Somatic Emotions Training (SET) as a Brief Thomistic Intervention

The experience of emotion is a distributed phenomenon, occurring simultaneously physically and mentally. Significant emotional events result in somatic distortion throughout the body that have long-term impacts on the feelings associated with mental emotion. These specific somatic experiences associated with emotion are individually repeatable, while being specific to person and culture. Many clients enter therapy without an accurate compass in their own emotional toolkit. One way to help provide this toolkit is the psychological passions in the framework of Thomas Aquinas. The purpose of this article is to describe a brief experiential therapy intervention, Somatic Emotions Training (SET), and to illuminate by case examples the contribution to efficient treatment of trauma. This series of case studies and clinical reflections presents the use of SET to aid client engagement in a specific somatic integrative trauma therapy, Lifespan Integration. Several small cases are presented illuminating the merits of this emotional mapping method both for the therapist and independently for the clients. For the therapist, the somatic profiles of the emotions are used as a therapeutic tool to reveal cognitive distortions that had been blocking treatment and to navigate linguistic barriers. The examples provided are taken mainly from clinical inpatient addiction recovery in which model SET contributed qualitatively to the patients' reported insight and rapid clearing. An outline of an experiential interview structure is proposed for standardization of SET.