Embodying Emotions

Psychologist Raja Selvam, discusses his new book, The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes.  Raja is the creator of Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™), an effective somatic therapy that encourages optimal mental health by fully embodying emotions. Raja and I explore how clinicians can facilitate patient resolution of difficult emotions by allowing increased recognition of emotion and then expanding that emotion to more of the body. Rather than cognitively down-regulating emotions, this somatic approach of expanding emotion increases affect tolerance and resolves systemic distress. ISP is a complementary modality for all talk therapy methods. It was an honor to dialogue with Raja about ISP and also our mutual interest in non-dual philosophy.

Clinical psychologist Raja Selvam, PhD, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™), an effective somatic therapy that helps clients achieve optimal mental health by fully embodying their emotions. Raja is also a senior trainer at Somatic Experiencing® International. His work is informed by Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, Bodynamic Analysis and Somatic Experiencing, and bodywork systems of Postural Integration and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. His work is also inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India). He did trauma outreach work in India in 2005–2006 with survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, based on which he has published an outcome study titled “Somatic Therapy Treatment Effects with Tsunami Survivors,” in the journal Traumatology in 2008. Dr. Selvam’s work is also inspired by the work he did in Sri Lanka in 2012–2014 with survivors of war, violence, loss, and displacement, and with mental health professionals engaged in treating them, after Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war ended in 2009.