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BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma is a welcome and timely addition to the literature on trauma and particularly, early developmental trauma. It is a book with a difference. Dunlea invites the reader to read with the BodyDreaming approach - by tracking their responses carefully in their own bodies.
For those psychotherapists and analysts wishing to integrate the insights of neuroscience and trauma to work with the body ‘hands-off’, this book demonstrates in detail how it can be done successfully. The basic premise is that those who have suffered early developmental trauma (in utero and/or within the first few years of life) have that experience deeply embedded in their body and nervous system. For example, Dunlea writes that one client's experience of the womb was not safe. As a result, her nervous system was over-reactive and she felt unsafe in herself. She had grown up around this patterning in her body. She was often overwhelmed and retreated into ‘her head’ as her default position. Hence, what had happened to her could be understood intellectually through talking and thinking, but never fully sensed in the body. The trauma continued to cycle around as repetitive thoughts, in spite of an understanding of it. As a result of the BodyDreaming approach, which offers a different and effective way of working with this, by slowing the sessions down and focusing on the sensation in the client's body, the client could access a sense of safety and feel more secure in her own body. This was a new experience. Dunlea describes how the client may then perceive the outside world in a different way, think more clearly, have more ideas and imagination.
The foreword by Donald Kalsched beautifully summarizes the book. Part 1 then ‘sets the scene’. The fundamental point is that the body is not metaphor. Dunlea quotes Jung:
The difference we make between the psyche and the body is artificial …. In reality there, is nothing but a living body. That is the fact: and