A Review of the Treatment of Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	3
Staying with Awareness and Building Aliveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	4
Separating Out the Triune Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	6
Steps for Treating Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	7
Body Signals to Guide Action after Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	9
Mapping the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	11
The Bottom-Up vs. the Top-Down View of Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	16

Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone. I am Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in the State of Connecticut and the President of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
 
We’re glad you’re here and setting aside the time to be with us.
 
Our guest is Dr. Peter Levine. A lot of us follow his work, especially in trauma. He has done some groundbreaking work.
 
First of all, he has synthesized and built on some of the thinkers that might be his predecessors or perhaps his intellectual ancestors.
 
In fact, maybe we can talk a little bit about that – some of those ancestral figures as we go along.
 
So, Peter, welcome – I’m awfully glad you’re here.
 
Dr. Levine: Thanks – it’s good to be here! It’s been a while.
 
Dr. Buczynski: Yes, it has…Let’s start with one of the ancestors that you noted in your book – and let me just show you some of Peter’s books before we go on.
 
Waking the Tiger was one of the first ones that people started thinking, “Wow – these are different ideas and we have to pay attention to this new set of concepts.”

In addition to that one, he’s also written, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness” – so, take a look at that as well.
 
Dr. Levine: That book is really my major work.
 
Dr. Buczynski: Peter, one of the things I noticed is that you credit several people but one of them was Wilhelm Reich. I follow Wilhelm Reich’s work a bit, too, and I was curious and excited about that.
 
Tell us what got you started thinking about him and why his ideas are important to our thinking about the treatment of trauma.
 
Dr. Levine: Yes, he is really the person who brought the body into psychiatry.
 
He’s certainly not the person, whose methods have been most influential but he’s certainly the giant on whose shoulders body-oriented psychotherapy or emotional work stands on, and methods and psychotherapy are related.
 
There were many other people who were working around the same time – some before but a number after. Reich stimulated a whole series of thought among people like Gerda Boyesen, Magda Proskauer, Lillimoor Johnson in Norway, Charlotte Selver, and many, many others.
 
These researchers, in different ways, were working with the cultivation of the body’s experience and the importance of therapeutic change in the alive body.
 
There really is a rich tradition – and actually a colleague of mine just recently wrote a book called Body Psychotherapy – this is an encyclopedia, many hundred pages, tracing this very rich, vibrant history.
 
Dr. Buczynski:  He also influenced Alexander Lowen with biogenetics, and Fritz Perls, with Gestalt therapy – I have studied extensively Gestalt therapy and Perls referenced him quite a few times.
 
Neither Lowen nor Perls focused specifically on trauma, but their ideas have influenced some of the ways people who look at trauma think about the body and the experiencing, rather than just focusing on the conversation – the dialogue part.

Dr. Levine:  Yes. Reich's work clinically had a lot to do with emotional release – and that was certainly the direction that Lowen took and furthered although he added important concepts.
 
For example, one of those concepts was grounding, but it really had to do with emotional release. That may have been applicable for general therapy, but trauma is a very different beast. We can think of trauma as the beast that is.

Then Fritz Perls took these ideas into a little bit of a different direction. The emphasis wasn't on emotional release per se, but on how we embody our conflicts – how we embody different parts of ourselves, such as the critical judge, the underdog, and the upper dog…

He took trauma in a direction that was building more on awareness and less on emotional expression.
 
Staying with Awareness and Building Aliveness

Dr. Buczynski:  In building aliveness as you were saying…Perls had the awareness expression cycle and as you stay with what you are aware of, excitement builds.
 
If you stay with that, you move into action and complete the Gestalt – and that is an important thought. Very often we would focus on something a patient was doing and just say, "Stay with that and tell me more about that…"
 
Also Fritz Perls had the Empty Chair Technique, which was another approach. Very often you would be saying, "Put your backache or (the problem) in the chair and see what it wants to say." 
 
Dr. Levine:  Right – it is a way to separate out (the issue) physically so you could really look at it and address it.
 
One thing you said which is critical – definitely critical in my work – is the movement towards excitement and vitality.

I like to think of that as the vitality affect – it is not an emotion, but it is really a core movement that people make as they are healing either emotional wounds or traumatic injury. It really means to come back into aliveness and to know the aliveness.