Another respondent below, Red Lawhern, made some really good points and I commented on his post.
The ensuing discussion created some useful content that I didn’t want lost down in the comments. I’m re-pasting it here so it’s discoverable:
I know nothing of “psychosomatic medicine” … what I can say is that I’ve spent a massive amount of time and money traveling the country and studying with best people I could find, and the Hakomi crowd understands the human condition better than most … including precisely how (most) repetitive negative experiences recur in life.
That method/work did more to reorganize my nervous system and remove stress & chronic patterns of thought and muscle tension than all the other techniques (yoga included) combined. This is not to say that yoga & acupuncture are not incredibly helpful … they are … only that BEFORE Hakomi, they were fighting against an anxiety producing, non-verbal, fear inducing worldview in my limbic system, plus a very strong evolved (probably genetic) push toward preservation of homeostasis.
For me, change was slow going until Hakomi and being an engineer, you can look at a few points of reason to understand why.
Well established brain science shows that the neocortex is not really much online until about 7 years old, and not fully developed until ~21. So which part of the brain is acquiring notions of self and world between 0–7?? It’s the limbic system … separate from the language processing areas … and the source of dreams, poetry, metaphor, art and dance. So you have every reason to imagine that it uses different tools to communicate and express itself … dreams are one example of this. Sadly, most shrinks don’t understand this language … one who truly did was Milton Erickson … read “Uncommon Therapy” if you need convincing.
You can call these insights “blaming the victim” all you want, but I’m more concerned with understanding and solving the problems, than worrying about who’s “at fault”. And since these phenomena are all unconscious and automatic (not intentional or willful choice), I find the concept of “blame” to be a silly and moot idea. You cannot be at fault for something you did not consciously choose, and clear thinking people should see that instantly.
Dewey Gaedcke’s answer to How do you teach people accountability and to stop being a victim?
Dewey Gaedcke’s answer to What laws totally backfired?