Pranab
Welcome to the pod. Right before recording, we had a pretty spirited discussion on narrativizing versus somatic work, the role of trauma and how it may be overemphasized at times, but also under-emphasized other times, creativity, psychedelics, stuckness, and lots of other interesting topics. First, do you mind telling the audience who you are and what you do?
Dan Grossman
Sure. So currently I'm a fifth-year PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. My research focuses on psychedelic-assisted therapy and specifically examines the somatic or embodied side of people's experiences using psychedelics therapeutically.
Pranab
I'd be interested to hear about the role of somatic and body-based experience and how that might be underemphasized in both psychedelic research and in meditation practice.
Dan Grossman
So I think speaking to psychedelic research, the field—and, more broadly, our healing traditions in the West—has inherited a mind-body dualism. It's implicit in how we do the research: most of it tends to be focused on cognitive or neural mechanisms of change. There is also a focus on mystical experience, which doesn't really quite fit either of those things. But there's just a lot of interest in changes in belief and insight. And I think academic psychology more broadly, localizes the mind as a neck-up phenomenon. We don't really think of the mind as an embodied process so much. And I think it's reflected in how we practice psychotherapy, for example, psychotherapy is talk therapy, basically. And I think talk therapy is great. I do a lot of it as part of my training. But I also think any intervention that limits itself to one mode of engagement is going to run into some limitations. And so I think this shows up in psychedelic-assisted therapy, where we are using the tools of a more verbal mode of therapy to frame how we approach it, at least in academia and in the clinical trials, where there is more emphasis on verbal engagement. But what's interesting to me about psychedelics is they often throw people into more preverbal or symbolic or somatic realms where they may not be able to put their experience into words as they normally would and it ends up getting expressed more through somatic expression, nonverbal vocalization, and movement. This is how people communicate on psychedelics. They aren't necessarily engaged in discrete meaning-making. That does happen, but the peak of a psychedelic experience is often in these preverbal realms. That's one way that it shows up in psychedelic research. And you were also asking about the potentially misplaced emphasis on this stuff in meditation. Sure.
Pranab
Let's pause there and dive into the psychedelic research. And one thing I enjoyed from the research talk you shared with me is what people may not appreciate is that these experiences are shared amongst various psychedelics. Because typically the way psychedelics are researched, they're divided along mechanistic pathways and types, but your research finds that across all psychedelics, there's this shared symbolic and somatic experience. The implications for healing and support and growth may also translate into typical ways that we think about therapy. So I'd love for you to expand on that.
Dan Grossman
That's a great point. To briefly recap, the study was a big online survey that was asking people about their somatic experiences using psychedelics therapeutically. And then I did 30 follow-up interviews with 30 respondents. We were looking specifically at observable somatic responses. We might imagine that psychedelics cause somatic stuff for anyone who takes them, and they might not be particularly salient for some people. They cause increased heart rate and pupil dilation and all these sorts of autonomic effects. So that's not surprising, but I think where it gets interesting is when it becomes observable. If I'm in the room, I could see you having a somatic experience. So that was the threshold that we set. And then I didn't limit it to the kinds of psychedelics that people were taking because my sense was that common themes would show up that cut across the psychedelics involved. And that was just from personal observation and just seeing people posting about these experiences on Reddit and talking to friends in these communities and just a lot of similar language applied to different psychedelics. So for my money, those kinds of somatic experiences that people have on psychedelics are more of a shared feature of altered states of consciousness rather than a specific feature of a given psychedelic. There are differences. As I noted in my talk, ayahuasca is a lot more likely to cause vomiting, for example, than LSD, but similar meanings often arise from these experiences. There is a blurring of mind and body, with people enacting psychological processes somatically: release-like somatic experiences—for example, with ayahuasca, it's like purging, but people talk about somatic release on MDMA as well. People describe a similar idea of something stored in the body being released somatically. I imagine your listeners are probably largely familiar with this stuff. But yeah.
Pranab
To ground this for people that are less familiar, what does somatic release mean? I'm thinking of shaking, moving, yelling. What do you find and what would you say to someone who asks, “Why is that happening?”
Dan Grossman
I would say I have somewhat more uncertainty about this topic than I did when I first started this project. My background is in yoga and meditation and I practiced a form of yoga for many years that was meant to stimulate shaking with the understanding that shaking is one of the ways that the body releases stored or accumulated tension. In my write-up, I describe somatic release as release-like somatic experiences, because it's a little more neutral ontologically, and also because people don't always use release as their framing. Sometimes it's purging or clearing or cleansing, but it's basically this idea that the body is a container for stored or accumulated experiences, and that that material emerges through physical expression, whether it's through vocalization or shaking or weird undulating movements. The idea is that the body participates in working through the material by releasing this accumulation. And yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting implicit ideas in this. And part of what interests me about this is that if this is real, the implications are vast for how we understand health and disease. If the body can accumulate traumatic experiences on some physical level—if “the body keeps the score”—what does that mean for autoimmune conditions or chronic pain, lower back pain? These conditions are often highly localized. How would that influence how we actually approach treating these things? Because right now in medicine, I feel our hands are tied when it comes to more somatic approaches. You can find them, of course, abundantly in the alternative healing spheres, but most people aren't going to those circles. They're going to doctors and what can doctors give them? They can give them drugs and medical procedures and all that stuff is great. But in my estimation, we're not that good at healing chronic conditions. And these are the people that often end up going to ayahuasca ceremonies and having significant somatic purging and just all of this stuff. Does that answer your question?
Pranab
That raises several more questions. I'm on the same page; this makes a lot of sense. For people that are a bit more skeptical or scrupulous about some of this stuff, how do we know that “the body keeps the score,” or that the body can store things in this way? How do we acknowledge that alternative medicine and alternative techniques seem to work in some way, but how do we actually institutionalize that and verify that this is a thing? And ontologically, how do we know this is real?
Dan Grossman
So I love that question. This is why I said that I feel less certain about this stuff than I did when I first started this project. That is because I actually think that the concept that “the body keeps the score” to me is still a form of mind-body dualism. I don't think it's as simple as the body holding trauma while the mind merely accompanies it. I think bodies make meaning. I'm still struggling with what that means. I'm still struggling with this question: what does it mean for minds to be embodied and for meaning to be embodied? Because I don't think it's just that the body's releasing this and the mind has nothing to do with it or that the body stores trauma and the mind doesn't. To me, that still reflects a mind-body duality. And what's fascinating to me about the experiences of the people I interviewed is that that duality starts to break down, or you start to see through its illusoriness. In the beginning, when I had all this qualitative data and I was starting to code people's experiences and try to sort it into themes, I kept trying to divide their bodily experience from their interpretive frameworks. I often failed miserably. And then at some point I realized that's like one of the core insights of this whole project is that this duality starts to break down or you start to see through it more clearly in these psychedelic experiences: mind and body start to blur together. Why does release-like experience occur under those circumstances? I don't know if I have a good answer to that. I think it has to do with the brain's inhibitory function beginning to relax. And so maybe there's just more freedom for things that maybe were suppressed from conscious awareness to start to emerge. But my honest answer is that it's a really good question. And I don't know if I have the best answer. But I'm trying to avoid a particular dichotomy between saying that something was literally stored and something was literally released. At the other end of the spectrum where you're saying, they experienced the shaking and interpreted it as release. I think there's a third way, which is more aligned with Gendlin's Focusing: the idea that bodily somatic responses might themselves be a form of knowing or understanding or meaning-making. And that leaves me asking: how do I understand that? This is what somatic therapists talk about. Wilhelm Reich, who was one of those original somatic therapists way back in the day, wrote about this idea, that these somatic processes are just psychic processes in the somatic realm. There isn't a mental process and a somatic process; it's the same thing. I don't even know how to parse that. It's just, it's like a Zen koan for my mind.
Pranab
For sure. Yeah, my mind goes to, there are so many angles of looking at this. There is the empirical angle of the fact that you can just see that stuff happens and people feel release. And I think even in somewhat mainstream places, this is becoming more legitimate. There's John Sarno's work on the mind-body connection. People talk about reading the first page or reading an Amazon review of the book and having release from back pain and just the relationship between chronic pain and the psyche. But even there, the dualism remains. Then there are Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), which went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago with people talking about how much shaking helps. And then there's the whole contemplative side of samskara and vasana theory where we hold conditioning and you're releasing conditioning and energy, but that's another angle. Go ahead.
Dan Grossman
This is like Michael Johnson's work, right? I've read some of it. Yeah, I find it very interesting. I think there's much more interest in this topic and formalizing it because to me, how I understand the work that I'm doing is that there's been this major rift between the world of somatics and the world of rigorous empiricism. And I hate that. I hate that there's a rift there because I've had experiences that I feel have no validation in rigorous empirical science. When I imagine debating someone who's committed to CBT all the way, they have mountains of evidence supporting their views and I have only personal experience. I've been in this situation before and it's enormously frustrating to not be able to point to any high-quality evidence that supports the idea that the body has its own role in healing and that it might emerge in ways that are cognitively elusive and that we don't really have good models for.
Pranab
How familiar are you with Dr. Michael Levin's work?
Dan Grossman
Not at all.
Pranab
It's somewhat separate from this stuff, but it's somewhat related. So he's a researcher at Tufts. He has appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast too. But he talks about minds everywhere and intelligence at various levels of complexity.
Pranab
He explains how you can look at cognition from cells to tissues to organ systems to beings, super-beings and communities. But it gets into the question of where do we define our boundaries? Do we define it as mind, body, or can we define these subsystems and parts? This might be a good segue into what do you think about parts work and Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a model and how that's used in the psychedelic research framework in general.
Dan Grossman
I would say that within academic research settings, it's not really used. People spontaneously start doing parts work and using parts language sometimes, but the way we formally approach it in the research setting is not really through IFS. Personally, I have a favorable view of IFS and parts work; it has been. Part of my meditation practice and my self-therapy for several years. I appreciate IFS as a model; I think it's one way of understanding the broader process of doing parts work. I don't call my parts managers and firefighters and I find it a little bit cartoony in a way. But often the clinical work that I do sometimes ends up veering into parts work. I just find it to be a useful model. Is it more than that? I don't really know. I don't really make any big ontological claim. I just think it's useful. All models are wrong, but some are useful. I think parts work is a useful user interface for doing work on oneself.
Pranab
Your clinical experience so far, and maybe just research or personal experience, where do you view the downside or less usefulness of parts framing or maybe the way that people tend to think of it?
Dan Grossman
Hmm. Let me think about that for a moment. I don't know if I see a specific downside in using parts. I think there's a risk of clinging too tightly to this as a model of understanding the self. At the end of the day, I do subscribe to the Buddhist notion of the emptiness of self. And I think parts is an interesting complement to that in some ways and also a place where I think you can get really caught up in taking parts too seriously and having this just huge story about yourself and all of your different parts and then I think it can lead you to maybe a little like an excess of inner focus. Models are useful in that they explain some amount of information. But where they fail is that they can't capture all the information. So if you cling too tightly to a model, you might start missing things. And you might start missing certain ways of seeing that might actually be helpful. Now, I don't know if I've encountered that. Most of what I'm doing is trying to help people develop a clearer formulation of their parts rather than helping them cling less tightly to it. Often there is no clear sense of the other parts, emotions, or energies running the show. And I find it useful as a way of creating space to be able to notice just because this is your experience most of the time doesn't mean this is what you are. It is as though John was riding the bus and you were driving and at some point John took the steering wheel from you and you thought, “All right, I guess I’m a passenger now.” that's a little bit what it's like when you're working with folks. They might be in survival mode 99% of the time, but getting them to have language for describing that survivor part and what its functions are, that's the task that I spend a lot of my time doing. And then once you can do that, you can step out of that role a little bit and maybe find a safer, calmer place to hang out. I think about the anxiety character in *Inside Out 2* and eventually saying, “Okay, well, you can have your special chair here. You're not going to run the show anymore.” That's a little of what it's like.
Pranab
I'm curious. In the clinical work or maybe stepping back, there's a range of where people are at in terms of how okay they are. Some people are more in survival mode. Some people are healing and some people are flourishing. And I'm curious, how does working with someone change throughout that? Or maybe a better question is how does the experience of psychedelics change for people throughout that spectrum?
Dan Grossman
Hmm, interesting. I don't really have an answer for the second part of that question because the work I've actually done with psychedelics clinically has been pretty limited during my PhD time. It's probably something I'll be training in more after the PhD. But as far as working with people in conventional psychotherapy, I've had clients whom I've seen for multiple years, allowing me to track the phases. I think about Judith Herman's work on, she actually, I think it was Pierre Janet, who did three phases of trauma work, which is like stabilization and then memory processing and then reintegration. And I think that's like a pretty good model for what it's typically for people, that often you're spending a lot of the initial phase. Doing stabilization work. I'm not really doing parts work during that period. It's mostly regulation. And sometimes it's not even that. Sometimes I'm simply present with them while they're going through storms of emotional episodes. And eventually just through consistent presence, they can start to relax into the relationship. And then maybe we can start to bring in the parts and start to work with them. It's like a process in some ways of increasing resolution—not in the sense of completion, but in the sense of how clearly you can access what's happening psychologically for folks. Because in the beginning for some, there isn't much access. It's just extreme emotions, and they can't even talk. They can't even do therapy. And then later on, you might be able to start to help them become calm enough to begin asking, “Do you notice that when this happens, you're maybe gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly?” Or when you start to talk about this topic that you start to speed up verbally, it starts to come out a lot faster. I'm losing your original question.
Pranab
No, this is great. This is great.
Dan Grossman
With parts work, you really have to meet people where they're at and not everybody is going to connect with this idea of parts or latch onto it. Sometimes they simply need help learning how to self-regulate and how to do breathing. And they think of it more in terms of working with their emotions. And at the end of the day, that's what I think parts is. It's a language for working with our emotions and their associated meanings and narratives and related material. Yeah, it's a really good question. Yeah.
Pranab
This helps, thank you. This reminds me of the conversation we had before we started recording around the role of symbol and image. And, that maybe that whole Jungian view of things and how it relates to, modern therapy and and, obviously, how it relates to the psychedelic experience. But I'm curious if you could talk more about your understanding of the importance of symbol and image, maybe in the research, maybe in clinical work and how institutions view it.
Dan Grossman
I don't know. In my experience, the psyche often produces stories. As with everything, there are risks of extremes and at one extreme, it's interpreting the stuff that the psyche produces too literally—for example, assuming that everything, every thought that enters your mind, if it sounds the voice of God, then it is the voice of God. And then, you can see the dominoes of megalomania emerging from that. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater by saying it is all just noise. And I think my learning is that mindfulness practice can tend to be somewhat dismissive in a way. I think at the end of the day, therapy and Buddhist psychology, I would tentatively say, serve different aims, though the aims are related in some ways. One deals more with absolutes in a way, and the other is more dealing with the relative truth. For me, the struggle with mindfulness has been not to dismissing every thought that comes into my mind as being noise. And that's where I think parts work became so helpful for me was realizing that I can apply mindfulness to my emotional baggage all day, but is that what it needs? We're getting a little off-topic, but I think about Thich Nhat Hanh, I found a quote from him that I have right here. I think it's beautifully illustrative of the process that I went through. It helped reconfigure my understanding of what mindfulness was and how it related to the more therapeutic side. The quote says: the function of mindfulness is first to recognize the suffering and then to take care of the suffering. A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother recognizing and embracing suffering without judgment. He then says that if we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already. So from this perspective, mindfulness and self-compassion and self-love are closely connected. It's self-compassion through mindfulness and mindfulness through self-compassion. And this is way off the topic of what you were saying about symbols. I'm not even sure how I got here.
Pranab
It's so good. Don't worry. I think a lot about the relationship between meditation and therapy and where they are actually different and where there is the obvious overlap?
Dan Grossman
But, but yeah, go ahead.
Pranab
It reminded me, I just this week had a conversation about Thich Nhat Hanh and I think a lot of people view him as maybe a bit more introductory or beginner in some ways.
Pranab
In some sense, yeah, because he's not as rigorous about the thing you just said, oh, that's like a mix of metta plus vipassana, you can break it down in that way. But he is also so deep. He was obviously deeply realized when he was alive and just clearly transmitting just this powerful message. Yeah.
Dan Grossman
For sure. I mean, I haven't read a great deal of his stuff, but I often find that there's a simplicity in his presentation that's refreshing. It's very pure mindfulness in a way without all the bells and whistles of Buddhist philosophy. I think that is why it has such mass appeal. And I think, yeah, can see how that would appeal for someone who's newer to meditation. It may also appeal to someone who's a lot more experienced, who maybe got a little bogged down in some of the philosophy. On the topic of symbols, I think there is in some ways an art to reading the mind and reading the psyche and understanding. I don't do much dream work, know, sometimes it comes up with clients of mine and it's something I'm actually interested in doing a little more of. And I mentioned, I don't know if it was on the recording or before it, Irvin Yalom, who basically developed group therapy. He's the existential therapy guy and his view, which I think may apply to symbolism as well to symbolism as well, is that working with dreams means: “strip it for parts”. Basically you don't need to know exactly what this is. And maybe there is no way to know exactly what this is, but you can draw nourishment from it and say, “Well, some of this has stuff that has emotional resonance in it; let's explore that and break that down.” And I think that to me is, at this stage, my understanding of symbols less about finding. Some objective meaning and truth and more utilitarian in a way. Sometimes some things here might be useful and other things. I don't know what to make of that. Not right now. Maybe one day I will, but right now I don't.
Pranab
And how much is that view that utilitarian appreciating the nebulosity, that view translate towards somatic experience and the psychedelic experience from your point of view?
Dan Grossman
I mean, I take the Stanislav Grof view that psychedelics are nonspecific amplifiers. And so I think what they do is they just spell all this stuff out in bold. And this to me is where meditation and mindfulness training really comes in handy because to me, it's like wearing a seatbelt: if something happens and you aren't wearing a seatbelt, there's much more risk than if you are. For me, meditation and mindfulness provide a I think of the phrase epistemic hygiene there's a way that it grounds you in a little more discernment that I can now see a thought as a thought instead of buying wholesale into the narrative. And you see a lot in psychedelic culture, people just adopt a lot of weird ideas and there isn't much access of critical thought and rigor. This speaks to the rift I mentioned between somatics and academic rigour: the world of vibes and then there's the world of science and materialism. And I think both have their lessons. They also both have a tendency to just reject the other. That really bothers me. And I find I'm not at home in neither of those circles. As far as symbols and psychedelics, I think to me, it turns the volume up is what I think we see with folks that imaginal function of the mind, just it's just turned up to 11. It becomes far more visionary. In relation to the somatic, mean, people begin enacting symbolic processes somatically. I think of one participant who had autism and had, part of what she was reckoning with on her LSD experience was a habit of masking. And she was doing these arm movements that she described as symbolizing that unmasking process during her journey. Which I just think is interesting. For these participants, it is one and the same for these folks, the way that they talk about the somatic expression and the symbolism. It's this blurring of mind and body and how healing that can also be. I think one of the ways that psychoanalysis went wrong in the history of psychotherapy was undue emphasis on insight as the curative mechanism of psychotherapy. It is now, I think, generally well accepted within the sphere of most practicing psychotherapists that it's not just enough to get the story right. You have to enact some change in your life. This is where psychoanalysis eventually evolved and maybe more contemporary psychodynamic theory focuses more on corrective experience. The idea is that perhaps in my relationships, I'm usually not seen, heard, or understood, and now I'm having the experience of being seen and heard and understood. And I think that enacting of some new reality is so important. And I think these somatic experiences to me are a form of that enactment for a lot of folks. Even if you're not literally releasing trauma from your body or something, there's something very real about even a symbolic understanding of that. That the mind maybe encodes our traumas symbolically and somatically, and that through a somatic symbolic act, we move through those narratives, we release whatever meaning was encoded through that. So I just, it's so hard to talk about this, because our language to me just constantly reinforces a mind-body duality. And probably here I'm contradicting myself a thousand times, and I don't know how to avoid that yet.
Pranab
For sure. Yeah. And I think you, me, also want to bridge that gap between, vibes-based and rigorously scientific approaches so you can bring rigor to vibes. If you, if you relax the structures of how you think everything has to be, you can bring a little more openness to scientific rigour.
Dan Grossman
100%. I think there's a wisdom in a lot of these circles, in these vibey circles. They are more fringe and maybe there's a haze that surrounds it in some ways. But I also just think, yeah, I don't know, some of the most amazing people I've met have no training in rigorous science and seem to have just more understanding than your textbook academic psychologist. I would trust the psychological opinions of a 10,000-hour meditation teacher more than someone who's read 100,000 books on meditation or on psychology. There's something about that just experiential side that confers some wisdom. But yeah, I think there needs to be a process of refining insights. And to me, this is where science can be so useful. We can take the raw material of vibes, throw it in the meat grinder of science and see what comes out the other side. I'm interested in that. I think science has a virtuous aspect in terms of its commitment to separating fact from fiction as imperfect as that pursuit is. I still think it's worthwhile because I still think it can lead to breakthroughs. And I think there's something compelling and that lends legitimacy to your pursuit if you're willing to subject it to rigorous study. It shows that I'm not being so precious about my beliefs that I will do a controlled trial to see if they are true. And right now, the data I have on somatic experiences is pretty shiny and promising and it looks good. But I'm fairly sure that if I stay with this research, there will be findings that just do not confirm the things that I believe. As hard as that is to accept, I care more about creating a rigorous study of somatics than I care about promoting my ideas about it. I want to lead by example and say, “Let's study this stuff and not be afraid to be wrong.” Because every other legitimate field of study in science has done that. And it's time to grow up and start to actually do this stuff instead of promoting a lot of stuff. I think about polyvagal theory. And I think there's a lot of utility in polyvagal theory. For me, there is utility in thinking about moment-to-moment understanding of threat and safety. I do that with my clients and I find it very helpful to notice, okay, in this moment, it starts to feel like the nervous system is getting dysregulated, right? Maybe more autonomic activation. When this happens, more parasympathetic activation. That's maybe a useful model for people, but if you look at research on respiratory sinus arrhythmia and what, this dorsal–ventral vagal distinction isn't what Stephen Porges is describing. It's not that one of these mediates shutdown and one of these mediates fight or flight. That's not how it works. I feel for physiologists who say, “So many people believe this and it's just not true.” People who devote serious study to this topic do not find this to be true.
Pranab
What's the way forward? What do you envision as where somatics can become rigorous? Because it does seem polyvagal theory, even if it's not mechanistically accurate or scientifically verified, there's experiential truth, quote unquote, to it. But it does seem a lot of practitioners tend to want to validate that as a frame by saying, and look here, it's in the science and the body, here's the studies, almost prematurely before it's really there.
Dan Grossman
I think about the path forward a lot. I can speak more narrowly to my path forward here, which is I'm already studying somatic experiences on psychedelics. I want to keep doing research on this topic. I'm probably not going to be squarely within academia, but if I can find small grant money to keep funding this research, I want to keep doing it. And for me, the most important thing I can do as a next phase is scale development. I think part of what is contributing to the lack of rigorous study here is that we haven't actually operationalized any of the concepts promoted in somatic therapy, such as somatic release. How do you operationalize that? What is that? Science asks you to be serious about how do you define this? Be very specific, right? I think starting to use my data and formulate a survey scale with subscales and components, the release-like quality, an altered sense of agency, energy-like experiences. I can think of a set of different constructs that might be relevant for people's healing. Validating whether these somatic experiences might have some therapeutic benefit would be a good first step toward generating more interest in the subject. Now I do think there's amazing work being done on the neuroscience of interoception. And that's something that I was very interested in before I started my PhD as well. And that's really promising because they're also showing that in conditions including depression, PTSD, and anxiety disorders, people also show differences in how they process interoceptive information and to what extent they're able to access it. And I think that's a beautiful neuroscience-based framework for starting to develop a more rigorous study of somatics. But it hasn't quite penetrated somatic therapy yet. At least not from my read of it. I could be wrong. Maybe some people know things that I don't. But I think developing these kinds of scientific frameworks, operationalizing our concepts, I think that's really the path forward. And I would also love to one day do a study similar to the one I did with psychedelics on people just doing somatic therapy without psychedelics. That would involve asking them about their experience and starting to probe the phenomenology of what Somatic Experiencing, for example, entails. With polyvagal theory, I'm not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know that a lot of people benefit from this way of thinking. And I think these approaches are a response to a vacuum in our healing traditions around somatic experience. Those vacuums give rise to less rigorous alternative modalities because of our cultural bias towards the cognitive and verbal; somatic approaches do not get research funding. It's not their fault. They want to help people. So they just develop these ideas and these systems and just bypass the evidence thing because people need help. People are suffering and I respect that. And I think they should help those people as best they can. But helping people should not be exclusive of science and research and testing our claims. We should refine our theories. I love Somatic Experiencing, but consider the claim that animals shake—the idea that mammals “shake off” trauma. I don't subscribe to that anymore. I thought I did in the beginning, but I'm not actually sure that that understanding is accurate. And the reason is, if you actually go and look up that claim, there is almost no evidence in support of it. There are two videos on YouTube of animals shaking as evidence of this trauma release. And I've looked this up. I've tried to ask, “Where does this come from?” Because I'm genuinely interested in this. I subscribed to this for a long time. But the videos are posted by people already in Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing camp. And then if you go look on Google Scholar for evidence of this, I can't find anything. There really isn't much.
Pranab
It's a nice narrative.
Dan Grossman
Again, it speaks to this rift that these theories are developing without rigorous peer review. I think as a result it leads to some erroneous understandings or, at the very least, it means that they don't get adopted by a broader mainstream of our medical or psychotherapy traditions.
Pranab
There's a lot more we could talk about here, we are sadly out of time, but I'm very curious about the relationship between somatic understanding, research, what peer review can do, how that can then become operationalized, what it would look like in the mainstream, and what a world in which this is validated would look like. There's a lot of interesting stuff there. But for now, where can people find out more about your work and more about you?
Dan Grossman
Good question. I'm not really posting much on the internet these days. I have the shell of a Twitter account. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn or something. I can also share my email with you if you want to post it, if people have questions. I've been in the phase where I'm thinking about building myself a website. So maybe I'll do that soon.
Pranab
Good stuff. Anything else you'd like to share before we close?
Dan Grossman
Not really. Thank you so much for having me, Pranab.
Pranab
You got it. Thanks, Dan.
