Escuchar al cuerpo en psicoterapia. Psicosomática clínica para el trabajo con el trauma

This webinar is the second in a new series of free events created from listening closely to our Spanish-speaking community.

Through a dedicated survey, many clinicians shared their questions, daily challenges, and the topics they most wanted to explore in greater depth.

We carefully reviewed their responses — and this session is the first step in answering what they asked for.

For decades, we have said that the mind–body dichotomy is obsolete — that we can no longer separate the psychological from the physical — and yet we continue to do so. Separate systems, separate careers, separate specialties have been built.

Listening to the Body in Psychotherapy. Clinical Psychosomatics for Trauma Work

Medicine goes one way, psychology another, and in between stands the patient with their suffering, fragmented among professionals who rarely speak to one another. This seminar begins with an uncomfortable yet well-documented premise: human beings fall ill for lack of language. When there are no words to name suffering, the body speaks.

And it does so in a preverbal language learned long before we could say “it hurts” or “I’m afraid.” Today we know that early traumatic experiences — often silenced for years — produce alterations that manifest in the body through chronic inflammatory processes.

What appears in consultation as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, dermatitis, or chronic pain may be the bodily expression of what could not be put into words. The problem is that almost no one asks.

And each time we miss the opportunity to ask, each time a patient is forced into silence because no one shows interest in their story, we retraumatize them.

This seminar offers tools to support that translation: to recognize bodily symptoms as messages that seek to be understood, and to integrate the biographical and the somatic in psychotherapeutic work with trauma.

Learning Micro-Objectives

• Recognize somatization as a legitimate language of psychological suffering, identifying in clinical practice when the body is speaking about experiences that could not be verbalized.

• Understand the mechanism by which chronic stress derived from early traumatic experiences produces bodily manifestations, integrating current contributions from the inflammatory model.

• Incorporate exploration of possible trauma history as part of the clinical assessment process, understanding that linking the physical with the biographical is, in itself, therapeutic.