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Dissertation Proposal

Voice as Sense:

Investigating the Sensory Capacities of the Voice and Languaging

at the Site of Trauma Healing Toward a Theory of Somatic Psychopoetics

Mindy Nettifee

Track S–Pacifica Graduate Institute

©Mindy Nettifee 2018, all rights reserved.

DISSERTATION PROPOSAL 1

Purpose Statement

Something significant is lost when verbalization is defined as an act of cognition or

mental insight, separate from or in opposition to the “felt-sense.” This research intends to

challenge these dualisms by framing and investigating the voice as an embodied sense,

where “voice” is understood to include the relational phenomenon of sounding and

languaging, and “languaging” is understood to be the somatic activity of producing

words. The research addresses the field of trauma theory and trauma healing practice as

sites where the harm of a split cognitive characterization can be keenly felt, and the

potential impact of an embodied, depth theory of voice and languaging may be discerned.

Using a grounded theory methodology informed by heuristic, hermeneutic, and

phenomenological inquiry, spoken and written data will be gathered from two primary

groups of participants—trained healing practitioners who work with voice, and writers

and spoken word artists with experience voicing their own trauma. These groups will be

interviewed and co-witnessed in solo, dyadic and group interactions that reflect the

diverse relational environments of the lived experience under study. In doing so, this

research aspires to capture languaging from the varying power locations of academic,

professional, autodidact, and artist perspectives that are invested in understanding trauma

and reclaiming the healing and creative powers of voice and languaging. The

conceptualization of voice as a sense also requires the placement of traditionally disparate

fields of research on voice and languaging into dialogue with each other, the aim of

which is to rethink trauma intervention from the perspective of a sensing voice that

aspires to meaning and resolution. This grounded analysis contributes to the emerging


field of somatic depth psychology through attention to the development of its own theory

of voice and languaging—a theory of somatic psychopoetics.

Introduction to the Research Problem

There is great tension around the framing of voice and languaging between the

fields of somatic studies and depth psychology. Historically, depth psychology has had a

foundational relationship with the spoken word—the “Freudian slip” and the “talking

cure” offer ample illustration—and a long love affair with the soul speech of poetry

(Jung, 1976, Raab, 2015). Languaging was relied upon on for its ability to reveal or

access the unconscious and was believed to be an agent in healing symptoms (Breuer &

Freud, 1893). Yet characterizations of languaging are often found in depth psychological

discourse that emphasize its capacity for removed reflection, detached intellectualization,

and rational consciousness, and the dangers those capacities pose to the soul (Hillman,

1975, Winnicott, 1973). Somatics, too, has attributed dissociative and distancing

tendencies to voicing and languaging, even while actively interrogating whether this

distance is a fantasy of the mind-body split (Barratt, 2010, Hanna, 1970). A distinction

tends to be made between two modes of experiencing: one that is primary, felt and

immediate, and one that is secondary, representational, and verbalized. While language is

praised for its social benefits, it is believed by some somatic theorists and practitioners to

essentially split the experience of the self, and to be an obstacle to staying in contact with

the soma (Hartley, 1989). But what if the voice were, instead, a sense? How would this

challenge the mind-body dualisms genetic to these framings of voice and languaging?

This research hopes to explore such questions as a pathway to the coniunctio possible


between somatics and depth psychology, and as a remembering/discovery of the healing

and creative powers of the voice.

These ideas are also very much alive in professional healing practices with depth

and somatic orientations. They have been in a defensive or corrective pose in reaction to

the dominance in a Western culture of cognitive behavioralism and therapies that, as

Stromsted (2014) put it, “prioritize mental insight over embodied experience and the

spiritual dimensions of the healing process” (p. 37). To address this imbalance, therapies

and healing modalities have emerged that could be said to conversely de-emphasize

cognitive insight and verbalization, such as sensorimotor psychotherapy, Somatic

Experiencing, Bodymind Centering, and Authentic Movement. These modalities instead

affirm embodiment, non-dual “in the moment” presence, and the witnessing of affect and

sensation when exploring the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal realms (Barrett,

2010, pp. 54-70). A key concept to these practices is the use of interoception, awareness,

and touching into the “felt sense,” (Gendlin, 1996). Levine (1997), a leader in the world

of somatic trauma healing modalities, once explicitly argued that this kind of sensing was

in direct opposition to words, for “language is a linear process and the felt sense is a non-

linear experience” (p. 67).

Something significant is lost, however, when verbalization is defined as an act of

cognition or mental insight. Verbalization, languaging and voicing are not merely mental,

abstract, representational tasks; they are also of the body. The categorization of language

as a linear faculty in opposition to the “felt-sense” is not only reductive; I believe it

potentially casts part of embodied experience into the shadow, inadvertently reinforcing a

mind-body split, and obscuring the full, visceral, lived experience of how bodies co-


create meaning from sounding. A possible way to avoid this mischaracterization is to

consider the voice as a sense. The physiological rationale for strong mind-body dualism

when it comes to voice and languaging has already been dispelled by neuroscience over

the last two decades. Neurological lateralization research has shown that while there is

evidence for left-brain dominance in language and semantic processing, there is also

evidence that the right-brain is dominant for certain types of language—curse words,

concrete images, metaphors, synaesthetic phrases, emotion words, prosody, and more

(Kane, 2004 & Jung-Beeman, 2005). The language of poetry and story—and of emotion,

image and sensation so central to many therapies—deeply involves the right-brain,

integrated with the circuits neurobiologist Allan Schore (2012) named “the seat of the

embodied functions” (p. 5). This suggests that a great deal of further research is called for

to develop a theory of voice and languaging that accounts for these integrating and

embodied capacities. By pairing “voice/voicing” and “languaging” as terms for this

active, sensory phenomenon, I mean to distinguish this research from explorations of the

nonverbal capacities of voicing alone. It will also keep some questions alive about the

relationship between speech and its technological extension through writing.

Many practitioners of somatic and depth healing modalities have already long

been engaged in exploring and healing the split between language, sensation/perception

and soul (Woodman, 1985, Gendlin, 1996; Newham, 1999, Adler, 2002). But the tension

persists. Trauma theory and trauma healing, in particular, are sites where the urgency of

this tension can be felt and seen: trauma has an undeniable impact on voicing and

languaging (van der Kolk, 2014). Traumatic experiences are characteristically difficult

and, at times, nearly impossible to express in words (van der Kolk, 2014). Yet healing


from trauma seems to ultimately require exactly that—voicing it in words. In a chapter

titled “Language: Miracle and Tyranny,” Van der Kolk (2014) summed up the

complexity of the situation: “Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized”

and then, immediately after that, we must confront “the limitations of language” (p. 235).

This again points to a lacuna in the theory, and the potential for more rich, qualitative

research into the nature of languaging and voice. It might reveal the voice’s capacity to

sense and integrate information coming from the body, other bodies, the environment,

and the imaginal, transpersonal realms. It might reveal how this sensory capacity is

shaped by its development, and impacted by trauma, with implications for its care and

nurturing.

Romanyshyn (2013) wrote from this lacuna in his treatment on language and

psychology in The Wounded Researcher. He described the psychologist/researcher as a

“failed poet…one who stands in that gap between the fullness of experience and the

‘failure’ of language to command it” (p. 9). His exploration of research with soul in mind

mounted a staunch defense of psyche’s access to articulate realms, in which the writer’s

voice is leant to the voices of Others. “Alchemical hermeneutics, we might say, is the art

of ventriloquism” (p. 230). He also asserted the body’s “central place” (p. 235) to this

process, and claimed that “Perhaps the best test of whether or not a piece of

psychological writing dances in step with soul is how it feels when it is read aloud…Does

it resonate with your body and not just make sense to your mind?” (p.330). Though

Romanyshyn was speaking to researchers, and not therapists, he attested to a critical

power of voicing that opens further questions relevant to the healing of trauma.


Both Romanyshyn’s work and that of Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) suggested this

avenue for inquiry: to conceive of the voice as an embodied sense, and to see what

perspectives and understandings that may reveal for somatic studies, depth psychology

and trauma healing. In this proposed research, new data will be gathered and analyzed

with the intent of mining such insights. Another unique contribution this research will

make will be to put existing theories of language and voice from distinct and disparate

fields, cultures and practices into conversation with one another, and in conversation with

the concept of voice as sense. This research would speak to two audiences: therapeutic

practitioners who use voicing and languaging as diagnostic tools and healing practices,

and theorists contributing to the development of somatic depth psychology as a

discipline. There is a great deal at stake for both groups. For professional practitioners,

this research may engender new implications for treatment, such as best practices for

developing and recovering the sensory capacities of voice. I consider this the primary aim

of this research. For theorists tasked with voicing this emerging dialogue between

somatics and depth psychology, their ability to define terms, articulate questions,

translate between disciplines, and work with inchoate knowledge will be affected by how

they understand and enact their relationship to languaging. An embodied, depth-steeped

theory of voice and languaging could critically shape the work that will ground this

emerging field—a secondary aim, though nonetheless potentially impactful.

Definition of Terms

By the words “voice,” “voicing” and “languaging” I mean to include the entire

phenomenon of sounding, verbalization, speech, writing and being heard. I will use

“voice and languaging” or “voicing and languaging” throughout this work, following an


intuition to make a distinction between the area of this research and the territory of

practitioners who primarily use song and sounding without words when they speak of

voice, like that of Voice Movement Therapy (Newham, 1999). It may at times feel like a

redundancy, but languaging has the flavor of literacy in it, and voicing has a more

oral/aural quality. By not choosing just one, I hope to stay curious and open about what

the differences might be between speaking and writing. Questions about writing as a

technology that extends voice, and the way technologies challenge our boundaried

understanding of embodiment, will be addressed in the dissertation as well. Further, the

choice to use “languaging” instead of “language” is intended as a signal. By using the

verb form, I am somatizing language, and reminding the reader that the phenomenon

under study is an active process of producing language to make meaning.

It is premature to offer a concrete definition of “sense” here, as part of the work of

this research and its literature review will be to investigate the challenges posed by

neuroscience to traditional definitions of the senses (Simner, 2012; Thaler, Arnott, &

Goodale, 2011). In his introduction to Foundations of Sensation and Perception, Mather

(2016) acknowledged that there is still an “explanatory gap,” and that “No one has been

able to explain precisely how the qualitative nature of sensation can be explained by

reference to neural activity” (locs. 347-348). This research recognizes that, traditionally,

“sense” was understood as a faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus,

limited to sight (ophthalmoception), smell (olfacoception), hearing (audioception), taste

(gustaoception), and touch (tactioception). There has been widely acknowledged

expansion of the general understanding of the sensorium to include temperature

(thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance


(equilibrioception involving the vestibular system), and vibration (mechanoreception)

(Mather, 2016). The above senses are generally categorized as “exteroception”, while the

detection of internal stimulus is general discussed under the umbrella term

“interoception,” whose definition is still being established (Ceunen, Vlaeyen, & Van

Diest, 2016). Clear divisions between senses and between boundaried inner and outer

fields of perception are being challenged at the theoretical frontiers of somatics,

(Sobchack, 2004, 2010) as well as by researchers into synesthesia and affect transmission

(Simner, 2012, Colembetti, 2014). This research is positioned within this opening.

The word “trauma” is carrying a variety of meanings at this cultural moment.

Derived from the Greek word for “wound,” it is now used to encompass all manner of

contemporary understandings of suffering, while also holding specific, institutionalized

meanings. Some have argued that with regards to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),

no other diagnostic condition has generated more controversy for the DSM (Cureton,

Jones, 2014). As this is not a clinical dissertation, the definition of trauma as it presents

as a diagnosable medical condition or disorder in the DSM will not be privileged, but it

will be acknowledged. There is agreement among some sources that it is not an event

itself that is traumatic, but an individual’s subjective experience of an event (Ogden,

Minton, and Pain, 2006; Levine, 2010; van der Kolk, 2014). Levine argued that “Trauma

is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic

witness” (2010, p. xii). Experiences of trauma may be connected to a singular acute

event, or a series of events, or exposure to an ongoing stressful environment (Levine,

2010). Our understanding of the symptomology of trauma is still evolving (Substance

Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). According to Levine (2010)


and van der Kolk (2014), symptoms of unresolved trauma may be psychological,

emotional or physical, and point to a disruption to our abilities to self-regulate. The

DSM-5 includes such symptoms as intrusion or re-experiencing of traumatized states or

traumatizing events; avoidance or numbing behaviors, and dissociative or depersonalized

states; negative alterations in emotion, mood or cognition; and increased arousal or

reactivity (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Symptoms of childhood trauma may

include impaired developmental competencies in the regulation of arousal, attention,

behavior, sense of self, and relational engagement (van der Kolk, 2014). The definition

put forth by the practitioners of Levine’s trauma healing modality Somatic Experiencing

is formative: “Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end

product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability

to function with resilience and ease. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors

such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional

abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of

ongoing fear and conflict” (“What is somatic experiencing,” 2017, para. 3). For the

purposes of this research, the definition of trauma will also acknowledge the traumatizing

effects of systems of oppression, which impact every individual within them (Watkins &

Shulman, 2008).

The terms “subjective” and “subjectivity” will be defined as a possible

perspective or dimension of reality concerned with the lived experience of interiority, a

definition adopted from Integral Theory (Wilber, 1995). Wilber understood interiority as

one of and in contrast to at least four irreducible perspectives with correlate

phenomenon—the subjective (personal interiors; aesthetic, expressive, and state


phenomenon), intersubjective (collective interiors; cultural and moral phenomenon),

objective (personal exteriors; empirical, material, behavioral and organismic

phenomenon) and interobjective (collective exteriors; environmental, social and systemic

phenomenon). These four dimensional perspectives are all considered to be true, but

partial, and they are not considered in isolation. They are understood to be not just

interacting but co-arising. In Wilber’s theory, perception and sensation belong to the

“subjective” realm, for example, but are enacted relationally, shaped by the physiology of

the sensing perceiving body interacting with the earth and other bodies in the vicinity,

and informed by the cultures of shared belief and meaning which in term are shaped by

collective systems. Furthermore, each perspective is understood to be manifesting within

the reality of the unconscious. Subjectivity that is aware of the unconscious might be

termed “deep subjectivity” as it was by Romanyshyn (2013). The term “embodiment”

will be used to mean the bodily aspects of subjectivity.

Researcher’s Relationship to the Topic

My professional work for the last 14 years has been as a poet, storyteller, teacher

of the writing and performing arts, and producer of live literary events. I was not

academically trained as a poet; I learned the art orally, by attending poetry readings

beginning at the age of 12. My understanding of the performative and community aspects

of poetry gave shape to my career. One of the experiences that brought me to the study of

depth psychology was facilitating poetry workshops for women who were survivors of

sex trafficking. I was mystified by a transformation process I witnessed repeatedly.

Initially, participants were visibly uncomfortable, highly defended with their arms

crossing their chests, using voices that were quiet and cramped. Over time, sometimes


years, they transformed into loud, brassy, sprawling presences, eagerly speaking and

warmly listening to others. I wanted to understand what was happening, both to prevent

harm, and to more reliably create the circumstances that catalyzed and nurtured these

healing transformations.

I began pursuing this understanding through the study of psychology. Cognitive

and behavioral approaches to the mind were interesting, but felt inadequate to describe

the irrational and mysterious processes I was witnessing. Depth psychology, with its

belief in the reality of the unconscious, held up the larger mirror. A program that also

emphasized somatic studies felt like it offered the sturdy philosophical container I needed

by anchoring the study of the psyche in the presence and reality of the living body. In the

last three years, as these transformations I had witnessed became more and more

understood to me through the lenses of depth psychology and somatic studies, I also

became aware of my personal complexes with regards to voice and languaging, and the

core wounds guiding my work. Both of my parents could be said to have had traumatized

voices—my father, a Christian pastor who suffered greatly both before and after coming

out of the closet as a homosexual; and my mother, who also dreamed of being a minister,

but who came of age in a time when women’s voices were devalued, delegitimized and

silenced in public spheres. Had either of them been free to express their truth, they would

not have met or married, and I would not exist. I feel particularly sensitized to silenced

voices, their struggle to feel they have the right to speak, and then their struggle to speak,

as if using a long-neglected, atrophied muscle.

My years of training and practice in the arts of the written and spoken word and

my personal and cultural experiences with the traumatized voice give me a perspective


tailored to this research. While I will not be able to aspire to objectivity, I am uniquely

positioned, professionally, to co-work with the communities for whom this project

engages as well as analyze the voice data that will emerge from it. I will be engaging both

heuristic and hermeneutic research approaches, along with more outward-facing

phenomenological approaches, to anchor a process of defining my relationship to the

material as I go. This will include an in-depth and iterative process of speaking and

writing to understand the experiences, cultures, environments, bodies, and images that

have given rise to my ideas and intuitions about voicing and languaging, and will color

and tune my reception of new, incoming data.

Statement of the Research Question

This proposed inquiry aims to consider a vision of voice and languaging as

nonlinear phenomena in the effort to explore dissolving the tensions between “cognition”

and “feeling” in the therapeutic world. These aims are addressed through the following

research questions: What is the lived experience of the traumatized voice? How might the

voice operate as a sense? How might the framework of “voice as sense” reshape our

understandings of the impact of trauma on the voice and languaging? What role might

this open for voice and languaging to play in trauma healing and trauma healing

integration? By referring specifically to “voice and languaging” as opposed to “voice and

language,” this research and its questions somatize language, and continuously signal that

the subject of this study is a living, dynamic process of producing and using language to

make meaning.


Literature Review

Comprehensively tracking the literature on voice and languaging in all disciplines

is beyond the scope of this inquiry–though in the full literature review of the dissertation,

I intend to map the terrain and make demarcations to clearly position this study within the

wider territories of knowledge. The literary terrain within which these research questions

are being posed is specific to the fields of somatic studies and depth psychology, the

theory and practice of trauma healing, and the lens of voice as sense. This review will

focus first on voice and languaging in the frontiers of somatics and depth psychology,

seeing how researchers and theorists have been problematizing and grappling with

languaging phenomenon. The second area of focus will be on how the tension presents at

the site of trauma specifically. I will review literature in trauma theory that touches on

voice and languaging, and the literatures of diverse healing modalities that incorporate

some aspect of voice and languaging in their practice. Finally, I will review literature that

investigates sensorium. This will help construct the framework for a new understanding

of the voice as a sense, which will allow us to ask new questions about how we are

sensing, perceiving and creating meaning, and more critically what this might mean for

the healing of trauma. Particularly, a look at how sensory studies are currently been

transformed by the perspectives of neuroscience will support a re-examination of the

cognitive-feeling dualisms in question.

Voice and languaging in the somatic depth psychology frontier

While some might argue that depth psychology has already merged with the

perspectives and modes of somatics, such claims to integration are premature.

Historically, the body and bodily experience received little attention in depth psychology


except as a location of symptoms or as a sort of bridge to communication with the

unconscious (Chodorow, 1995; McNeely, 1987, Romanyshyn, 2011). Heuer (2005)

stated that “Jungian psychology seems marked by a theoretical ambivalence towards the

body, whilst mostly ignoring it clinically” (p. 106). Sassenfeld (2008) argued that while

Jung believed in the psyche-body connection, there is still an imbalance in contemporary

theory, little attention to Reich’s contributions, and a lack of guidelines for how to bring

the body more fully into clinical practice. Further, while both historical and contemporary

depth psychological texts argue for an epistemology of the heart and of the imagination—

a way of knowing in which the incorporeal image speaks—the body transducing that

speech, giving it breath and language, is hardly mentioned (Corbin, 1972, Hillman,

1992). The mind/body, spirit/matter split is still present in the soil and the bloom. In The

Emergence of Somatic Psychology and Bodymind Therapy, Barratt (2010) provided an

overview of the many theorists and practitioners who have been attending to this split,

but argued that we are still at a site of merging and emergence. My attention to voice and

languaging in this study hopes to contribute to this ongoing work of integration by

placing body/soma and psyche in dialogue in a way that does not privilege one over the

other, and then reading, speaking and sensing from this unsplit perspective.

Languaging is one of the paths by which academic disciplines forge and defend

their kingdoms, so any emerging or interdisciplinary discipline may be a site of conflict

and tension with language. A way of understanding this potential conflict might be

through Wittgenstein’s (1953) theory of language as a lived practice of not just rules, but

rule breakage and play. If researchers arrive to a discourse from different disciplines,

such as dance, ethnography, neuroscience, philosophy, psychodynamic theory,


ecopsychology, they are likely bringing their own disciplinary cultures of languaging.

Academic specializations have different conventions, or to borrow Wittgenstein’s lens,

very different games they are playing. Communicating with each other may present

difficulties while academics from different disciplines are still working to develop a new,

shared game. I believe this is one helpful way of reflecting on any tensions, conflicts or

disagreements that arise around languaging in the merging/emerging field of somatic

depth psychology. Second, the phenomenon that a somatic depth psychology seeks to

study is often ephemeral, ineffable, outside of conscious awareness, or not easily split

from, and therefore complex or difficult to voice (Samudra, 2008, Sheets-Johnstone,

2010). Third, the written language conventions of academic discourse tend toward

abstraction and disembodiment (Bizzell, P. 1993, Mascia-Lees & Sharpe, 2010), a

phenomenon that might be especially troubling to the lived experiences of the body under

investigation in somatic studies. Despite these challenges, languaging is happening in

somatics and depth psychology, and meaning is being both created and transferred in

ways I hope to explore in this section of the literature review. By investigating the

different strategies being used, it might be possible to see what new, shared language

games are being played and what they might tell us about an emerging somatic depth

theory of voice.

In Samudra’s (2008) anthropological research into how we code lived kinesthetic

details in studies of movement, she articulated some of more straightforward aspects of

the problem. In her article, Memory in Our Body, Thick Participation and the Translation

of Kinesthetic Experience, she began by saying, “I have frequently run up against the

limits of language for expressing embodied knowledge” and then backed it up with


evidence from an interviewee who, when asked about the physical effects of a practice,

told her, “you can’t even really talk about it in a way, because it’s so subtle” (p. 665). The

“thick participation” (p. 666) she proposed as a strategy for languaging highlights some

important assumptions at play. The denotative meaning for thick participation she

provided was “cultural knowledge recorded first in the anthropologist’s body and only

later externalized as visual or textual data for purposes of analysis” (p. 667). The kind of

knowledge she is arguing for is pre-linguistic, or rather, unnecessary to verbalize for its

meaning to be passed from body to body. Therefore, any attempt at verbalization can

only be made after the body has fully absorbed the knowledge. She made the split even

further explicit: “Because somatic knowledge is not semiotic knowledge, thick

participation may or may not be subject to symbolic interpretation” and further, “Insisting

on a semiotic analysis of movement risks distorting meaning” (p. 668).

Sheets-Johnstone (2010) might agree, but place the blame at least partially on lazy

semiotics. In her article, Kinesthetic Experience: Understanding Movement Inside and

Out, she let loose a fury at the term “embodiment” for what she felt was its role in

flattening discourse:

[C]ognition is not embodied; experience is not embodied; self-awareness is not

embodied; agents are not embodied; and movement is certainly not embodied…

Moreover, subjectivity is not only not embodied, but it is not a sensorimotor

phenomenon any more than intentionality is a motor phenomenon (p. 122).

The crux seemed to be an argument for further seperatio and splitting, at least in our

languaging. For Sheets-Johnstone, agency, kinesthetic awareness, sensations, movement,

thought and emotion all ought to be allowed to fully flower as separate aspects of our


lived experience. They interact in important ways that might be hidden from us if we

become lazy or sloppy in our articulation; mislanguaging, then, is misconception. Sheets-

Johnstone argued that “When theories or linguistic fads overtake real-life observations, or

when readymade categories of behavior…triumph over finely-detailed descriptive

accounts of the actual movement dynamics of animate beings, the basic realities of life

itself are elided” (p. 117). Her proposed strategy for coping with the difficulty of

languaging in this field was slightly different from Samudra’s: “begin with the

fundamental fact of animation,” (p. 118) relate to it through greater attention, and strive

for more specific language.

Both Samudra and Sheets-Johnstone argued for a clear split between the kinds of

knowing involved in sensing and languaging. However, there are other ways of

understanding semiotics. The work of Johnson and Lakoff (1980) in Metaphors We Live

By is relevant here as an introduction to embodied cognition, the idea that both pre-

linguistic conceptual understandings and their languaging are fundamentally grounded in

bodily experience. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002), too, would question

conceptions of voice and languaging that were abstract and divorced from sense. In

Phenomenology of Perception, he advised that we must “restore to the act of speaking its

true physiognomy” (p. 211). Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, that one of our most common

metaphorical concepts of language is that it is a container carrying meaning-objects, or

the “envelope and clothing of thought” (p. 211), but this concept should not be confused

with the thing itself. For Merleau-Ponty, the fantasy of an inner life disconnected from

the outer world is at work here. Words don’t work by arousing in us “representations” (p.


xi) associated with them; they enact sensation, perception and meaning at once; they

create it. As Merleau-Ponty elaborates,

The process of expression, when it is successful, does not merely leave for the

reader and the writer himself a kind of reminder, it brings the meaning into

existence as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism

of words, establishing it in the writer or the reader as a new sense organ, opening

a new field or a new dimension to our experience (p. 212).

Understanding language as a sense organ, not a logical delivery mechanism for

information packets, is theory that could possibly be integrated into a somatic depth

psychology. As a strategy for languaging, it suggests that researchers may be able to

transfer the empathy they feel for living beings, the sensuous concretizing powers they

associate with touch, to words themselves.

Media theorist Sobchack (2004) is actively exploring the edges of Merleau-

Ponty’s understanding of languaging. In her essay, What My Fingers Knew, she explored

his use of “chiasm” to call into being the idea that perception and expression are both

separate and not; as processes they are capable of both simultaneity and reversibility. In

her article Living a ‘Phantom Limb’: On the Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity,

Sobchack further reiterated her argument:

Experience is understood as always already meaningful, even prior to active

reflection. That is, the objects of consciousness as well as the affects and values

that qualify them are synthesized (even when dissonant) by an embodied

consciousness, a ‘lived body’. This lived body, which is always perspectivally

situated and intentionally directed, ‘rises to the world’ and others through the


reversible activity of perception and expression—this its primary modalities of

being in the world (indeed, of having a world at all) (p. 52).

This synthesis of meaning enacted by the reversibly perceiving expressing body is

happening, at least in part, through language and voice. This perspective is made, I think,

especially available to us through imagining the voice as a sense.

Rather than troubling language’s inadequacy, Sobchack has argued passionately

for its capacities. In the same article, she hypothesized that readers did not have to have a

phantom limb to access its meaning through language, to “understand mimetically from

their own experience the ambiguous nature and play of the lived body’s double-

sidedness, its capacity to be both immanent and transcendent, opaque and transparent,

‘here’ and ‘there’, present and absent” (p. 53). Indeed, Sobchack’s languaging was

successful in this regard. She pointed to work from Riceour (1977), from The Rule of

Metaphor, to further explain how this is possible:

If there is a point in our experience where living expression states living

existence, it is where our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters

the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between

actuality, action, production, motion (p. 309).

“Entropic slope” is a fantastic turn of phrase for the experience of difficulty in

articulation. By framing language as interactive, as Riceour and Sobchack suggest, we

might understand better how it nonetheless shapes meaning and has the power to call

experience into being.

These capacities of language are explored further by anthropologist Hayward

(2010) in her investigation of interspecies communication in Fingeryeyes: Impressions of


Cup Corals. When studying coral, or any other non-human species, “thick participation”

is less a straightforward cultural exchange. But Hayward had recorded knowledge in her

body, and she employed many languaging strategies to communicate this meaning. One

of the most striking is structural: before anything else in the article, she described the

living contextual environment of the ocean surrounding the marine biology lab, and

centered the medium of water. She then wrote in “watery” ways: she described the “moist

threads” she found herself entangled in; she questioned directional flow; she called

attention to how easily boundaries are dissolved; and she used words fluidly, inventing

words, making verbs of nouns and adjectives. What she implied contextually and

connotatively, she also made explicit: “Insides become outsides and exteriorities become

interiorities; sensoria and sensations are made and unmade. The power of who observes

and who is observed is tentacled through machines and expertise at ever-changing scales

and grains of resolution” (p. 580). Hayward demonstrated that language was plastic

enough to play in the chiasmatic realms of “multispecies and multimedium sensing” (p.

582).

Hayward’s work is particularly relevant to depth psychologists, who are tasked

with engaging in “thick participation” not with other living species, per say, but with

autonomous beings in the imaginal realms. When describing the mundus imaginalis,

Corbin (1972) wrote in ways nearly identical to Hayward’s expression of the sensorium:

“this world is at the limit where the relationship of interiority expressed by the

preposition ‘in,’ ‘inside of,’ is inverted. Spiritual bodies or entities are not in any world,

nor in their world, in the same manner as a material body is in its place or may be

contained in another body. On the contrary, their world is in them” (p. 10). This


demonstrates that we are working with the same themes when we study sensorimotor

phenomenon and psychic phenomenon—permeable boundaries that resist fixed location

and definition, and operate in tangled, mutually influencing relationships. There is great

value in rendering the imagination as a sensory organ to understand its capacities, and our

languaging of these phenomena suffers when we fantasize that language is primarily an

act of disembodied cognition. As we expand our conception of voice and languaging into

the realm of the senses, will further productive dialogue become possible about the

relationship between the body and the imaginal and material worlds?

Hillman (1992) spent a great deal of his career trying to reform psychology of its

fantasy of science and its deadened relationship with language. He called for a return to

meaning-making through speech of the soul. He wrote in The Thought of the Heart and

the Soul of the World that “the heart is the seat of imagination, that imagination is the

authentic voice of the heart, so that if we speak from the heart we must speak

imaginatively” (locs. 31-32). This conception of the heart and the imagination as sensory

organs, capable of navigating and speaking from the mundus imaginalis resonates with

Merleau-Ponty’s framing of language as capable of creating a new sense organ within. In

The Wounded Researcher, Romanyshyn (2013) brought the body more literally,

materially into the discourse of alchemical hermeneutics, making the connection even

stronger. His intuition was that in the reading or voicing of text,

[S]omething of the animal of mind is felt in the body, in the expansion and

contraction of the chest, in the vibrations felt in the throat, and in the resonances

experiences in the sinus cavities and the ears. In this process of embodying one’s


reading, meaning is no longer a matter of a Cartesian mind making sense of a text.

It is a matter of sense arising from sensing the text and being sensed by it (p. 298).

Romanyshyn seems on the edge of articulating the sensory capacities of the voice and

languaging, and was certainly intuiting the same themes as Merleau-Ponty.

For Abram (1996), and perhaps for Romanyshyn, too, this isn’t so much a frontier

of the future, but a remembering of the past. In The Spell of the Sensuous, he drew

together linguistic anthropology and ecology with phenomenology to trace the history of

human language and embed it within the living, sentient natural world. He emphasized

the origin of language in the spoken medium, evolving in an animistic context and

inextricably tied to breath and the singularly sacred powers ascribed to air. Air was the

sensuous, experiential source of the concept of psyche, and our participation with it

through breath and language gave us powers of manifestation. In the Kabbalist

understanding, “to combine the vowels—the sounded breath—with the visible

consonants was akin to breathing life into a clump of clay” (p. 245). It was the

technological medium of the written language that served to dissociate us from the

sensing, sensuous world. Now, “every human language secretes a kind of perceptual

boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and

the sensuous terrain that they inhabit” (p. 253). According to Abram, this boundary is

porous and permeable, for the “I” hermetically sealed within an interiority is a sort of

forgetting—a story that can be untold. In Abram’s view we can tell different stories about

how we “make sense” that challenge the false dichotomies of inner and outer, conscious

and unconscious, civilized and wild. Imagining voice and languaging as senses might be

one such story.


Finally, a review of literatures on voice and languaging on the somatic depth

psychology frontier would not be complete without attending to the post-Jungian theory

and work of Woodman (1985). In her work to bring soma into integration with Jungian

theory, she explicitly addressed the importance of the spoken, bodily voice. She wrote in

The Pregnant Virgin that body and psyche could be brought into authenticity and soul

through the voice: “In those brief moments when we do manage to free our authentic

voices, the whole being resonates with that truth, and a marriage of personal and

transpersonal is palpable in the environment” (p. 64). Her practice of Body-Soul Rhythms

was created in tandem with dance educator Mary Hamilton and voice coach Ann Skinner,

and incorporates work with opening to one’s voice. In an interview with Stromsted

(2005), she articulated then that she felt her talent and expertise was in the

“understanding of metaphor and sound” (p. 12) and how together with the image in the

body, they release energy. Finally, there is ample evidence that Woodman’s personal

healing work to inhabit her own ensouled, sensing voice, transformed her as a facilitator

and speaker, enabling her to reach clients and students in deeper ways. Sieff (2017)

reported that, “Woodman shared stories from her life in a way that was profoundly

healing…[She] gave us an example of somebody speaking one’s personal reality in a way

that was authentically connected to feeling, but which was also contained and

responsible” (p. 14). I believe that Woodman’s body of work, engaged with from the

perspective of voice as sense, will offer critical support to the development of a theory of

voice and languaging grounded equally in psyche, soma and soul.


Voice and languaging in trauma theory and trauma healing practices

It is in the realm of trauma, I believe, that the human stakes of this work may be

most fully articulated. Ogden, Minton, and Pain’s (2006) Trauma and the Body: A

Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy gave an overview of the somatic interventions

used by psychotherapists to help clients work through unresolved trauma. The

introduction began with the complaint that, “The body, for a host of reasons, has been left

out of the ‘talking cure’” (loc. 368), framing their work as a response to psychotherapy’s

ineffective reliance on voice connected to mind. Language and voice here are categorized

as a “top-down” intervention, a use of cognition to regulate affect and sensation.

Conversely, in “bottom-up” approaches, sensory and kinesthetic experiences are the

entry-point. The wish here is to reduce language’s dominance in the client’s self-

experiencing, for “talking about” is divorced from an immediate observation of

experience. Curiously, according to Ogden, Minton, and Pain, this treatment depends on

the therapist’s ability to use language and voice skillfully, to make “contact statements”

that keep clients aware, present and engaged relationally, but there is no attention paid to

the resonant field established by the therapist’s voice, or moves made to imagine a kind

of voice and languaging that could be both “bottom-up” and “top-down.” Would a theory

that saw the voice and languaging of the therapist as sensing within a resonant, relational

field, be one way of understanding the effectiveness of these “contact statements” at

maintaining dynamic connection? If the sensory capacities of voice and languaging were

left undeveloped or otherwise impacted by trauma in clients, might this be one way of

understanding why their languaging in talk therapy is ineffective?


Levine’s (2010) seminal work In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases

Trauma and Restores Goodness also centers the impact of trauma on the body. Levine’s

treatment modality, Somatic Experiencing, relies on voice in ways similar to body

psychotherapy—as a tool of social connection between therapist and client. Though

Levine has also been suspect of talking alone as a path to healing, he has deeply explored

sounding, particularly the integration of “voo” sounds into his trauma healing practice

with powerful results (p. 125). The “voo” sound, he believed, “opens, expands and

vibrates the viscera” (p. 126) in a way that initiates change in the nervous system. Levine

has a clear awareness of the voice’s resonant powers, how specific sounds might shape

our sensations and experience, and the importance of the voice’s work with breath. A

deeper dive into the literatures of Somatic Experiencing may yield rich theoretical ground

for a sensory or “bottom-up” understanding of voice and languaging.

Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal

Spirit (1996) and Trauma and the Soul (2013) grounded trauma theory in the depth

psychological perspective, particularly regarding the inner archetypal figures that arise in

response to trauma. For Kalsched (1996) language is associated with the rational “logos”

function, which is “the way in which our minds give form and representation to otherwise

undifferentiated input from the body and its senses” (p. 63). It is crucial to making

experience comprehensible, but in trauma, our mind, body and spirit split (p. 67).

Messages from the body aren’t available to the explanatory powers of cognition and

language, and so they stay pre-symbolic (p. 67). According to Kalsched, this means the

traumatized person “will not be able to work through sensate experience psychically–to

play with symbolic meanings–and this will rob him or her of the experience of feeling


real and fully alive, a tragic condition we know as de-personalization” (p. 67). The goal

of psychoanalysis then in this framework can be considered to facilitate the reconnection

of spirit and matter in psyche.

Kalsched’s case studies describe powerful relationships with inner figures and

feature ongoing dialogues with daimonic voices. Though he does not directly engage

with an embodied theory of voice or languaging, we can infer from his references to the

“mytho-poetic riches” (2013, p. 280) of the inner world; from the copious amounts of

dialogue with patients that he recounts in his case studies; and from his great attention to

etymology of any words that arise in sessions, that the voice and languaging are honored

and active parts of Kalsched’s depth trauma healing process. One of his case studies, in

particular, involved a client Deborah whose mother severely ridiculed and shamed her,

whose effects she described by saying: “She took my voice away” (p. 289). Early in their

therapeutic process, they began “together to contemplate (and find words for) the

speechless horror of her early beginnings” (p. 293). An entirely rational logos-centered

understanding of languaging does not account for how this process works. While he does

not explicitly address it as such, Kalsched’s work suggests that the psyche does have

access to an articulate realm, and that embodied soul speech is a crucial part of trauma

healing.

It is van der Kolk (2014) that most clearly articulates the powers and frustrations

around voicing in trauma theory. He included a chapter on language in the section of The

Body Keeps the Score on paths to recovery. As van der Kolk points out, voicing our

trauma is necessary to diminish isolation and get us assistance in healing, but it also

reveals our changed selves, and confronts us with the difficulties of languaging our


experiences. Van der Kolk argued that, “Language evolved primarily to share ‘things out

there,’ not to communicate our inner feelings, our interiority” (locs. 4426-4427), a

statement that defines the need for the interventions of phenomenology. Yet he also cited

the growing body of work that demonstrates that writing and expressive language arts are

medicinal, and ends with an unequivocal statement on the value of voice to trauma

healing, at least in its storying capacities: “There is no question that language is essential:

Our sense of Self depends on being able to organize our memories into a coherent whole”

(locs. 4613-4614). His observations are that this comes in the final stages of the healing

process, after the body has been reinhabited fully. This temporal and linear framing of the

trauma healing process might be common among practitioners, who clearly experience

beginning, middle and advanced or ending stages of work with clients. But I believe the

suggestion that languaging is only possible or essential later in a process is, at best,

imprecise. Voicing and languaging may be possible and happening at every moment in

the trauma healing process. They are not activities that surface as a product of healing

and clarity, but rather ongoing processes that sense and create that healing and clarity.

This lens of the voice as sense could be said to challenge temporal frames of trauma

healing that place voice and languaging as culminating activities, and may offer instead a

more accurate, trans-temporal understanding.

Having said that, there are times when languaging is not yet possible: during

infancy and in to childhood, when it has not yet been acquired. The study of voice and

languaging at the site of trauma therefore also necessitates a look at theorists who utilize

a developmental framework. Our vocal and languaging abilities are acquired along

recognizable developmental patterns across infancy, childhood and adolescence, as laid


out in Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith’s (2001) Pathways to Language. The

developmental time period according to Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith during which

one experiences trauma or traumatic interruption would therefore potentially influence

both the quality and severity of impact on voicing and languaging. Understanding the

effects of traumatic environments and interpersonal trauma in infancy and early-

childhood trauma has long been a focus of psychodynamic theory (Fairbairn, 1981,

Klein, 1932, Winnicott, 1973), but in looking through the literature this view seems to be

still somewhat a frontier of traumatology. Van der Kolk (2014) led a well-supported

effort to get a developmental trauma disorder and its symptoms recognized in the DSM-

V. While he was not successful, the dialogue and effort appears to be ongoing (Bremness

& Polzin, 2014). This research aims to be informed, then, by developmental perspectives,

provided by Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, Van der Kolk, and Heller and Lapierre’s

excellent (2012) Healing Developmental Trauma. Together they will instruct and

complexify the conversation between various theories and practitioners as they are

examined within the light of questions about the sensory capacities of voice and

languaging, and whether and how this capacity is developed and integrated.

While there is no consensus yet that I have found in searching the literature on

voice and languaging in traumatology, there are healing practitioners not mentioned

above working with voice in intentional ways. I will very briefly touch on them here,

with the intention of fully investigating their literatures in this research. Gendlin’s (1978,

1996) technique of Focusing is about making contact with a kind of inner bodily

awareness called the “felt sense.” A key step of Focusing is the moment when one gets

what Gendlin calls a “handle” on the felt sense, or the right word that describes the senses


quality. When the word isn’t right, one “[sounds] dissatisfied” (1978, p. 16). When the

right word is voiced, “relief…is clearly audible” (1978, p. 16). For Gendlin, the felt-sense

is “unsplit” (1978, p. 192), a site where conceptual thought (logos) and the experiential

soma are not equated but brought into inseparable relationship with the capacity to brings

new insights into focus. Thus, practitioners of Focusing are already using the sensory

capacities of the voice. Gendlin’s (1997) philosophical work Experiencing and the

Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective

explicates the genesis and evolution of his perspective on this process, and will offer

theoretical foundation to this research. Preston (2008) worked to further communicate

Gendlin’s contribution to psychoanalytic theory, specifically with his explorations of the

implicit, movement between the unconscious and conscious minds, how we search for

words, and the paradox of nonduality. Rappaport’s (2008) Focusing-Oriented Art

Therapy: Accessing the Body's Wisdom and Creative Intelligence introduced the

integration of Gendlin’s work with the practice of art therapy. Tobin and Tisdell’s (2015)

narrative research into embodied learning and creative writing processes offered a look at

how Focusing is being applied outside of therapeutic settings, in the expressive arts, and

called for further research. This inquiry into the voice as sense is an answer to that call.

Adler (2002) wrote extensively about Authentic Movement, which, while rooted

in the embodied arts of dance and sighted witnessing, involves a practice of conscious

speaking. Language is understood to be a sacred bridge between body and consciousness,

with the potential to heal any splitting in the experience of the self. The realization of

such a unity is achieved through a practice of “embodied text,” and has transpersonal


implications as well. Adler made explicit what Authentic Movement regards as the

connection between voicing, the body and the unconscious or soul dimension:

Words that are seeded in the body knowing, birthed into consciousness and

arriving into the world in a shape, named, and offered, can be expressions of

devotion. When these words emerge from direct experience in the conscious

body, out of a clear space, unencumbered by the density of specific personhood,

they can become energy, illuminating a glimpse of the union between oneself and

the Divine (locs. 2246-2249).

I consider this work to be critical to imagining what a somatic psychopoetics of language

would look like in practice. The designation “psychopoetics” has been broadly used in

linguistics, poetics and aesthetics to mean everything from the study of how a reader

processes and reacts to literary texts mentally, to how we might psychoanalyze an

author’s work and the author herself through her work. Slatterly (2013) more recently

defined the term for his article Mimesis, Neurology, and the Aesthetics to mean “how the

psyche makes meaning of an event by offering a narrative, an extended metaphor, to

reveal the inner sleeve of the event through an energy transfer from the event to a form of

‘affective presence’” (p. 268). One of the turns that emerged from conceiving this

dissertation research was the felt need for a theory of languaging that joined psyche with

soma more equally and intentionally—for a somatic psychopoetics. In doing so, I am

attempting to create a theoretical container capable of explaining what Adler has

described.

Newham’s (1997, 1999) modality of Voice Movement Therapy is also critical. He

researched and wrote a history of the use of voice and singing in therapy in Therapeutic


Voicework. His emphasis is on vocalization rather than verbalization, and his work grew

out of extensive research with nonverbal populations. He united physiology and

laryngology with psychodynamic theory to develop a methodology for interpreting vocal

sound and a practice of vocal release, both elucidated in Using Voice and Movement in

Therapy. For Newham, the voice is “a channel through which to express or ‘push out’

something from the inside…a major bridge between the inner world of mood, emotion,

image, thought and experience and the outer world of relationship, discourse and

interaction” (1999, p. 16). I intend to put VMT in conversation with phenomenological

challenges to the inner/outer split to trouble the clarity of the boundary Newham asserts,

and see how these ideas and practices react to a more relational perspective of

embodiment. I will also be particularly curious about the transition he has witnessed in

clients from a quality of voicing that is characterized as cathartic discharge to voicing

from a place of “artistic distance” (pp. 180-181), which seems to Newham to both

transcend and include catharsis. Would one way to describe these transformations be that

the client’s voice is sensing the safety and relational space that can witness and contain

this catharsis, and then when this release is complete, returns or begins to sense and

respond to the dynamic resonant environment within and without?

This conversation would be woefully incomplete without the profound work of

the field of expressive arts therapy. Levine (1997, 1999) is one of many who established

the field’s theoretical scaffolding, and called for a new poetic psychology in Poiesis: The

Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul. The languaging practice referred to

as poetry is often applauded and defended by depth psychologists as an agent of healing

an integration, though it is considered a special case of language, in contrast to more


everyday language. Siegel (2007) explained the same phenomenon from the perspective

of neuroscience in The Mindful Brain. Siegel states that everyday words “are the

cognitive contraptions we use to work our way through the world of uncertainty” (p.

160). But poetry for Siegel is somehow a “bottom-up” or right-brain dominant use of

language that “artfully [induces] an integrated state that melts away the simple secondary

enslavements that everyday top-down usage of words can become” (p. 161). The sensory

understanding of voice will no doubt further enrich this dialogue, and offer more paths

for investigation.

McNiff (1992) deeply explored engagement with languaging in Art as Medicine,

forging connections with voice and depth practice. He attributed the origins of expressive

arts therapies to Jung’s practice of active imagination, and he posited that “Imaginal

figures appear whenever we immerse ourselves in the speech of imagination and become

a ‘stranger’ to nonpoetic language. They are inseparable from the language itself

[emphasis added]” (p. 82). This description of language brushes up against the more

chiasmatic understandings expressed by Merleau-Ponty and Sobchack, while being

firmly planted in depth psychological theory.

Kossak (2015) is also developing theory and practice in the realms of Expressive

Arts Therapy, and his book Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy lays some critical

foundations for exploring the sensory capacities of the voice in the therapeutic context.

He devoted a chapter to “Rhythm and Resonance” where he put Dr. Hans Jenny’s

experiments with waves and cymatics (visualizing sound waves) into conversation with

studies of entrainment (our understanding of tuning forks and sympathetic resonance

phenomenon) and Kohut’s (1971) theory of affect attunement. He included the voice as


well, and reported that voice quality is one of the ways he tunes in to discover what his

patients are expressing and experiencing:

Like in the cymatic experiments, the sound quality or vibrational quality in the

voice…will have an effect on the body (form) and the mind (formation of thought

patterns). The quality of the expression will also begin to translate into an

embodied empathic interpersonal resonance that will also begin to change the

inner and outer way someone expresses their life (p. 98).

Kossak described interventions he makes with patients at the level of the voice, having

them sound different vowels or qualities to awaken new, alternative energies. A sensory

theory of voicing would support and deepen this work, and further Kossak’s exploration

into the nature of resonance within and between bodies.

While perhaps not positioned as healers of trauma, vocal teachers in the world of

acting, singing and theatre have long been significant contributors to theory and practice

on voice and languaging. I want to look specifically at the work of Kristin Linklater

(2006), whose eponymic method and book Freeing the Natural Voice are influential in

the field of voice work. She stated two main assumptions that underlie her method: 1)

that all humans possess a natural voice with the capacity to express all manner of

complex or subtle experiences, and 2) that the acquired tensions, defenses, inhibitions

and blocks “diminish the efficiency of the natural voice to the point of distorted

communication” (p. 7). Her method—a complex collection of experiential exercises

exploring breath, sound, movement and words—is intended to help actors “produce a

voice that is in direct contact with emotional impulses, shaped by the intellect but not

inhibited by it” (p.8). I believe a review of Linklater’s work will be a necessary


integration to the literatures on therapeutic work with voice, as I seek discover how

tensions between cognition and feeling are already being resolved in practice.

Finally, I will dive more directly into literatures that describe the vibrational and

resonant capacities of voice, and explore how those theories challenge traditional

understandings of voice and language. While acknowledging that “the word ‘vibrational’

conjures up an image of something vibrating or making sound” (locs. 152-153), Gerber’s

(2000) A Practical Guide to Vibrational Medicine defined it as referring to “an evolving

viewpoint of health and illness that takes into account all the many forms and frequencies

of vibrating energy that contribute to the ‘multidimensional’ human energy system” (locs.

157-159). In addition to providing some theoretical framework for expanding voice

beyond its transmission of sound waves, Gerber’s work brings into this review the

practices of verbal visualization (loc. 2053) and techniques of the chakra system (locs.

418-520) which will provide a valuable perspective to this research. Understandings of

mantras will be fleshed out with Judith’s (1996) Eastern Body, Western Mind:

Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self, which also gave an in-depth

treatment to the throat chakra and its indicated healing practices. The chakra named

vissudha, meaning purification, is all about rhythm. It has the task of detoxifying and

enhancing the resonance of all the subtle vibrations within us, and bringing them into

coherence with the vibrational fields outside of us—other people, and the environment.

This is largely accomplished through the sounds that we make, which use “the same

primordial energies that create the world around us” (loc. 5445). This creative, relational

and vibrational description clearly supports a somatic perspective on voice.


Goldman’s (1992) Healing Sounds attended to harmonics in the voice and other

instruments, and suggested that the frontier of healing and wellness is creating a “sound

mind and body” through sound and harmonic frequency therapies (p. 89). This will round

out the review with a look at the healing practices of toning and overtoning, which

enables an individual “to use their voice to scan a person’s body and energy field and

then project sound [harmonic frequencies] into specific portions of their body and this

field” (p. 142). The use of the voice to perform a “scan” is an apt description of a

sensory capacity.

Voice and languaging in sensory studies

The way we conceptualize the senses has been changing for some time. For this

last section of the review, I will look at the frontier of research into the sensorium and use

existing findings to support shaping the lens of “voice as sense.” Meyer and Rothen

(2015) synthesized the current topics being explored in synaesthesia research in

Developing Synaesthesia: A Primer. But Simner’s (2012) article Defining Synaesthesia is

perhaps a more a robust introduction to this exciting frontier. She argued that the field

should move past defining the phenomenon as a “‘merging of the senses’ or as some type

of ‘cross-sensory’ experience in which sensory/perceptual stimuli trigger unusual

sensory/perceptual experiences” (p. 2). She found that “for a large number of

synaesthetes, the condition is not purely sensory/perceptual (with respect to the inducer at

least), and that any definition reliant on this claim might overlook the overwhelming

majority of (linguistic) manifestations of synaesthesia” (p. 3). This suggests that it is the

purely cognitive definition of language that has been a challenge to this area of research.

For Simner, a move to neurobiological definition of synesthesia solves the problem—as


opposed to getting curious about a sensory definition of language. The phenomenon then

becomes one defined by hyper-connectivity or hyper-association in the brain, which is

also referred to interestingly as “cross-talk” (p. 9) between brain regions that do not

typically interact. One of the fascinating consequences of this definition is that persons

who are particularly verbally adept might be considered synaesthetes with hyper-

association in the fronto-temporal language regions (p. 10). This has been an area of

concern for Simner since her 2007 article Beyond Perception: Synaesthesia as a

Psycholinguistic Phenomenon, and suggests that new research into the definition of

language and voice is called for.

Anaki and Henik (2017) took the discourse to a similar edge with their recent

article Bidirectionality in Synesthesia and Metaphor, which put Simner’s work in

conversation with the latest research in metaphor and embodied cognition. They point out

that some have claimed that synesthesia can be entirely explained within the framework

of metaphor (p. 142), which points to a blurring of boundaries between sensation,

perception and cognition in both theoretical and empirical research. They were

particularly interested in the way synesthetic and metaphoric processes mirror each other,

including recent findings in the research of both that dispel beliefs in their

unidirectionality. Though the research has not arrived anywhere definitively, there is

evidence for the existence of neural and anatomic foundations of a chiasmatic

understanding of language. Simultaneous cross-activation of perceptual and conceptual

maps would present a serious challenge to the idea that are clear distinctions,

neuroscientifically, between cognition and sensation.


Studies into human echo-location provide further fodder for a reconstruction of

sensory capacities and voice. Research has shown that humans—like dolphins, bats and

other animals—are capable of using reflected sound waves to perceive physical

characteristics of their environment. Pittenger and Stoffregen (1995) argued in their

article Human Echolocation as a Basic Form of Perception and Action that rather than

conceiving of echo-location as a special, learned capacity of the blind, it should be

understood as a basic ability of both blind and sighted humans. Most of the research thus

far has been behavioral, so we still know little about how this relationship between what

is traditionally thought of as auditory and visual sensory capacities works in the human

brain. Thaler, Arnott, and Goodale (2011) published one such study of neural correlates

that showed echolocation clicking activating the visual cortex in blind participants,

without any detectable activation in the auditory cortex, and other exciting cross-modal

results. What does it mean if the visual cortex is processing echoes? Neurobiological

research is radically challenging our constructs of cognition, sensation and perception in

ways that may have been predicated by the phenomenologists. The field of

neurophenomenology is, in fact, leading the interdisciplinary dialogue between the

experimental sciences and phenomenological investigations of experience and

subjectivity (Gordon, 2013).

Research into the mysteries of affective transmission provides further critical

perspectives. Colombetti’s (2014) The Feeling Body: Affective Neuroscience Meets the

Enactive Mind is a resource. In defining the realm of affectivity, she claimed that “even

the simplest living systems have a capacity to be sensitive to what matters to them, and in

this sense they are affective” (p. 2). “Mind” for Colembetti is a sense-making activity, an


activity of relating and responding to stimuli is sensed as significant for the organism,

both endogenous and exogenous, and this activity is cognition. Brennan’s (2006) work

on affect transmission exemplified how theorists are problematizing the relationship

between biological and social phenomenon, going far beyond the territories of gene

versus meme. Here we see the vast mysteries still presented by the olfactory sense, which

is finding new life in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology. Whether affect transmission

is happening along visual, hormonal, or pheromonal channels, it as a challenge to the

paradigm of “Neo-Darwinism, which is anchored in the assumptions of self-containment”

(p. 75). However, even “the most hardened materialist would agree that ultimately all

differences registered through chemical as well as electrical means are differences in the

rate of pulsation or vibration, registered in the heart and affecting variations throughout

the circulatory system” (p. 96). Brennan seems to be suggesting here that the heart be

considered a sensory organ.

While she stops short of expanding into a sensory or vibratory understanding of

voice and language, other theorists have argued that language is inherently affective.

Wilce’s (2009) work in Language and Emotion certainly makes this argument. In his

anthropology of this topic, he contended that not only has language evolved for emotional

expression through sound, but that it cannot be separated from its context-specific,

sociocultural signaling, for “we are hard-wired for intersubjectivity, not for private

emotional experience” (loc. 2591). Jenson (2014) concluded his article Emotion in

Languaging: Languaging as Affective, Adaptive, and Flexible Behavior in Social

Interaction with this statement:


…emotions are part and parcel of our ecology in the manner of which they are

intertwined with our languaging behavior in the animal(human)-environment

system. Embodied emotional actions are enacted in languaging as affordance to

locate and orient us to the possibilities that we encounter. In that sense, emotions

help us to build an interpersonal ‘geography’ for us to share, participate in or

confront (p. 12).

Jenson comes close to imagining language as a form of emotional echo-location.

Literatures on the acoustic theory of speech production (Lieberman & Blumstein, 1988,

Scott, S. & McGettigan, 2016) and Szendy’s (2015) exploration of sounding and

acoustical architecture lend support by pointing out how we understand resonating spaces

through our bodies.

Summary

These three literary categories are perhaps not self-evident. They emerged out of

my own sensing, voicing and languaging process, as I worked toward the development of

this dissertation topic. I first began to home in on my strong interest in working with

voice and languaging—as a way to both integrate my new field of learning fully with my

professional and artistic practices in creative writing and performance, and to address my

irritation with the simultaneous dismissal and mystification of speech and languaging I

had found in the literatures of somatics and depth psychology. I was also being called,

through my dreaming and waking work of creative engagement with the unconscious, to

work with trauma, but I was not clear at all, on how these would intersect. As I journaled

and attempted to write process papers for a dissertation development course, questions

proliferated. What made writing in somatics or depth psychology “good”? When did I


experience ideas being communicated well? Where was I experiencing the most

confusion? What if I owned that confusion, not as evidence of my own failure to

understand, but as valuable data? What happened in my body as I approached, and then

experience epiphany, clarity? What did any of this have to do with trauma? Why is there

so much talk about how hard it is talk about trauma? I think I know what they mean, but

do I really know what they mean?

My theoretical lens only emerged after I began voicing my questions out loud, to

myself, to friends, and to my cohort, within a dissertation development work group, and

discovering how much information was in the resonance, or lack thereof. The somatic

and depth practices I had learned allowed me to witness myself in this process of

discovery—a process that could only be facilitated by speaking aloud to a listening

group. New questions formed. I thought, what is happening? What does my voice know,

and how does it know it? Could the voice somehow be sensing? I began to pursue an

education in what, exactly, a sense was. What I found supported my rather destabilizing

questions. I also found the crucial third point that allowed what was emerging to take

shape. The literatures of somatic studies and depth psychology marked the general

territory that I was hoping to contribute to. The category of trauma literature, both from

theorists and healing practitioners, was necessary to ground the inquiry in a location

where real suffering could be witnessed, the stakes could be felt, and new insights could

be tested for relevance and efficacy. And literatures from the field sensory studies, in the

midst of being revolutionized by phenomenology and neuroscience, were needed to give

context, both theoretical and empirical, that supported a radical reimagining of voice and

languaging.


This particular grouping of literatures is being put into conversation with each

other for the first time, which is itself a significant contribution. As I began to allow

myself to more fully imagine and voice the previously unimaginable to me—the voice as

sense—I also began to see something else that I was after. I was looking for a theory of

voice and languaging that could both explain that sensory capacities I was experiencing

and witnessing, and serve this new field of somatic depth psychology. While I did not

find a fully articulated theory already in existence, I found pieces of it already in

existence, in literatures throughout the three categories in this review. I began to refer to

this theory as a somatic psychopoetics. My hope is that the creation and grouping of these

literary categories will yield solid theoretical footing upon which to develop and cohere

this new research lens, and the theory born in its wake. I also hope that it is useful to

other researchers, as an example of how a path of analysis can arise out of the questions

themselves; a demonstration of the sensing voice at work.

All together, these literatures point to an exciting evolution of how we understand

how the body senses and makes sense. I believe this research will support new

understandings of the voice as a sense that creates a resonant receptive field capable of

feeling out emotion and affective spaces, both within the body’s interior resonant

chambers and without in the human and non-human environment. Together with the

literatures on voice and languaging in somatic studies, depth psychology and the

literatures of trauma theory and healing practices, they will hopefully build a pathway

toward a theory of somatic psychopoetics.


Methodology

Methodological Framework

The aim of this study is to conceive of the voice as an embodied sense,

particularly at the site of trauma, and to see what perspectives and understandings that

may reveal for somatic studies, depth psychology and trauma healing theory and practice.

The research questions born from this aim are themselves an intervention in our Western

epistemologies, in how we question and how we know. The assumption that the voice has

sensory capacities, and that voice and languaging may sense meaning in an embodied

way, challenges traditional assumptions of the mind body split, and suggests an emergent

qualitative approach to inquiry itself. I am reminded of Aizenstat’s (2006) guidance in

Dream Tending, for how one might enter the realm of the living dream. Step one is to

“meet the dream in the way of the dream” (p. 24). Similarly, a methodology must meet

the subject in the way of the subject—an exploration of the sensory voice must take place

through the instrument of sensory voicing, using a bodily and metaphorically coherent

methodology. This inquiry, then, necessitates an embodied, spoken methodology that

privileges the aural and the oral.

Implications for data collection. This has many implications for what data

should be sought, and what methods of data collection are suited. Data from an interview

or process observation might include verbal, nonverbal, silent, breathing and gestural

data, reported from both subjective and intersubjective/objective observation. It may also

include emotional, affective and other “state” data, as well as inner voice, covert speech

or verbal thinking data. Voicing, languaging, the auditory sense, and the interoceptive

sense will be considered primary tools for data collection. Interviews and process


observations will be recorded as both audio and video, in addition to being documented

through field notes in the form of voice memos, written notes, and ongoing iterative

verbal and written reflections. While field notes and reflections are common data

collection techniques, the interrelationship between voicing/languaging and the

technology of writing will give them a heightened significance as data sets for this

inquiry.

Furthermore, voicing and languaging are understood here as relational

phenomenon, their enactment interwoven with and responsive to the human and

nonhuman environment. The relational and environmental circumstances under which the

data is given will dramatically shape the data. Data should therefore be captured from

varied relational and auditional situations. These situations include written texts, both

from those with which I cannot speak, and those with which I may speak; self-talk and

journaling or writing to the self; writing intended for a reader or a listener; dyadic

speaking and listening; and voicing to groups of various sizes. Voicing should also be

captured from varying social power positions, such as those from professional, academic

and licensed professional backgrounds, as well as the autodidactic and nonprofessional.

The power relationship between researcher and participants will also be noted and

handled mindfully, with attention to its potential influence on the data. For example, I

will exclude participants who I have previously been in a position of power over, such as

students or clients; I will attempt to dress, sit, and speak in ways that minimize status

differentials, intentionally shifting my own status to meet theirs; and I will attempt to be

empowering in my languaging, reminding participants frequently of their autonomy and


powers of consent. Finally, the physical acoustic environment under which data is

collected will be carefully documented and evaluated comparatively for its impact.

Implications for data analysis. The tools and instruments employed in data

analysis will also be primarily embodied and spoken. Todres’ (2007) Embodied Enquiry

offered guidance for enacting embodied analytical technique, integrating both

phenomenological research approaches and Gendlin's Focusing technique in his methods.

He called for research that attempts to make manifest the presence of a lived experience

through words, “an aesthetic pursuit that centrally requires the lived body as the ‘place’

where intimate understanding of both experience and language happen” (p. 5). Led by

Todres’ work, and the necessities of this inquiry, the instrument of my own sensing voice

will guide data analysis. This will include the use of embodied transcription, as outlined

by Brooks (2010), in which interviews are transcribed with one’s own voice using voice

recognition software. It will also include the watching and rewatching of video of

interviews and processes, both with and without audio, noting any contrasting

experiential data. It will include engaging in reflection and analysis using both

extemporaneous voice memos and writing read aloud. The writing itself will explore

formal, informal and poetic modes of expression. Prendergast, Leggo and Sameshima’s

(2009) Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, will ground my use of

poetic inquiry and poetic methods of analysis. Finally, the hermeneutic technique of

“close reading” any written data must be accompanied by the reading of data aloud.

Throughout, my own interoceptive experience of resonance and the absence of resonance

will be used in my analysis.


This approach also suggests certain aspects of the data be given heightened

analytical attention. The dynamic properties of the voice are paramount, assessed through

qualities of pitch, volume, pace, rhythm, breathiness, nasal-quality, tension, accent,

perceived emotional inflection, and more. Additionally, the specifics of participant

languaging are of great interest, including vocabulary, tense choices and shifts,

misspeaking and “slips,” ironic or sarcastic usage. In Coppin and Nelson’s (2005) The

Art of Inquiry, they described a central move of depth psychological research as

imagining language “as a living being and co-participant in the work” that is “capable of

constructing reality on its own” (p. 109), so attention will be paid to who, exactly, is

speaking. In this understanding, mistakes, misspeaking, typos, and words with enigmatic

meaning are portals to psyche and “potential veins of gold” (p. 110). Equally, the

meaning of silences, and how that meaning is known or conveyed or not known, is

important to this research. Finally, and perhaps of most importance, I will be curious

about when a participant seems to be in conscious possession of their voice as a sense,

and when they do not, and why.

Challenges presented by the framework. The nature of this research and its

potential transformative framework present some challenges, as do the meta-dimensions

of the study. Hillman (1972) opened his section in Re-Visioning Psychology on

psychologizing or see-through with a quote from the Enneads: “Our general instinct to

seek and learn will, in all reason, set us inquiring into the nature of the instrument with

which we search” (p. 115). This is in many ways an apt description of this research—an

inquiry into the nature of the instrument of voice, an instrument by which we sense

meaning. It sets up an ouroboric or recursive dynamic, an epistemic dilemma that shares


territory with consciousness studies and physics, or as McCulloch (1965) so colorfully

described, “the very den of the metaphysician, strewn with the bones of the former

explorers” (p. 143). It is important to acknowledge the heightened potential for confusion

when it comes to an inquiry into languaging, while nonetheless forging ahead. The stakes

for the development of a somatic and depth informed theory of voicing and languaging

are high, for both therapeutic practitioners seeking to create the circumstances for

healing, and for scholars seeking to include traditionally excluded and oppressed voices

and ways of knowing into the scientific academy. My intention then, is to design a

methodology that honors these stakes and meets this complexity by attending

systematically to a variation of perspectives.

Additionally, this research faces the challenge of bringing into full view any

assumptions scaffolding the framework. The challenges of subjectivity and meta-

discourse are not new to psychological or philosophical inquiry, nor to any kind of

qualitative inquiry that presences the subjectivity of the researcher. However, tuning into

voicing and languaging in a meta-inquiry may turn the volume up on these common

issues. Language cannot be extricated from cultural and personal values and biases. I will

answer this challenge primarily by enumerating my known assumptions and biases, and

by including a heuristic component to my methods, inquiring into my own voicing and

languaging early and often. I will aim to contextualize my own languaging when

necessary, to illuminate my position, and when possible, I will also seek to discover the

context for participant generated languaging as well, and make note of when it is not

possible. Finally, I will rely on the sensitivity of the bodily instrument itself to alert me to

hidden harmonics of subtext, and make note of when that appears to succeed and how.


To briefly begin to address this here, my philosophy is both social constructivist

and feminist. My situation as a white woman, born and raised in the United States by the

queer community in the 1980s; educated through graduate school in American English;

trained in classical piano, but drawn into poetry as an autodidact; all this and more shapes

my understandings. I am also explicitly informed by the theories of depth psychology,

somatic studies, and poetics. I place myself in the long tradition of those working in the

boundary-blurring, border crossing, shape-shifting, transliteral arts of Hermes and

Mercury, by straddling different worlds, putting distinct disciplines and perspectives in

conversation with one another, and trusting in the combined capacities of language and

voice to do the work of translation, discovery, and integration. I also place myself in the

tradition of somatics studies and phenomenology, who privilege the perspective of

“relational embodiment” (Fikes, personal communication, December 5, 2016). In my

understanding, relational embodiment is a declaration of opposition to the myth of

isolation, and draws everything through the portal of interconnectivity.. It sees living

dynamic processes of mutually influencing interactions between bodies and their

environments in interwoven personal, interpersonal, intrapersonal and transpersonal

spheres. It is, in no small part, this perspective of relational embodiment that makes this

Hermetic, different-world-straddling possible, for it does not see worlds as disconnected,

even as it holds space for difference and distinction. Finally, all of this is being filtered

through the frame provided by trauma theory, which I will briefly address more in depth

here.

Implications at the site of trauma. I am guided through the vast territory

presented by voice and languaging by taking narrower aim, and investigating this


phenomenon at the site of trauma. The introduction of trauma as a frame or location

necessitates some specific additions.

A trauma model must be introduced in my opinion that recognizes different kinds

of silencing: interpersonal, social, and political. As opposed to the silence or quiet that we

choose, that we seek out as tranquil retreat or spacious ground for processing, the kind of

silence that traumatizes is imposed; it dominates. It removes agency. It severs connection.

It isolates. It may be the result of sudden overwhelming threat that activates a freeze or

collapse response in the nervous system. It may be an adaptation to a family system, a

society or dominant culture, or an oppressive political regime. Feminist activist Solnit

(2017) wrote that “Being unable to tell your story is a living death and sometimes a literal

one” (locs. 247). Silencing, then, in the trauma framework, might be considered a kind of

violence that may be enacted interpersonally or through a system that disenfranchises or

makes speech dangerous to safety and survival. Voicing and languaging might then take

on a specific purpose—in aid of the return to power and agency, connection and meaning.

Having access to one’s voice and the right to use it or not use it might be capacities

necessary for the fulfillment of freedom and justice. This research will seek to make

comparisons between the impacts of different kinds of silencing, and discover to what

degree silencing is not only the result but the cause of trauma. I will stay attuned to how

framing the voice as a bodily sense within trauma theory might shape new

understandings of these consequences.

The grounded theory approach. This research aims to move beyond description

and begin to generate a theory of voicing and languaging that can serve theories of

somatic studies, depth psychology, as well as trauma and recovery. Grounded theory is


uniquely suited to support this research orientation. As a parent method for this research,

it offers both a particular logic of inquiry and common stages and procedures to follow,

such as conducting intensive interviewing; coding the data; memo-writing; theoretical

sampling; refining and saturating categories; and sorting, processing and integrating

towards the emerging theory. It also brings a stance of great care for shepherding

emergent concepts and processes, resonant with transformational frameworks such as the

one this research calls for. Charmaz (2014) in her second edition of Constructing

Grounded Theory elucidated critical moves or commitments of a grounded theory

approach that illustrate this resonance (locs. 8741-8751). It encourages researchers to see

themselves as a part of what they study, not separate from it, a stance critical to the

success of meta-inquiry. It fundamentally supports the growth of the methodology from

the research topic, as this methodology has grown out of the needs of the topic of the

sensory voice. Its emphasis on inductive and iterative process, a kind of ongoing

conversation with the data; its capacity to be combinatory, to hold multiple methods of

data collection and several sites of inquiry in an integrating way; and its prescription of

theory testing, a way of voicing the emerging theory to sense its ‘rightness”; all feel

metaphorically coherent with the research topic. Together with the insights gained into

what the specific methodological requirements are of research into the sensory capacities

of voice and languaging at the site of trauma, grounded theory guides the design of the

procedural processes and methods that follow.

Research Design

To meet this need for a combinatory, iterative and integrating design, that meets

voice and languaging in their way and at varied relational locations, the research is


designed with four qualitative methods, all representing a core phenomenon of how we

experience voicing and language, and all in conversation with each other. The first

method is a heuristic study, an attempt to study my own voicing and languaging of

trauma. The second is a hermeneutic study, an investigation into how others have voiced

their own and others’ trauma and the processes that healed them in their writing. The

third method will be to conduct interviews with professional trauma healers and

therapeutic practitioners, to inquire into how they understand languaging and voicing

processes in their work with clients. The fourth method is to conduct both interviews and

an experimental workshop with writers and spoken word artists with no professional

training in trauma healing, but who have experience with languaging and voicing their

own experiences of trauma. I will discuss this work as taking place in three phases – an

initial phase without participants, and two following phases with different participant

groups.

Phase one: heuristic and hermeneutic study (2 months). To develop my own

interpretive lens, and track the process by which that development takes place, a

component of self-focus will be indispensable. Heuristic research is aimed at discovery

through self-inquiry and dialogue (Moustakas, 1994). As a necessary component to this

research, I plan to query my own voice and my voice-as-medium in the initial phase of

the research and throughout the process. This will involve conducting exercises in

voicing my own trauma and healing, with the intention of witnessing my own process. I

will select at least three traumatic experiences I have had, and write poetry or prose or

simply speak aloud and attempt to language and make meaning from them, while

observing my sensing voice in action. I will document this process in both audio


recordings and written text, examining the languaging itself and my observations of the

process. By exploring what my own voice as a sense looks and feels like, particularly

when voicing or languaging trauma, I will be grounding the development of my lens in

my own lived experiences. Discoveries made during this heuristic research will support

what I observe and learn in the field. Rather than posing a potential conflict of interest, I

believe it allows me to avoid such a conflict by clearly and methodically developing my

lens and exposing its frame.

This heuristic study will take place concurrently with a hermeneutic study of the

literature, as preparation for research with participants. While all dissertation research

includes a review of the literature along a chosen analytical path, in this case it carries

special weight as data for the inquiry into voice and languaging. As the ultimate focus of

this research is on the site of trauma and trauma healing, I will engage in close reading of

literatures on trauma healing, to examine their history and acquire tools for the self-

exploration of voice as sense. Particularly for this phase I will also identify and pay

special attention to literatures that offer first-person accounts, narratives, prose and poetry

about the experience of trauma, the healing process, and the work of integration and

meaning-making. The evidence I discover during this phase and how I discover it will be

a navigation device. Together with the heuristic component of study, it will shape the lens

of voice as sense, and inform my methods for interviewing participants.

Phase two: research with participant group one – individual interviews (4

months). For the next phase, I plan to conduct interviews with therapists and

practitioners of healing modalities that involve voicing and languaging. This may include

therapists who use Gendlin’s technique of Focusing; poetry or expressive arts therapists;


practitioners of Newham’s Voice Movement Therapy; sound or energy healers who use

voice; Somatic Experiencing practitioners; Authentic Movement practitioners; and body

psychotherapists, somatic psychotherapists, and trauma therapists of other kinds.

Recruitment will be conducted largely by email, with the use of an electronic flyer,

through networks of therapists and practitioners, via public listservs of different healing

modalities. I will avoid conflicts of interest by declining participation to anyone I have

worked with in a professional capacity, as a client or practitioner, or anyone who works

for an agency or organization I teach or produce events for. Criteria for inclusion as a

participant is that they have had an active professional practice with their healing

modality for at least five years. If the modality requires licensure, then having an active

license with their licensing body will also be criteria for inclusion. Participants must also

be emotionally stable, something that will be assessed when participants interview to

participate in the study. In addition, every participant must have their own ongoing,

therapeutic support in the event that the interview processes cause unanticipated or

unmanageable psychological discomfort. I hope to identify and recruit at least five

therapists and practitioners to be participants for this component of the study. Interested

potential participants will be able to contact me by phone and email. Preliminary

procedures will include an initial phone call or brief in-person meeting to discuss the

research and determine appropriateness, interest and willingness. Upon selection of the

interviewees, at least 2 and no more than 4 interviews will be scheduled with each

participant, at least 8 weeks apart, with at least one week between each scheduled

interview.


As Charmaz (2014) recommended for grounded theory-guided qualitative inquiry,

these interviews will be a “gently-guided, one-sided conversation that explores research

participants’ perspective on their personal experience with the research topic” (locs.

1941-1942). Participants will be recorded by both audio and video, to capture both voice

and bodily, gestural data. Audio of interviews will be transcribed using techniques of

embodied transcription. Video will be reviewed both with and without audio, and

extensive voice memos and written notes will be taken to collect data. Locations for

interviews will be kept consistent if possible, but may vary. Some may take place in the

practitioner’s therapeutic office or studio if scheduling does not allow for a more neutral

space. Whenever possible, interviews will take place in person in a recording studio,

where quality of audio and video recording can be guaranteed. If there are variations in

location, they will be carefully documented as important context for data comparison. I

will store all data securely, using password-encrypted data storage devices for electronic

data, and locked cabinets for physical data.

At least 2 and no more than 4 interviews with each practitioner are planned, for 60

minutes each. All recordings and transcripts will be analyzed according to the embodied

and spoken methods laid out in “implications for data analysis.” Following transcription,

participants will be given the opportunity to read through their interview and offer any

corrections or addition. After initial analysis and coding, participants will be contacted

for follow-up interviews as needed. The second interview will serve as the opportunity

for member-checking during data analysis, as categories emerge.

Phase three study with participants – research with participant group two,

individual and group interviews (four months). The next phase involves conducting


interviews with writers and spoken word artists who have had experience with voicing

and languaging their own trauma, and observing them go through their process of voicing

and languaging during an experimental expressive arts workshop. At least five

participants will be sought, and no more than seven. Recruitment will be conducted

largely by email, with the use of an electronic flyer, through networks of writers and

spoken word artists, via public listservs. I will avoid conflicts of interest by declining

participation to any current or former students or clients, or anyone who works for an

agency or organization I teach or produce events for. The criteria for inclusion for this

participant group is that they are over 23 years of age; have had an active writing or

spoken word practice for at least five years; self-identify as having experienced trauma;

have experience writing and speaking about their traumatic experiences; considers

themselves to be in a completed or ongoing healing process; do not currently consider

themselves in crisis; and have reliable, ongoing therapeutic support in the event that

unexpected, acute trauma symptoms surface. The rationale behind the age criterion is first

to mitigate risk to younger participants. I arrived at the age of 23 as the cut off because at

that age, the “at least five years” of writing or spoken word practice (another criterion)

will have taken place while they were legally an adult. Interested potential participants

will be able to contact me by phone and email. Preliminary procedures will include an

initial phone call or in-person meeting to discuss the research and determine

appropriateness, interest and willingness, as well as to assess safety concerns. As I will be

asking participants to disclose their own experiences with trauma, I will want to assess

beforehand whether there is too great a potential for harm. Considerations will include

the length of time that has passed since acute trauma, and whether participants have an


established support system that includes being under the care of a licensed professional

counselor. As it is not an absolute requirement that participants be under the care of a

licensed professional counselor, but a factor of the screening assessment, I will also be

prepared to offer referrals to psychotherapeutic resources should the need arise.

The first step will be to conduct one-on-one intensive interviews with participants,

for approximately one hour, gently guided with open-ended questions that aim to capture

the participant’s perspectives and experiences on/with the research topic. Questions may

be phrased like, “tell me about your relationship to your own voice,” “what is your

writing process like?” and “what is it like for you to talk about trauma?” Locations for

interviews will be kept consistent if possible, but may vary. Whenever possible,

interviews will take place in person in a recording studio, where quality of audio

recording can be guaranteed. If there are variations in location, they will be carefully

documented as important context for data comparison. Interviews will be recorded by

both audio and video, to capture both voice and bodily, gestural data, and one-on-one

interviews. Following these interviews, which will capture data from a dyadic,

participant-to-researcher relational situation, participants will be given the chance to turn

in any written or recorded materials of their own that they believe may be relevant, in the

form of journal entries, poems, voice memos, or more. I will store all data securely, using

password-encrypted data storage devices for electronic data, and locked cabinets for

physical data. I will also remind all participants that they may leave the study at any time,

for any reason.

A series of at least 2 and no more than 4 structured group workshops will take

place in a location convenient and suitable, with the most important needs being privacy


and quiet. During these workshops, an initial container of safety will be set, in which

participants are reminded that they should prioritize their own safety and well-being; that

they may leave the workshop at any time should they need to, as well as the study, for

any reason at all; that everything that occurs in the workshop should be held in

confidence by them, including specific instructions on what is ok to share or not share

with others and how to go about sharing one’s own experience while protecting the

dignity and privacy of others; and that they may ask and receive support at any time

during the workshop or after. We will agree on a norm for the group, for how to ask for

help and support when we need it. Then will engage in a ritual of affirmation of our rights

and freedoms as autonomous humans. Participants will be invited to create a comfortable

“nest” somewhere in the space, using their own stuff and any items in the space they

would like to use, as to treat this space as a home-base for their own being, to go to

whenever they need to. They will then be invited to engage in their own process of

writing and voicing trauma and trauma healing. This may largely be a silent writing

process, and/or there may be some voicing out loud. There will be audio and video

recording of this process, and I will be observing and taking field notes. They will be

given at least one hour to process and work for some time on their own. Then we will

gather to speak with each other as a group about their process and experience, which will

allow me to capture data from the group relational situation. I am a trained council

facilitator, so I will be implementing an adjusted “council format” for sharing, which will

guide the group to speak one at a time, speak from the heart and from one’s own

experience, be spontaneous, and to practice deep presence and listening. I will also

establish ways for them to reflect back what they hear each other say, and react and


respond with their own new sharing. I am also a trained facilitator of Somatic

Experiencing, which will combine with my council training to provide me with ways to

manage tensions and conflicts that surface in the group, and attend to anything that arises

with trauma-informed care. Each workshop will end with a formal closing of the

container, and a reminder of the code of confidentiality. The literary scene in Portland,

Oregon is not so small, but there is nonetheless a risk of breach of privacy that these firm

reminders about confidentiality hope to successfully address. Any discovered leaks will

result in removal from the participant group, and an obligation to eliminate that data from

the data set.

Audio of interviews and group conversation in the workshops will be transcribed

using techniques of embodied transcription. Video will be reviewed both with and

without audio, and extensive voice memos and written notes will be taken to collect data.

All recordings and transcripts will be analyzed according to the embodied and spoken

methods laid out in “implications for data analysis.” Following transcription, participants

will be given the opportunity to read through the group process interviews individually

and as a group to offer any corrections or additions. After initial analysis and coding,

participants may be contacted for follow-up interviews as needed, and they will be

contacted for member-checking during data analysis, as categories emerge.

Ethics

Many ethical considerations have given shape to the methods and procedures

outlined above. Charmaz (2014) warned that “Ethical problems can arise when

researchers use a data collection approach that contrasts with their analytic methods”


(locs. 8863-8864), such as collecting data in a way that strives for empathy and

understanding, but analyzing that data in way that does not really represent that

experience fully. The extent to which I have allowed the methodology to completely arise

out of the nature of the research question is an attempt to circumvent this ethical

dilemma. While a dissertation research project has limitations—it is intended to be

conducted primarily by the candidate themselves, in a limited period of time, and often

without outside funding—I aim to represent as many perspectives as possible, and render

my analysis in ways that respect and honorably represent the offerings of the participants

and the authors of any written data.

It can be generally said that all ethical concerns in scientific research arise out of a

primary concern that participants not be harmed. What exactly constitutes “harm”

changes with each potential population, and may even change with each individual within

that population. This captures the thread alive in trauma theory, that harm and trauma are

subjective. Yet in order to prevent future harm, I am called to study trauma and seek to

understand those who have past and present experiences of living with trauma.

The path forward is to positively balance the potential benefits of any research

with the possible risks of harm to participants. The potential benefits here are great. If

van der Kolk (2014) is indeed correct, that “communicating fully is the opposite of being

traumatized,” (p. 235), then discoveries that expand our understanding of the nature of

human communication are critical to the efforts of trauma healers, and of incalculable

value to those who suffer from trauma. The participants in this study are likely to gain

such benefits themselves, from communicating their trauma and exploring how they may

communicate more fully. Additionally, it is hoped that a sensory theory of voice and


language will contribute significantly to the territories of inquiry being developed and

expanded by somatic studies and depth psychology. Specifically, it may expand the

abilities of researchers in those territories to fully sense meaning, and understand and

communicate their findings.

Risks associated with trauma recall. There are potential risks to participation in

this research associated with recalling traumatic events and experiences. There is a

particular risk to writers and poets who may participate in the third phase of the study.

Criteria for inclusion includes that they self-identify as having experienced trauma, so

they will necessarily be from a population considered to be vulnerable. Ethical research

with this population begins with full disclosure of the nature of the study and the nature

of trauma, and moves through the establishment and maintenance of a respectful

relationship. This disclosure will include an accounting of the known risks of recalling

trauma. These risks may include the triggering of recurrent, involuntary and intrusive

memories; nightmares; dissociative reactions; intense or prolonged distress; physiological

dysregulation; and attentional dysregulation such as a preoccupation with threat, impaired

capacity or boundary setting or self-protection. To mitigate the potential for harm, I will

not include participants who are under 23 years of age, are currently in crisis, or do not

have a support system that includes access to a licensed professional counselor. I will

back off lines of questioning if the participants become distressed, and gently end the

interview for the time being if I become concerned that they are experiencing harmful

consequences. I will coordinate with a licensed professional counselor to be available if

crisis emerges during interview sessions.


This risk is also present for those therapists and healers who consent to be

interviewed for the second phase of the study, for the use of embodied voicing to speak

of trauma may invoke strong psychological and physiological responses. Contents may

arise from the unconscious that can be disturbing, and trauma can be triggered. To

mitigate the potential for harm, I will follow the same procedures for these participants as

outlined above.

Informed consent and intrusion. All participants must give informed consent. I

will use both written forms and spoken discussions to ensure that potential participants

are fully informed about the nature of the study, and the potential risks and benefits of

participating in research that involves speaking from and about the site of trauma. I will

also offer ongoing assurance that consent may be withdrawn at any time. I will also

disclose to the best of my ability the intended audiences for this research—trauma

therapists, those who have experienced trauma, and researchers in the fields of somatic

studies and depth psychology. Consent forms will be given or read and signed prior to the

start of each interview. But as Charmaz (2014) noted, consent means more than signing

an initial form (locs. 2288-2289). One of the potential consequences of trauma is a

compromised ability to sense and set boundaries. As the interviewer, I must pay attention

to non-verbal cues and check-in with participants during the interview before asking

questions that could be intrusive. I will remind participants that they may decline to

answer a specific question or line of questioning. I will back off lines of questioning if

the participants become distressed. I will also generally minimize the risk of intrusion by

asking questions in non-confrontational ways that communicate openness, interest and

acceptance of whatever the participant wishes to share. For example, questions will avoid


assumptions, and be formulated with “tell me about,” “what is x like” and “how do you

experience” questions that include a “for you” or “in your experience.” I may repeat

words the participant uses as questions, as a means of encouraging further explanation.

Follow-up questions will be asked warmly and softly to insure the participant does not

get the impression I think the answer they have given so far is inadequate, but rather that

I am genuinely curious and just want to know more.

Confidentiality. The convention of confidentiality ensures the protection of

privacy for all participants, and builds trust and rapport. I will protect the anonymity of

all participants by assigning them aliases, and going through a data cleaning process that

removes all names, addresses and other identifying information from written data and

transcripts of audio and video data. I will store all data securely, using password-

encrypted data storage devices for electronic data, and locked cabinets for physical data.

Should confidentiality breaches via deductive disclosure become of particular concern,

that data will be unpublished to prevent such breach.

The risks to confidentiality are greater for those writers and poets who agree to

participate in the group experimental workshop, due to the potential that members of the

group may breach confidentiality about what they witness in the workshop. I will

safeguard this possibility by setting a strong container at the start of every workshop,

where every participant agrees verbally to hold confidential the proceedings and

identities of other participants. I will also mitigate this risk by not using participants for

whom the risk of exposure is too great, for example, those in current crisis situations and

without strong personal support networks.


Representation in research. The scope of this study is small, in terms of the

number of participants I will be studying, which raises ethical issues around

representation. I will aim to make my sample as diverse as possible, while noting blind

spots in my data set. Where appropriate and possible without breaching anonymity, I will

also allow participants to speak in their own voices about their identity, so that I do not

risk social misidentification. The member checking phase of data analysis will also serve

to mitigate the risk of misrepresentation of the identifications, thoughts and ideas of those

participants I am able to include.


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dissertation proposal voice as sense: investigating the ...€¦ · (jung, 1976, raab, 2015)....

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