Dr. Kelley Callahan & Dr. Pat Ogden: Sensorimotor Therapy

It's good to see you again.

Good to see you,

Kelly,

As always.

I thought we maybe could take a few minutes to talk about why SP,

You know,

Why when there's so many different approaches and modalities of how to be with clients.

Why should folks be interested in what sensory motor psychotherapy has to bring to their practice?

Yeah.

Good.

That's a good topic.

I get that question a lot.

Can you speak about it from your perspective?

Because you came to SP after you were already a therapist and you had different modalities you were working with.

What drew you to SP?

No,

I think that I had a foundation.

My primary foundation was.

.

.

Relational psychodynamic approaches,

Though I had done a internship at the National Center for PTSD and so had some CBT training there as well.

But I felt like what Sensory Motor brought to the table was kind of a.

.

.

Thank you.

A map that everything else could be integrated into.

And my specialty had always been working with complex trauma.

And of course we know,

Right,

That lives in the body,

Trauma memories,

Our body memories.

And in the case of complex trauma,

It's.

Procedurally learned repeated patterns over and over and over again yeah right so i i you know i guess like uh two two things one was Nowhere else.

Had I gotten the foundation in phase one work,

You know,

Being able to establish Safety,

First and foremost,

Is a body-based experience,

Right?

So Sensory Motor taught me how to track for that and work in the present moment.

And help to shift patterns of dysregulation,

Hyper hyper arousal,

Right?

Like,

So there were specific skills around phase one work with.

You know,

With complex clients,

That can be,

You know,

A year or two of therapy,

Right?

So that felt incredibly useful that none of the other approaches really gave that to me.

And then I think.

Yeah,

I mean,

I think the piece around being able to change procedural patterns that it's one thing to process a memory and.

And have relief around that,

Which is huge.

And a lot of modalities have approaches to do that.

But it's another to.

.

.

Rewire kind of change how some how you move through the world or how you respond to the next opioid overwhelming experience right i think that's i think what you're naming is What does make sensory motor psychotherapy unique is that we.

.

.

We want to help clients kind of shift how they inhabit their bodies.

So if they're.

.

.

Pulled in and constrained,

Which was really going to limit your experience in the world.

They learn about the part of them that's pulled in and they process the memories associated with that part so it can expand and be more open to.

Experience.

Yep.

Yeah.

I mean,

I would say early on when I,

Before I became faculty for sensory motor,

I taught and would do,

You know,

We asked to come and do a grand rounds or do things to talk with different people who are coming from totally different modalities.

And I would say,

You know,

In my humble opinion,

Right?

Like there are a lot of different approaches to phase two work,

Like trauma processing work,

But it feels to me like.

The the um What would we say?

The pledge that we take to do no harm,

Right?

That what SP brings to phase one work,

My opinion was like,

Everyone should have that.

As a foundation to their practice,

Even if their therapeutic home is a different modality.

You know,

If they tend toward.

.

.

You know,

EMDR or CBT or psychodynamic approaches to address phase two.

Work that you know that everybody needs the skill set of being able to track the nervous system and intervene and regulate and then even when you do your other approach to trauma processing.

You have the sensory motor skills to integrate that into the body,

Right?

Yeah,

I think that's basic.

I mean,

In my.

.

.

In my opinion,

Working with the rod is essential with trauma,

Especially because trauma first and foremost affects the body.

So the regulatory skills that you're talking about are really how to develop somatic resources so that you can downregulate or upregulate as needed.

And that's basic.

And you're right,

That goes through all phases of treatment.

Right.

I feel like the.

.

.

The work with the body is so important in phase two as well,

Because.

It has to do with those instinctive.

.

.

Defenses that are subcortical body-based,

And the cry for help,

Fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

And pain-death responses.

And it helps clients.

Develop more flexibility among those responses when they're faced with future trauma.

Because instead of developing this default instincts,

You know,

Like always going to freeze,

No matter what the threat is.

You get flexibility.

Right.

You're accessible again.

Right.

Right,

Or always going to fight.

Right.

And like,

This feels funny to say it this way,

But always having to fight against that fight urge,

Right?

Like to be able to kind of process it through to conclusion and have your system reset.

Feels,

Like something that's different in this model.

The other thing I sometimes I'm tickled by is you know,

In teaching sensory motor psychotherapy to therapists,

Right?

Most of the time,

These therapists have done a lot of their own work,

Right?

And of course,

We all know,

You know,

Those of us.

Who choose to become therapists,

We have our own histories that bring us here,

Right?

Absolutely.

And I'm always kind of moved by the experiential part of the training and how folks get to.

Experience from bottom up,

Like from their practicing with one another.

Wow,

I've done a lot of work on this already.

I know everything about it,

Right?

Like I used to say I could write it.

I could have written my dissertation on me.

That's how much insight I had.

But it's working at a different level when you're working in the body.

And I think to your point,

Like what SP brings to phase two trauma processing is.

It's different,

You know,

It's different.

And even when you've done other.

Types of work that have been meaningful and life-changing,

There's something additional and more and deeper in a way that.

.

.

That can come from working with working it through in the body.

Yeah,

And I think What you're saying.

.

.

What comes through is really the intelligence of the body.

The body really does know how to resolve trauma,

How to embody those different instinctive defenses so they're effective and can be caught upon when needed.

So I think often what we do is just evoke that intelligence.

And when you talk about complex trauma to evoke that intelligence of the body to help parts of the self integrate as well.

Yes.

Yeah,

I feel like you know,

I mean,

You obviously know this,

So I'm not telling you anything,

Right?

But SP is really,

It's grounded in these principles,

Right?

Of how we practice and how we understand being embodied human beings,

Right?

And I feel like that is also another piece that is why I call SP home,

Which is in working with complex trauma.

Something shifted it for me in the work when I could,

When I could.

Not just understand,

But like feel that trust in the body.

Yeah.

Right.

And my own body.

And so sometimes,

You know,

When I'm doing consultation or something,

People will.

Comment.

You know,

Actually,

Someone said this to me the other day about their SP therapist that,

You know,

It just seemed like whatever comes up,

There's this calm centered sense of life.

Okay.

Right.

And that's,

That's what SP fosters through the principles right that it's like whatever's here is coming from an adaptive origin yeah exactly we can be curious about it we can help regulate it we can shift patterns but it's there's whatever part is up.

You can meet it with that sense of like,

Okay.

And I think clients feel that.

They feel that the therapist.

.

.

Trust the intelligence of their system and any symptom they have or any.

.

.

What they might judge as a liability or something really dysfunctional,

There's intelligence there.

Yes.

We want to uncover the root of that intelligence.

Yes.

Yeah,

And I feel like the principle of organicity,

You know,

Of recognizing that the healing is actually in.

The client,

Right?

Or my healing is in me.

Right.

And it's a deeply relational model at the same time,

Right?

That I feel like.

Being able to rest into that is what makes it possible to hang in to do complex trauma work.

You know,

Where enactments and.

.

.

Polls for this or that and,

You know,

Responses in the therapist to all of that is playing out in the work,

Right?

Right,

Always.

That being able to rest into organicity,

Like I'm not here to save anybody.

I don't have the answers.

Right.

They're in,

They're actually in the client.

Right.

And our relationship can help be the container for that discovery of internal healing,

You know,

Between parts.

Yeah.

That is,

It's probably about an extra 20 years in my career.

I've heard a lot of,

Since you want to second every student say that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's more like with the relationship,

You're right.

This is.

That's really grounded in the therapeutic relationship.

And the task is together to really just create this context,

This container where healing can come forth.

So there's not that pushing or that forcefulness that I learned before.

Yeah,

Before I met Ron Kurtz,

Actually.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about.

.

.

You know,

How SP developed for you from your history?

Because sometimes I get the question about,

You know,

There are different somatic.

Methods out there?

Why SP?

What makes SP different?

When I met Ron,

Who's the pioneer of the brains behind the Hakomi method,

It was in the early 70s.

I was teaching yoga and dance.

In a psychiatric hospital because I was very interested in the body.

The body was always my own personal resource.

And I was.

.

.

Really curious about why patients seem to get better when they did both the yoga and the dance classes that I taught.

Maybe they were going to get better anyway,

But that really piqued my interest.

And then I met Ron,

Who was the first person.

Who was a body psychotherapist that I'd had contact with.

So.

.

.

I really wanted to learn from him.

So I moved to Boulder and we co-founded the Hakomi Institute with others in 1980.

And I taught at the very first Hakomi training.

Ron's method.

Also is very relational.

He was not trauma-focused.

So this was in the 70s.

At that time,

I became an adjunct therapist for women at Wardenburg Clinic,

Which is the clinic for the University of Colorado here.

And they sent me all the students that had gone to the clinic because of sexual dysfunction,

Basically what was called back then pre-orgasmic.

They wouldn't have orgasms.

And I was doing everything I'd been taught in social work school,

Everything I'd learned from Ron,

And they were not getting better.

And some were getting worse.

Because we were going into powerful emotions and all of that.

I remember saying to some colleagues,

I'm not going to do that emotional work.

I'm just going to try to keep them in their bodies.

And that's all I'm going to do.

And they were like,

Oh,

You know,

How are you going to get anywhere if you don't do emotional work?

But I found that they started to stabilize.

So that was really my first interest.

And trauma work,

You know,

Then I studied postural integration in the 70s and later on rolfing,

Which is all about integration in the body,

Like how the body itself.

Can find its balance,

Its peace with gravity.

Yes.

You know,

We're not slumped,

Our shoulders aren't forward,

We're not like this.

Makes me want to sit up a little more.

I know,

I know.

And so that wrapping was about,

You know,

Physical integration,

But it was separate from psychological integration.

And I really wanted to bring them together.

You know,

So that's.

.

.

And I had a lot of other influences,

A lot of other kinds of body therapy that I studied.

You know,

The work of the people on our advisory board,

I really studied and worked with them.

And so it evolved.

But those were the roots of it.

That's so cool.

It's funny as I hear you say that because in all truth,

I kind of came to sensory motor.

As a left brain,

You know,

Like you said,

You had talked about like your,

Your body had been a resource for you,

You know,

As a person moving through the world.

And for me,

I would have like.

I kind of really,

Part of what drew me to it as I was a postdoc when I took my first training was the sense of like,

Oh my gosh,

All these other people are reporting.

Experiences through the,

You know,

Experientials in the training.

And I'm like,

Well,

I know I'm in a body and I can,

I can feel my hands touching my body.

Right.

And yet I'm so,

I'm not,

I'm not getting that data.

And over the course of my becoming a certified practitioner.

You know,

I was learning the skills,

But also what I was charting and reporting to my colleagues on was like,

OK,

I'm I'm I'm.

Inhabiting my body awareness down to like about here now you know and then now I'm down to about here now and it really was this gradual reconnection of you know,

My own embodiment that has been huge.

Yeah,

It's a gigantic step.

And then that changes and shifts totally how I am in the work with.

Yeah.

Well,

You're really naming something also that I think is a hallmark of our trainings is that because students practice with each other,

The interventions and the embodiment of the principles,

They kind of learn from the inside out.

It's not a top down.

You don't just listen to lecture.

You know,

You practice,

You have peer support,

You watch videos of the work.

And so you get it from the inside,

Just like you're describing.

Yeah.

That's really important because you can't.

If you don't get it from the inside,

How are you going to help your clients with it?

Right,

Right.

And it's,

You know,

I think we're actually in a way coming back full circle to kind of where we started,

Which we were speaking about the quality of presence that.

That,

You know,

That SP fosters in how we are in the work.

And that really also starts kind of with our own embodied presence,

Right?

And capacity to regulate and track and be aware,

You know,

On that level of not just our thoughts,

Emotions,

But also kind of what's happening in our bodies.

Yeah.

So while you're also alluding to how our work is just not conversation,

Like it's not talk therapy.

We do work with what I like to call embedded relational mindfulness because it's a relational mindfulness where the client is assisted to really.

.

.

Be aware of what's going on internally.

Of the body first and foremost,

But also the thoughts and emotions and images.

Smells and everything that comes up.

And I do want to acknowledge Ron for that because when I was learning to be a therapist in the 70s,

All I was learning was talk therapy.

And then I met Ron and he said,

You know,

We need to get beneath talk therapy to what's really driving that conversation,

What's driving the content of people's lives.

So,

I mean,

He really taught me in the 70s.

It's the beginning of how to use mindfulness to work with how people organize the organization of experience instead of talking.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And.

You know,

What I appreciate is,

Again,

Coming to this work through the pathway of working with complex traumas is that.

And I feel like what SP is really grounded in,

In terms of a phase oriented treatment,

Which is like old standard for working with complex trauma is like,

You know,

I can hear a supervisor I had in graduate school saying to me,

Well,

You know,

Kelly,

Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.

And this concept of like,

Well,

You know,

We have to,

We have to process it.

So if someone starts to have.

An increase in symptoms or they aren't able to work for a while or have to go inpatient or we need to increase to three or five days a week treatment.

That's what we have to do.

And that is just really not the approach to working with complex trauma.

It just doesn't sit right with me,

You know,

Like that do no harm.

Yeah.

And I think that.

So to me,

A sensory motor affords us to combine sort of what you were just speaking to,

But in a.

.

.

In an intentional measured pace way so that it's always about what can be integrated rather than kind of,

You know,

Overwhelming and going and diving into a deep dive and well,

It might get worse before it gets better.

Yeah,

I've heard that a lot too.

I do think that.

.

.

Because we work so much with Tracking the body,

We can.

.

.

Often catch those signs of dysregulation or overwhelm starting to happen before it gets extreme.

And we can bring in those resources to bring arousal back into that window.

Right.

And when we're tracking the body and the nervous system,

We can also see how different parts of self attempt to.

.

.

Regulate or create safety in different ways.

Totally.

That are sometimes in conflict with one another.

So,

You know,

You're trying to do an intervention,

Really,

You think you're working with the whole client,

But you're really just working with a part.

Absolutely.

I know.

One example that I often use of that is that if a client's exploring like reaching out,

Like that seeking action to reach out to others.

If interactions with others have been unsafe,

Their body's going to pull back or hunch up or tighten up or they're going to not reach fully.

Right.

Their body's really reflective of those two parts.

Right.

And when we learn to track the body,

We start to see those parts in the body.

Yes.

Yeah,

Yeah.

And when we're working with mindfulness and.

.

.

And tracking across all of those co-organizers and helping our clients to do that as well,

Right?

I'm just thinking of a session the other day where someone,

You know,

Kind of resourced and went into a new way of being that felt good for life.

10 seconds,

Right?

Before another part of her had a thought right that was very different and felt afraid yeah right so that we can kind of then track and work with that in the body and Right.

Right.

Figure out how to negotiate and work with all the parts.

We're not asking parts to step back or.

Right.

Right.

Like step aside.

No.

We're asking them to communicate with each other.

Yeah.

Different.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I want to say,

Because you said core organizers,

Just so to clarify for people who are listening,

The core organizers are what we also call the building blocks of present experience.

They're like body sensation,

The feelings in the body,

Their movements,

The sensory perceptions,

Like images that we have,

You know,

Smells from the past and so forth,

And their emotions and then their thoughts.

Thank you.

That's what we become aware of when we're mindful is how they're operating inside of us.

Right.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think that.

No.

I know I've sensory motor is like home for me.

And then I've,

I integrate kind of other modalities or practices or interventions techniques come into that map.

And I realized not everyone who comes to our trainings is going to,

You know,

Have that experience,

Right?

It's more like they're going to be integrating SP into kind of whatever their home modality is.

Which I always feel great about.

And the reason why it's coming up for me is you're talking about the you know,

The organization of experience and helping like the skills that I've learned from SP,

Whatever.

Just happened,

Whether it was a relational intervention,

It was a cognitive restructuring,

Or it was an integration of through EMDR or something like that.

The integration of that through all of the four organizers,

Including the body.

Yeah.

Which is where those procedural patterns are held.

Right.

To me.

There's something that the skills of SP are applicable at like all three phases of treatment,

Kind of regardless of whatever your modality is that you call home.

Yeah,

I think that's true.

And I hear from people that they can,

That SP is very.

.

.

Easily integrated into other modalities.

I mean,

For me,

SP is basically what I do.

It literally is,

But you did,

And now we call it SP.

Yeah,

But it still has other elements of other approaches.

Of course.

Like a cognitive behavioral therapist watches my work,

They say,

Well,

There's a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy in here too.

I'm not aware of that,

But I'm not surprised,

But it is very easily integrated into other.

Of the modality.

So I think that's That's a plus.

It's not a rigid system.

No.

Yeah.

It's not a formulaic system.

Right.

Even though when we're learning it,

We're learning kind of like a.

The pieces of it,

Right?

And how to kind of weave that together.

All of those pieces can be woven and integrated in other ways of doing the work.

Yeah,

They're integrated in a way that is suitable for that particular client.

So we're not,

As Philip Bromberg said about sensory motor psychotherapy,

He said the sensory motor psychotherapist is not a handmaiden to the technique.

And I think that was just such a nice way of saying it.

Yeah,

The technique looks very different with different clients.

Interesting.

Yeah.

It's sort of making me think about this is a bit of a tangent,

I guess,

But it makes sense inside here.

The principle of nonviolence and the.

Where I often go with that is that it's not that we don't take action,

You know,

Or that we.

.

.

You know we I think it's really about trying like to,

Getting a sense of where the client is at.

And then not that we don't take action or that we specifically always take this particular action that we were trained to take,

Right?

But we're there tracking in the moment and adapting.

You know,

Trusting in the organicity that if there's regulation and there's.

Like the right containment in the moment,

Like what needs to come and evolve can be integrated.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Right.

It's more a matter of.

.

.

Trusting that organicity,

Like you say,

Because we are living systems,

We are evolving.

With nonviolence,

We just step into what already wants to happen,

What is the next step for that person,

For that client.

Yeah,

So there's no way to push or use force.

Well,

Thanks for.

.

.

Taking some time to chat with me today.

No,

That was fun.

I always love to chat about the work.

So thanks.

Loved hearing your perspective,

Too.

My pleasure.