The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Context (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

Praise for The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Context (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

My experience reading this book was a big 'YES'! By placing her powerful Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) approach 'in context,' Pat Ogden and her consultants have embraced the challenge and the call for locating mental health practice in an anti-oppression frame. Their commitment to anti-racist practice has inspired a revisiting and revisioning of SP from this ground. I consider this book a must-read for therapists and will be requiring it for the graduate students that I train. YES!
— Shelly P. Harrell, PhD, Professor, Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology

In this eye-opening new book, Pat Ogden, with her consultants, brilliantly charts the continuing evolution of her work. Based on a solid scientific understanding of human development, neuroscience, attachment, and body-mind connections, this book is filled with riveting case examples that illustrate the efficacy of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Original, illuminating, and mind-expanding about cultural biases and legacies, it helps us understand how the unexamined use of psychotherapy practices based solely on Western academic models without taking into account the effects of social marginalization and privilege/oppression is prone to lead to profound disappointments and colossal treatment failures. I hope this will become required reading for every therapist and policy maker!
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine, President, Trauma Research Foundation, author of The Body Keeps the Score

Ogden and her consultants place a quote from James Baldwin at the front of the book: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is face." For me, Baldwin saw denial of reality as perhaps the greatest of sins. By focusing on our explicit and implicit theories and states of consciousness, summarized by the phrase Ethnocentric Western approaches to psychotherapy, Ogden forces us to end our denial of what is evident: the inherent bias and limitations of talk therapy, of attachment theory, of trauma theory, of individualism and autonomy, of diagnoses, and more. You may have come to this book solely to see how Sensorimotor Psychotherapy might affect your way of working—which it will— but you also will find that you have to face up to discord about how you see and know yourself as a therapist and as a person. If you can overcome your denials, avoid a flight into certitude, and begin to make new meaning of yourself in the world, you will change and grow, and become better for grappling with this book.
— Ed Tronick, author (with Claudia Gold) of The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships Are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust

This is a remarkably thoughtful and generous book in which Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and all analytic psychotherapies, are illuminated and enhanced through their contextualization by race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender expression, and other diversities. Exemplary in it integration of an expansive diversities scholarship into its body-attuned, sophisticated yet accessible account, the book will be of immense value to students as well as experienced practitioners seeking reflective, embodied contextualization of their psychotherapeutic work.
— Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA, Training and Supervising Analyst, The William Alanson White Institute; Co-Chair of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association

A superb text, The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy in Context highlights the relevance of context in psychotherapy by integrating trauma treatment, culturally responsive methods, somatic approaches, and ecological theories into healing and well-being. This much-needed book is relevant to all clients, especially to those struggling with oppression. A timely and essential contribution to psychotherapy, this text provides an invaluable resource to all therapists. I strongly recommend it.


— Lillian Comas-Díaz, PhD, Clinical Professor, George Washington University, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, author of Multicultural Care