Love is a fervent fire. Meeting our shadow side can be a painful and frightening experience. Our shadow represents the unknown aspects of ourselves that are too reprehensible, incongruent, or forbidding to incorporate into our conscious personality. Mainstream trauma treatment has paid scant attention to helping terrified people to safely experience their sensations and emotions. Medications such as serotonin reuptake blockers, Respiridol and Seroquel (Sarah pills) increasingly have taken the place of helping people to deal with their sensory World. However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. Touch, the more elementary tool that we have to calm down, is proscribed from the most therapeutic practices. Yet, one cannot fully recover if one does not feel safe in one’s skin. Therefore, I encourage all my patients to engage in some sort of bodywork, be it swimming, tennis, or a walk through the park. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

Before examining our own hidden qualities, we may be in complete denial of our shadow elements, yet what we deny in ourselves can often easily be spotted in others. A person may despise another’s quick temper while at the same time fervently suppressing a wish to respond with anger. The first step in making the acquaintance of a person’s own shadow is admitting that the scary, annoying, or irritating qualities found in others are often the qualities in that individual that evoke the very same responses. You have to meet their point of resistance—the place that has the most tension—and meet it with an equal amount of energy. That will release the frozen tensions. You cannot hesitate; hesitation communicates a lack of trust in yourself. Slow movement, careful attuning will provide one with a tremendous confidence and empathy, let the pressure of your touch meet the tension they are holding in their bodies. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

Some people think that isolation is good for people who are traumatized. However, just like you can thirst for water, you can thirst for the platonic human touch. It is a comfort to be met confidently, deeply, firmly, gently, responsively. Mindful touch and movement grounds people and allows them to discover tensions that they are no longer aware of. When you are touched, you wake up to the part of your body that is being touched. When emotions are bound up inside, they would do things like form knots in your stomach because they body is physically restricted. When people are stressed out and feel unloved, their shoulders will tighten, backs starts hurting, they get headaches, and their facial muscle tense. They spend enormous energy holding back their tears—or any sound of movement that might betray their inner state. It is hard when the body is trying to heal and people constantly require your assistance, and you do not even feel like you are getting what you need. The body wants to rest and is using up its energy assisting someone else. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

When the physical tension is released, the feelings can be released. Movement helps breathing to become deeper, and as the tensions are released, expressive sounds can be discharged. The body becomes freer—breathing freer, being in flow. Touch makes it possible to live in a body that can move in response to being moved. People who are terrified need to get a sense of where their bodies are in space and of their boundaries. Firm and reassuring touch lets them know where those boundaries are: what is outside them, where their bodies end. They discover that they do not constantly have to wonder who and where they are. They discover that their body is solid and that they do not have to be constantly on guard. Touch lets them know that they are safe. The inborn collective unconscious becomes known to us through dreams, myths, and synchronistic events. The dream is one of the most important means of accessing the collective unconscious. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

Instead of serving high moral principles, many people base their actions upon fear or loss and desire for recognition. To me, one of the most baffling aspects of the behavior of men and women in highly-responsible positions in some segments of our society, is the comparative lack of concern for—perhaps its lack of awareness of—the factor of communication, as such, in the problems and situations in which they have to deal. It is a communication that makes human society possible. For communication to take place, the receiver must also be receptive. That means more than just having his ears clean. He must also want or need to get the message and be willing to decode and fit it into his existing pattern of ideas and associations. If the student receiver is asleep in a classroom, even the professor’s most exciting and beautiful message will not get through to him. If I am angry at you I may not receive your message, no matter what or how you try to send it. If you are unwilling to hear me because you do not like respect people of my gender, race, or background, then I am casting my pearls before swine (spilling my message onto unreceptive ground). #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5