How Does the Embodiment of Memory Affect Therapeutic Relationships?
December 6th, 2025
Memory and the Body
Sat Dec 6, 2025, 12-2 pm, Wilhelm Reich Center for Embodiment
Heather Ferguson, LCSW
hfergusonlcsw @ outlook.com
It is an honor to be invited by Doris and Jon to join the dialogue with Francoise, Nancy, and Vincent. I will share a vignette illustrating my work with Rhea and how we engage the nonverbal aspects of her traumatic recall and its sensorimotor traces, which reveal previously hidden, unformulated, and thwarted bodily and emotional impulses.
“Rick and I argued this weekend,” Rhea begins. “He reached out to touch me while I was asleep Saturday night. I jumped out of bed. I was repulsed by the smell of his cigarette smoke and the feel of his groping and demanding fingers.”
Rhea immediately twists her body away from me, clutching her stomach and turning protectively inward. A grimace and look of disgust appear on her face. I think of the babies in Beatrice Beebe’s films who respond with aversion to their intrusive and dysregulating mothers, turning away or going limp. Trapped with nowhere to go.
Rhea (not her real name) is a white female academic in her mid-40s who has worked with me for a year and is seeking adjunctive Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to supplement her long-term treatment with her primary therapist. Rhea has sought my help with her disordered eating and under-processed memories of her traumatic past. Although her long-term therapy has been profoundly meaningful and stabilizing, she and her therapist have made less progress in shifting her disordered eating.
Our first step was to address the entrenched restrictive eating patterns that posed a risk to her health. We collaborated with a nutritionist to establish goals for achieving and maintaining a stable minimal weight. Rhea and I then agreed to utilize the framework of EMDR to address the trauma states that maintained her long-standing issues with food and intimacy. We spent months crafting a safe and collaborative atmosphere, titrating our process so that she was not overwhelmed by the jolt of recall that trauma-focused therapy can elicit.
Although details have been changed to protect Rhea’s identity, the clinical material described today is based on an actual session. In the opening moments of the session, Rhea vividly recalls her encounter with Rick as if it is happening now, in the room with me, accessing images and sensorimotor traces that encode memories of childhood sexual abuse. I feel the electric shock of Rhea’s terror. I pause to consider what she needs from me and what she can tolerate. I keep in mind our therapeutic project: to untangle and process the protective impulses locked in her body, expressed in her disordered eating and aversion to sexual contact. I push forward.
“Rhea, I see you are turning away. What are you feeling right now?” I ask gently.
Rhea replies, without hesitation, “Revulsion, shame, and fear.”
“Where do you feel that in your body?” I ask.
“In my stomach and all over,” Rhea responds, squeezing her eyes shut.
Working to bring these somatic and implicit memories into conscious awareness, I say, “Your body is communicating so much. What thoughts go with these feelings of revulsion, shame, and fear? “I am disgusting. I am powerless,” Rhea replies.
After Rhea identifies the triggering encounter with Rick, I encourage her to recall an earlier moment that gave rise to similar sensations. We know that Rhea’s partner, Rick, is notthe cause of her revulsion but a “portkey” to an earlier memory state (Stolorow, 2007). (Stolorow is borrowing JK Rowling’s idea of a portkey–an everyday object or event that can transport someone to an earlier time). After months of work, Rhea can increasingly tolerate bodily activation as she connectswith and searches for words to describe the physical sensations, emotions, and underlying negative beliefs she experiences.
“Float back to an earlier time, in childhood or adolescence,” I prompt, “where you felt revulsion in your stomach and all over, with feelings of disgust, and shame, and thoughts about being powerless and trapped.” Rhea answers without pause, “With my uncle, Frank, reaching out to me with his groping fingers and the smell of cigarettes mingled with sweat.”
Rhea again twists violently away from me, grimacing and clutching her stomach. I feel the grip of Rhea’s shame and the terror she felt, at age 11, as I visualize her desperate wish to wrangle away from her sexually violating Uncle. I imagine Rhea, then, frozen with fright, immobilized, with no escape. Her body movements and expression in the room with me convey all that anguish and a long-blocked impulse to pull away.
I pause briefly, noticing a flicker of hesitation in myself as I fear retraumatizing Rhea if we proceed. However, I am aware of a contrasting impulse—a desire to liberate Rhea from the torment of living in her body in her current unresolved state. I see her hands twist into a painful knot; literally white knuckling it, digging her fingernails into her skin. She is reliving a memory state—her embodied response to feeling powerless to move or protest, her somatic narrative.
Pierre Janet, the pioneering French psychiatrist, suggests that traumatic memories are split off from conscious awareness and stored as sensory perceptions, behavioral reenactments, and symptoms. He writes, “the traumatized patients…are continuing the action, or rather the attempt at action.” (Ogden, 2019, p. 201). Therefore, when it comes to such recollections, they remain frozen in state-dependent memory. We often remember what happened not through the visual or autobiographical processes of memory, but by reliving nonverbal iterations of a historical event.
I say softly, “Rhea, look at your hands. There is so much energy there… What is your tight grip communicating?”
Rhea snaps back to the present, looking down at her hands as if surprised. “I am so angry,” she says.
I nod encouragingly, “Stay with that feeling. Tell me more.” As Rhea names her anger for the first time, I feel a bubbling excitement, but pause, waiting to see what emerges.
Rhea shakes her head, looking sad, as if lost for words. I turn our attention back to her body. “Is there an impulse to move, or energy in your hands that you would like to express?” I ask.
Rhea responds, “I would like to claw at my uncle and scream, ‘Get away from me,’ or just leave the room.” “Good,” I nod.
We resume our EMDR processing with bilateral stimulation to reengage her traumatic memory, pausing after each set to welcome Rhea’s associations. I carefully track her state of arousal, watching for changes in posture or facial expression. When Rhea becomes activated or briefly fragmented, I focus on orienting and grounding her in the present moment, reassuring her that we can navigate this together as her emotions emerge and move through her.
Rhea then accesses an impulse to shout, “Leave me the fuck alone!” I invite her to say it out loud or express it in her imagination, fully embodying it in the next set.
After many sets, we end, and I invite Rhea to access the memory now, noting the current feelings of intensity. After our sustained work, feelings of distress dropped from 8/10 at the beginning of our session to 3/10. We consider this reduction in her bodily activation and shame to be an achievement.
As part of our process, Rhea emails me a follow-up report on her embodied state after our session. This touchstone creates a sense of continuity and support after our work is complete. Increasingly, I hope Rhea will draw on her sense of dual awareness, observing her embodied memories with greater distance and curiosity, and tolerating momentary activation without recoiling or resorting to caloric restriction or overexercise.
As Courtois and Ford (2015) suggest, the therapist must sense into and be affected by the patient’s under-mentalized emotional states as essential embodied communication. Reis (2009) adds that repeating can be a form of communicating memory. The psychoanalytic encounter, he suggests, involves traumatic repetition, which takes on the quality of an address—an invitation from the patient to the therapist to enter “the fullness of the traumatic impact,” to witness their experience of re-membering (Reis, 2009, p. 1364). As Rhea’s case illustrates, a single moment in a patient’s life can suddenly transport them back to an earlier memory state, becoming a therapeutic opportunity. As we recognize and name the parts of Rhea’s mind that contain unbearable affective experience and recruit her eating disorder as a protective defense, she connects to the buried impulses to assert herself. Our work continues: to transform her embodied memories from a state of wordless terror.
References
Courtois & Ford (2015).Treatment of Complex Trauma. Guildford Press.
Ogden, P. (2019). Acts of Triumph. In: G. Craparo, F. Ortu, O. van der Hart, Discovering Pierre Janet. (pp. 200–209). Routledge.
Reis, B. (2009). Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: The transference as the scene of address. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 1359–1372.
Stolorow, R. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Reflections. The Analytic Press.