The Body Specular
Intermodal Therapeutics
Adam Bligh-Hasan
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CONCEPT STATEMENT
Our body is like a partner that moves through life hand in hand with the consciousness that observes it. What happens when we’re out of touch with how we feel?
What happens to our relationship with our body?
What happens to our relationship with others?
What happens to our identity, desires, goals?
When communication is lacking between the body and its observer, we experience a lack of clarity. The Body Specular is a multidisciplinary offering, with the intention of guiding people into a dialogue with their own form.
Sometimes the lack of communication with our body means we don’t feel emotions and sensations as viscerally as we would like to, or as we once used to; perhaps we lack intuition to guide our choices. Sometimes this lack is an overwhelm, an overstimulation that makes our choices for us out of habitual fear. Sometimes it can manifest as a numbness. We are disconnected from our desire.
I believe the reason for this lack of communication is that our body’s communications to us get lost in translation. They come in forms of communication, sensory, rhetorical, aesthetic, that we are desensitised to for various reasons - reasons which can be understood and addressed.
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Meet Adam
My name is Adam (he/they), and I have spent the past fifteen years of my life travelling through the many meanders of my psychological journey. Untangling the threads of immigrant, neurodivergent and queer identity, and the overwhelm of linguistic, aesthetic, sensory and communitarian material offered by those intersecting spheres. I have navigated highs of feeling like I have too many passions to fit into one human life, and lows of feeling a lack of interest in anything at all. Since my teenage years, I have been mapping the territory of my life by always engaging multiplicity. I have undertaken training in multiple artistic disciplines, studied several foreign languages, experienced multiple psychotherapeutic modalities, and studied cultural analysis from several theoretical perspectives. Currently, I am bringing together all the facets of my experience in an Expressive Arts Therapy MA.
I see myself as a therapist (in training) because it is my passion to listen to others. My methods centre around the metaphor of dialogue between body and consciousness; so what would a facilitator of this work be if not a listener, and what is a therapist if not a listener? At the same time, however, I am passionate about facilitating a study of the self, and the elements of the world outside it, which the self is in fact made of. Of all the things I’ve studied, my favourites were the ones I had the least natural talent for, because I got to observe my own mind and figure out how to develop a relationship with types of knowledge that were very alien to me. For me, the therapeutic journey is for each person to take a study into the unfamiliar terrain of the self.
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METHODOLOGY
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The practices to heal over the disconnect between body and consciousness have many layers. Their goals include physical sensitisation, mindfulness, emotional attunement and expression, honing of human relational skills, artistic development, psychological insight, and developing a relationship to our cultural heritage, intellectual passions, or the natural world. For each person the path is as unique as the circumstances which set that path in motion. That’s why the way I work is bespoke to a client’s or group’s needs. I work by taking careful, trauma-informed consultations, aiming to understand the intricacies of how different problems interact in my clients’ lives, the coexistence of desires for multiple transformative effects, and the need for interdisciplinarity in treatment practices.
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WHAT PROBLEMS MIGHT THIS WORK HELP ME ADDRESS?
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Alexithymia, or emotional overwhelm
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Working out identity
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Creative block
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Negative relationship with the body
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Lack of proprioception
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Difficulty making life choices
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Difficulty relating to other people
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Slowness of intuition
WHAT PRACTICES MIGHT I ENGAGE IN DURING A SESSION OR CLASS?
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Movement-patterning exercises
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Reflective journalling
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Dialogue-based relational exercises
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Any creative artform such as drawing, music, creative writing, dancing
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Bodywork such as massage and aromatherapy
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Meditation
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Philosophical reflection exercises
WHAT TRANSFORMATIONS MIGHT RESULT FROM THIS WORK?
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Improved emotional clarity
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Improved proprioception/introception
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More clarity around identity
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More creativity in flow
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More positive relationship with the body
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Less difficulty making life choices
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Sharper intuition
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More ease in relating to others
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The body will tell you which of the five senses it craves the most and which are numb, or which type of intellectual processing flows the most smoothly through it (because, yes, mental processing happens in our entire nervous and muscular system!). The body will tell you which flavours of emotion, and their corresponding relational patterns, are most often used to respond to the experience of life. The rest of us is like the dark side of the moon. How do we learn the languages of the other side, and translate its messages into the languages we already speak well?
I can’t say I have all the answers to this problem of translation, but I work by staying present with a client, until the dialogue starts to happen. As we listen to and learn the languages of those parts that feel alien, but nevertheless are carried within us, our expressiveness coheres towards a new style, and we can feel that expressiveness coursing through our system with a renewed vitality. And eventually, with work, that expressiveness can transcend the self-self dialogue, and reach the witnessing bodies of those people that we love.
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STATEMENT ON PROFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES
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In our initial consultation, we will establish that our work together fits into one of two categories: either bodywork-focused or therapy-focused. Generally, I would not incorporate physical touch into a therapeutic relationship geared at a more psychological journey, and conversely I would approach the emotional aspect of bodywork from a perspective that is different to a therapeutic relationship in the psychological sense. I feel that this distinction is important in order to maintain healthy boundaries and a safe space. Activities relating to artmaking and creative expression would find their place in either one of the two paths.
EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
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I trained as a massage therapist at Quantum Metta School of Massage, where I gained qualifications in Holistic Massage from ITEC (level 3) and Aromatherapy from MTI (level 4).
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I have completed the Level 2 Teacher Training at the UK branch of the Tamalpa institute, and as the student of Tamalpa I operate according to the ethical guidelines of ISMETA (International Somatic-Movement Education and Therapy Association)
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I am enrolled in the final stages of a Master of Arts in Expressive Arts Therapy at the European Graduate School, and as their student I operate according to the guidelines of IEATA (International Expressive Arts Therapy Association).
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My current research centres around working with transgender populations to increase gender euphoria. This is part of a larger project exploring how the relationship between language and embodied experience structures our human subjectivity. As well as working with transgender populations to explore these themes, I am interested in working with displaced people and neurodivergent people. I am exploring this theoretical material through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and exploring the capacity of Lacanian thought to be translated into an aesthetic theory for the Expressive Arts.
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