we're then able to relax into and make a part of our inherent shaping or patterning. So what that means on a practical level, Scott, is if I get really nervous about this cute guy that I'm dating who's just not texting me back, well, I can tell myself a million times that texting him a million times is probably not going to get the response that I want. But telling myself that isn't gonna change how I feel about it, it's not going to slow my heart rate or stop my eyes from darting over to my phone a thousand times per hour. It is really only creating an environment in which my body can first become intentional about what it habitually does, relax into what it habitually does, and then start to experiment with different kinds of behavior, feeling, and sensation. Then I can really start to change. And that's the power of somatics for me that it's changing by doing rather than by thinking or talking.
How would an attachment-informed world be different?
Scott:
I think that, I mean in an idealized fantasy, it's like, oh, there's world peace. But I don't actually think that's the case. I think we're better at navigating conflict and that we're able to be more present in relationship to what's happening. I don't think the idea of perfect relationships has anything to do with attachment. I think that's absolutely moving away from the reality and the navigation of that challenge and conflict rupture is innate within human bonds and non-human bonds. And that truly our ability to, for this more collective or and individual secure bond is that I can be with myself and be with you. And so the result doesn't have to end up creating more trauma in the world. It actually stays here and gets worked out and processed in such a beautiful and organic way. What about for you?
Kai:
I think a world that is more attachment informed has a greater sense of what is sacred about human life. I mean, of course, I'm in conflict, my own and other people's conflict day in and day out as a mediator. And I really see what you're saying. Like I really feel that the heart of strong attachment is the ability to be with conflict, conflict with others, and then the inevitable conflict within ourselves that opens up when we are in conflict with others. Of course, when we are struggling with another person and they're telling us we're bad, we start to go, Am I bad? No, they're bad. And then that cycles and, and then we struggle with it, right? And I mean, I think it is a feature of imperialism, colonization, puritanism, like all of these sort of like difficult systems that we live in, oppressive systems that we live in that drive us away from the sense that, so maybe we are “bad.”
Maybe we are imperfect. Certainly, we are flawed and we will definitely make mistakes in relationship with one another and the non-human world. But we don't have to be perfect because we are sacred anyway. Every being is sacred anyway. And if we are able to hold onto an embodied sense of that, not just to think about it, right, and not to spiritually bypass into it, but really hold on in our blood and our guts and our bones that we are okay, that others are also okay, and that that sacredness lies at the center of human mistake making, then we really start to treat one another differently. We start to treat ourselves differently, and the way we are together is different.
Scott:
It makes me think about a world of co-regulation where our nervous systems are attuned. Our beings are attuned in ways that I think like we're talking about, can navigate the true nature of conflict and the many, many layers of intimacy. I think one of the things that often gets confused too, in this idea of traditional attachment theory is intimacy. And it's like this one thing and we come together in, that's intimacy. And I think what I've learned most from Buddhism and various eastern philosophical origins is that there are layers upon layers upon layers and layers of intimacy. And growing the capacity to be with all of these layers of intimacy only helps us attune to the embodied sense of our true nature and the nature of being part of something, part of the whole.
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Learn more about harnessing the power of somatics to help heal attachment wounds and trauma, and support the creation of profound and empowering relationships for yourself, clients, communities and the world with our Somatic Attachment Therapy Certificate Program
