about formative psychology

Formative psychology arose from a recognition that, while a depth of self-acceptance as supported by humanistic therapy is a vital ingredient in a well-functioning person, most of our ways of being involve habits that are also deeply entrenched in the neurology of the human body. These habits are usually oriented towards protecting us from hurt or humiliation which, unfortunately also inhibit our capacity to live freely and openly. The neural web of our being that insists on such habits is not always inclined to be rewired by a emotional, behavioural or cognitive approach alone. Such re-wiring requires the embodiment of a new connectivity between our conscious mind and the voluntary muscles that determine action. Becoming conscious of how we determine our experience through how we shape ourselves somatically allows us to consciously re-shape our somatic structure and therefore re-shape our experience and behaviour.

For example, a child who has learned to shrink away from violence or humiliation will become an adult who unconsciously embodies a shrunken aspect. When the muscular behaviour that makes that shrunken shape is revealed to the conscious mind, it can be consciously shaped. Then it can be consciously re-shaped. In this way we take ownership of the way we interact with our own self and with others.

This way of working started with Reich, Lowen and the field of bioenergetics. Many somatic therapies have developed alongside the Formative Psychology of Stanley Keleman, all of which continue to take humanistic therapy on the journey towards embodiment. Just as humanistic therapies included the heart in what was a previously rational concern, formative psychology brings the body and energy of the self into the arena, whereupon the consciousness that often gets split off very early in our lives, can at last be re-integrated. At last, mind, body and spirit are one. From this re-integrated perspective, humans can indeed see that they cannot get BEING wrong. Then their very best features tend to emerge, happily, into the light of awareness. These best features of our unique selves are often the features we made most wrong about ourselves as children because these are the ones that we recognised ourselves by when we necessarily denied our embodied consciousness at that early age.