Amniotic therapy is a new group participation therapy that envolves body and psyche and it takes place in 34,5° water. The aim of this innovative therapy is to strengthen the participants self-confidence through the protective care of the group and to enrich the quality of wellness of their life and of their social relations.
Amniotic therapy
Angelo is 32 years old and in the 10 years preceding the therapy he suffered from
persecution delusions, hallucinations and other psychotic disorders.
From Angelo’s words at the beginning of his treatment path:
70% of my body is empty ... there are no organs, no bones, no skin, only empty spaces,
there are rooms closed since birth ...
In water’s heat ancestral memories of contacts with amniotic liquid can be activated; the patient gradually relies on the therapist who sustains and helps him to enter into a deep contact with himself and with the other participants of the experience.
In water body weight feels approximately six times reduce and this permits the one that helds as well as who is held, to feel light like during the very first months of life.
The movements that therapists apply on patients when sustaining them have as a model the alternation of contractions and relaxations of the womb which produces a harmonic rythm of contacts and detaches of the uterin wall from the body’s surface of the foetus, always mediated by amniotic liquid.
In amniotic therapy the alternation of contacts and detachments is experienced by the patients together with the therapists.
The group communication is based on typical gestures of parental care called by Winnicott (1945) “holding and handling” (two words that include the concepts of containing, holding in arms, manipulate, cradle, caress, approach and remove from ones body).
The patient also has the possibility to try the physical and psychic experience of helding and at the same time being held in a harmonic way creating the conditions to integrate psychic functions typical of the containment theory (Bion, 1962). Thanks to this kind of primary “amniotic” communication between therapists and patients begins an affective tuning that activates the sense of protection.
This helps to improve the positive awareness of being well in yourself, of being safe with the others.
The Amnios Group offers amniotic therapy sessions of one and half hour each, with frequency of 1 to 4 times a week.
Angelo 5 years after the start of his treatment path:
I really feel like a house builder, I am on a construction site and my first construction is myself, even though I am 32 years old I have not yet built myself and I feel I can do it ... I am discovering new lands inside of me [. .] that do not invade anyone and do not invade me. [..] Before I was a puzzle with the pieces scattered in the valley ... now I perceive myself as one. [..] I warn, I feel! I feel the spirit of myself which is always with me ... First this thing that surrounds me, this body [..], was really gone... I had really lost it, it wasn't there.
Bibliography
Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann
Winnicott, D.W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. In Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis: collected papers (ch 12). 1958. London: Tavistock.