69 PBSP Series 1.1: The Body Remembers
Sometimes your body knows you’re frightened before you have the faintest idea what you’re frightened of.
Have you ever found yourself reacting to something and thought, Why am I reacting like this? You know, logically, that you are safe. You know that this person in front of you, is not your father, your mother, your old teacher or the person who frightened you years ago. You know you are an adult and that you have choices. And yet your stomach knots, your shoulders tighten, your heart starts racing or you suddenly feel very small.
It can be extraordinarily frustrating. I know this. I’ve talked about this. I understand where it comes from. So why does my body still behave as though it is happening now?
This is one of the things I love about Pesso Boyden System of Psychomotor (mind body), or PBSP. It takes seriously the fact that our experience is not stored only as a story in our heads. Some of what happened to us becomes part of the way we organise ourselves physically and emotionally. Our bodies learn things. They learn when to brace, when to withdraw, when to please, when to fight and when to disappear.
And sometimes the body knows something before the conscious mind catches up.
I’ve worked with people who can give you an extremely articulate explanation of why they behave as they do. They know where their fear comes from. They know their childhood wasn’t their fault. They know they don’t have to keep everybody happy. And still they do.
In a PBSP structure, we may begin somewhere quite different. Rather than asking, Why do you do that?, we might ask, What are you noticing in your body right now?
Perhaps there is a tightness in the chest. A pulling backwards. A sense of wanting to get away. A heaviness in the shoulders. We follow the person’s experience very carefully, because those sensations can lead us towards something important.
Sometimes what emerges is an implicit memory. Not necessarily a clear, cinematic recollection of an event, but an old way of being in the world. I have to look after everyone. I mustn’t make a fuss. Nobody will protect me. If I don’t stay alert, something bad will happen. These voices can govern a life…and yet may not be in the client’s awareness, until we slow things down, and the voice emerges.
As a child, they made the best sense of the world they could.
And this is where PBSP becomes fascinating. We don’t simply tell the adult, You don’t need to do that anymore. We explore what that child needed and create an experience in which an Ideal Figure, often an Ideal Mother or Ideal Father, can provide something that was missing.
It isn’t about pretending the past was different. It is about allowing the person to have a different experience – now.
Sometimes you can actually see the moment something shifts. The shoulders drop. The breathing changes. The person who has been holding themselves rigidly upright for years discovers what it feels like to be supported.
And that brings us to the next question.
If we cannot change what happened to us, how can a new experience now make any difference to something that happened decades ago?
That’s what we’ll explore next: whether we really can change the impact of the past, without pretending to change the past itself.
Juliet Grayson
September 2026
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK RECOMMENDS PESSO BOYDEN
Click here to see a 3 minute video of Bessel van der Kolk saying the work of Al Pesso is the “only thing that really works” https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/1-Bvk-Best-One-reduced-size-not-tc.mp4
TRAINING AS A PESSO BODY THERAPIST
For therapists – our next training starts in June 2027. It is 6 months for Foundation Skills, or 2 years for the Complete Training
https://pessoboydentraininguk.com/pesso-boyden-training-course/
JOIN A PESSO BOYDEN EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOP
If you are a member of the public who would like to experience a Pesso Boyden session, look here https://pessoboydenuk.org/workshops/
Click here to give feedback, which Juliet loves to receive: https://bit.ly/julietmuses
See the list of Pesso Events that Juliet is leading: https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/pesso-events/
If you are a therapist, counsellor or health worker, and interested in thinking more about conflict, and you are a therapist, you might want to attend the Couples in Conflict module of the Certificate in Working with Couples.
www.therapyandcounselling.co.uk
If you’re a therapist and watching this you might be interested in my six modular workshops on how to work with couples. Go to www.therapyandcounselling.co.uk and look either at the calendar or look at the course for therapists: Certificate in Working with Couples.
Juliet enjoys hearing comments about how these talks impact people – both positive and negative. If you have time, please let her know your thoughts
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You’ll find more Juliet’s Musings on https://therapyandcounselling.co.uk/juliets-thoughts-for-the-day/.