Ilana Rubenfeld created the Rubenfeld Synergy Method® more than 30 years ago, when she realized that in order for people to understand their emotional state, they also would have to learn how to listen to their bodies. Our bodies speak the language of emotions, feelings, and sensations — rather than words. For healing to take place, emotions held within the body need to be brought to conscious awareness, acknowledged, processed, integrated, and released. Because emotions are not necessarily linear and rational, the Rubenfeld Synergy Method of “listening” respectful touch and verbal processing, guided by a certified Rubenfeld Synergist, adds a powerful dimension to healing not present in touch or talk alone.

The Rubenfeld Synergy Method is the outcome of both Rubenfeld’s own personal healing and her professional journey to integrate touch and talk into one seamless therapeutic modality.¹ A Rubenfeld Synergy session lasts about 45 minutes and is conducted with the client fully clothed on a massage table or in a chair. The approach combines gentle touch, body awareness, movement, imagery, active listening, and verbal integration. One of the limitations of talk therapy is that a whole realm of emotions is stored in the body. Often unconscious, these emotions may be overlooked as a starting point for inquiry.

Touch, in fact, is the doorway to the language of emotions. Painful patterns of behavior (including addictions), rooted in the past, might not be engaged automatically in a talk therapy session. Rubenfeld Synergy offers a new approach to healing and recovery. Engaging the emotions through touch, the method is especially valuable in clients, addicted or not, who are exhibiting trauma symptoms.

Trauma-body-addiction connection
As therapists, we often work with clients seeking help with anxiety, depression, trouble with intimate relationships, anger, sleep disturbances, trust and betrayal issues, just to name a few. These are symptoms which, if unresolved, can lead people to seek relief and self-medicate with food, spending, alcohol, drugs, sex, and other addictive behaviors. While these symptoms are not necessarily the result of trauma, clients who do report a history of trauma also present for treatment with many of these complaints, and often come to us seeking help when patterns of addiction and self-medication have failed to keep emotional pain at bay.

People experience trauma when faced with uncontrollable events and they feel helpless to affect the outcome of those events (Lindemann, 1944). When traumas are not resolved, not put into words, and not thought about or processed, they remain unintegrated and unconsciously impact our ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the world. In Trauma and Addiction (2000), Dayton talks extensively about how untreated childhood trauma is a major risk factor for drug addiction.

Research, especially in the field of neurobiology, is finding that trauma affects not just the body but the brain as well (Van der Kolk et al., 1966). In addition, we are discovering that traumatic memories and emotions are not just stored in the mind but also in the body as “cellular memory” (Pert, 1997). It makes sense, then, that the body, not just the mind, can be a valuable resource in accessing and healing deeply held emotional wounds.

Not only does the body hold memories, but it is also the part of us that tells our “story” (what we have experienced) through unconsciously held somatic symptoms. Van der Kolk (1987) describes how, when memories are stored without much conscious thought attached to them, they become “body emotions.” As a result of trauma, a failure of declarative memory may result in memory being stored on a soma-sensory level (such as flashbacks or somatization) that are relatively impervious to change (ibid). Later research sheds light on body memories and somatization: “Intense emotions cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness and stored instead as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic) or visual images (nightmares and flashbacks). Traumatized patients seem to react to reminders of the trauma with emergency responses that had been relevant to the original threat but that are inappropriate for the current situation” (Van der Kolk et al., 1996). As Dayton (2000) explains, “traumatic memories are not stored in the same way as more benign memories are. This is because at the time of the trauma, when memory gets encoded, our emotional and physical defenses are in a heightened state to protect us from feeling the pain of the trauma” (p.101).

Since memories of trauma can bypass the cortex, or the part of the brain associated with conscious thought, they are literally stored in other parts of the brain where we do not have cognitive access to them. This means that traumatic experiences do not get thought about. People who grow up in families where there is addiction, physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional abuse and neglect are frequently traumatized by the experience. When these early wounds remain inaccessible, they cannot be fully felt or understood. “In their attempt to manage their states of psychological, physiological or emotional arousal, they may use drugs and alcohol to make these symptoms less severe. This type of self-medication can and often does lead to addiction” (Dayton, 2000, p.24).

In The Listening Hand (Rubenfeld, 2000), Rubenfeld identifies the principles, philosophies, and theoretical foundations that underlie the Rubenfeld Synergy Method and guide the sessions. These include: the Synergist’s need to acknowledge the uniqueness of each client; the interrelatedness of the body, mind, and emotions; awareness of physical and emotional patterns as a key to change; that change and integration of insight occurs in the present; that people have a natural capacity for self-regulation and self-healing; that touch can be an effective mode of communication; that body symptoms/conditions can be metaphoric; that the body tells the truth, and that integration of somatic and cognitive awareness is necessary for lasting results.

The touch of Rubenfeld Synergy is a “listening” touch that enables the Synergist to “hear” the client more fully. It is not the manipulative touch of other bodywork modalities. The method also teaches clients to listen to their own bodies and the messages and metaphors held within them (e.g., pain in the neck, pain in the back, gives me a headache). Clients learn to listen to their emotions as signals and indicators of what’s going on inside of them. The Rubenfeld Synergy Method is valuable for clients who are trauma survivors, those with somatic symptoms, and those clients who struggle with addictions, eating disorders, and body-image distortions. It is fascinating that these are the very clients who, in my experience, seek out this kind of therapy.

What brings clients to the table?
Often a combination of emotional and sometimes mysterious somatic complaints brings a client to a Rubenfeld Synergist. For example, Anne came to me with a history of depression and anxiety, and an alcohol addiction. In Rubenfeld Synergy sessions, she revealed a history of severe and ongoing childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Coincidentally, she was also suffering from agonizing monthly endometriosis pain that she had experienced since adolescence. As Anne’s therapy progressed and she began to express, process, and integrate the abuse she suffered, her endometriosis pain virtually disappeared, much to both of our surprise.

Through Rubenfeld Synergy, Anne was able to make a deep, though unconscious, connection between her abuse and the endometriosis. Her body “understood” the connection, and as her body learned other ways — verbal rather than somatic ways — of telling its “story,” Anne found relief emotionally and somatically.

It is a personal theory of mine that where the body is involved in the trauma (e.g., physical, sexual) and/or an addiction that involves it (e.g., the full range of eating disorders), then the most effective treatment method needs to involve the body as well as talk in the healing process — i.e., to involve the whole person.

Based on the premise that through the body we can contact old buried feelings and core beliefs that exert powerful but unconscious influence over us in the present, Rubenfeld Synergy brings beliefs to the surface and into conscious awareness. At this point, their origins can be discovered, reframed, and experienced from a new perspective — and clients can choose to alter their beliefs. Through movement, touch, verbal intervention, and creative experimentation, the Rubenfeld Synergy Method can heighten clients’ awareness of habitual patterns and thus help them begin to make different life choices regarding their relationships and addictions.

Diane L. Nadler, CSW, BCD, is a psychotherapist and certified Rubenfeld Synergist in private practice in New York City. In addition, she is a certified Ericksonian hypnotherapist and EMDR practitioner. She may be contacted at (212) 253-1573.

Footnote
1 The Rubenfeld Synergy Method combines the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais®, Ericksonian Hypnosis and Gestalt techniques. For more information, see Rubenfeld (2000).

References
Dayton, T. (2000). Trauma and addiction. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.
Lindemann, E. (1944). “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.” American Journal of Psychiatry 101: 141-148.
Pert, C. (1997). Molecules of emotion: Why you feel the way you feel. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rubenfeld, I. (2000). The listening hand: Self-healing through the Rubenfeld Synergy Method of talk and touch. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Van der Kolk, B. (1987). Psychological trauma. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, Inc.
Van der Kolk, B., McFarlane, A., & Weisaeth, L. (Eds.) (1996). Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body and society. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, February 2004, v.5, n.1, pp. 46-48.

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