Book Title: The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes
Year Published: 2022
The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes
A body-based, science-backed method for regulating behavior, thoughts, and feelings and improving well-being–shown to shorten therapy time and improve emotional outcomes.
In the first book on Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP), clinical psychologist Dr. Raja Selvam offers a new, complementary approach for building more capacity to tolerate emotions using the body–especially emotions that are difficult or unpleasant.
The ISP model shows readers how to expand and regulate emotional experiences in the body to improve different therapeutic outcomes–cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physical, energetic, relational, and even spiritual–in life and in all types of therapies, including other body psychotherapy and somatic psychology approaches. You will learn the physiology of emotions in the brain and body and how to:
- Access different types of emotions quickly
- Facilitate embodiment and regulation of feelings
- Process and heal different traumas and attachment wounds
A go-to guide for emotional integration, The Practice of Embodying Emotions is of value in the treatment of a wide range of clinical problems involving difficult emotions–from ordinary life events to psychosomatic or psychophysiological disorders, developmental trauma, prenatal and perinatal trauma, attachment disorders, borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, collective trauma, and intergenerational trauma–and in improving outcomes and shortening treatment time in different therapies including psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).
About Raja Selvam
Pacifica Program Graduate: PhD in Clinical Psychology
Dr. Raja Selvam, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist from the US, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) (acomplementary therapeutic approach based on affective neuroscience and the emerging paradigm of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in cognitive neuroscience and psychology) to improve cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physical, energetic, relational, and spiritual outcomes in all therapy modalities. Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE) Professional Trauma Training Program. He has taught for twenty-five years in nearly as many countries in North and South Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and the Far East. His work is informed by older body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, newer body psychotherapy systems of Bodynamic Analysis and Somatic Experiencing, and bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. His work is also inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India). His book The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Method for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes was published on March 22, 2022.
Dr. Selvam’s work also draws upon his clinical psychology PhD dissertation on Advaita Vedanta and Jungian psychology, based on which he has published an article titled “Jung and Consciousness,” in the international analytical psychology journal Spring in 2013. He did trauma outreach work in India in 2005–2006 with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, based on which he has published an outcome study titled “Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors,” in the journal Traumatology in 2008. Dr. Selvam’s work is also inspired by the work he did in Sri Lanka in 2011–2013 with survivors of war, violence, loss, and displacement, and with mental health professionals engaged in treating them, after Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war ended in 2009.
