Abstract

“What’s Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct” is a narrative of the maturation of the sciences (psychology and neurology) and the authors’ combined experience, all of which started to take form in the 1960’s with the unrest of youth over the Viet Nam war—the era of “give peace a chance”. In the 1970’s, the authors, Martha Char Love and Robert W. Sterling, were involved in an occupational and academic counseling-teaching assignment at Santa Fe Community College, dealing with the aftermath of the previous era of changes in society and integration of the Black and White cultures. Having no effective references with which to work, they used a personality inventory (MBTI), based on the work of Dr. Carl Jung. Experience with groups and individuals soon allowed feelings of the students involved to surface at a variety of levels, which were centered on personal disturbances of their pasts and were not defined by the inventory. Hours of study of what they were learning from students in counseling sessions, suggested that the authors were tapping into genuine universal instinctive feeling intelligence, primarily focused in the gut area of the body. The authors developed the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP) to focus on these gut feelings of emptiness and fullness. They found that with hundreds of people using this technique, the gut feelings were a gauge of how well the person was having his/her needs met for two universal needs: feeling acceptance (connection) and the feeling of being in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally). In 1998, neurological research at Columbia University published the work of Dr. Michael Gershon that identified the enteric nervous system as a center of feeling-intelligence in the gut, which he called the “Second Brain”. The authors carefully examined this material and accepted the research findings as pointing to the same universal feeling intelligence they had experienced in counseling with hundreds of people. Utilizing the research of Dr. Gershon, the work of Dr. Lise Eliot who charts the development of children from conception through the first five years of life, a recent research study in 2005 of their own in the Psychology Department at Sonoma State University exploring the use of the SRP as a somatic depth psychology technique for self-awareness, stress-reduction, and optimal health, Love and Sterling explore the intelligence of the gut and its responses. Three main themes emerged in their study from the responses of the research participants to the follow-up interview questions. These were: increased somatic awareness; increased insights and new perspectives concerning inner needs and unresolved issues; and increased self-acceptance. They share a complete protocol and results of their clinical research findings for the SRP, including verbatim counseling sessions using this process. The results point to the importance of further research on the SRP as a valuable technique for getting in touch with the voice of the gut and learning to follow its wisdom toward a healthy life—unifying the body-mind split in the individuation process. Using their vast clinical experience, the Love and Sterling have presented an interpretation of recent medical research into a new Gut Psychology. They present a more accurate behavioral understanding of the Self and human nature than has previously been available and discuss the SRP as a medical intervention, opening a much needed conversation between somatic practitioners and immunologists. They identify the elements of the basic psychological experience of a somatic depth process like the SRP as having six phases summarized in terms of their relationship to each other while taking the person in the process toward reaching wholeness and the integration of the psyche. These six phases are identified as Initializing or Opening the Doorway; Identifying; Dislodging; Dispersing or Going Back to the Source; Absorbing; and Integrating Initiation or Experiencing the Self. Each depth method may either take the person into the awareness of a new phase of the cycle or further into the one he or she is presently in when they begin the process. It is in the sixth stage and the integration of the psyche that Love and Sterling demonstrate that the immune system is boosted and the body is stabilized to a more healthy balance, which they hypothesis is capable of measurement that would show an increased T-cell count in cancer patients and a significant improvement in the health of the patient. Furthermore, they point out that he first obvious similarity of the healing process of the two systems—the physical body system and the emotional body system—of the human being is the need for the foreign substance of each system to be identified and dislodged. This process seems to require some intelligence building experiences. The physical-body immune system has memory T cells to identify the foreign or cancer cells (similar to Dislodging in phase three of somatic depth processes) and both T cells and B cells eliminate these tagged cells (similar to Dispersing in phase four of the somatic emotional processes). In viewing the stages, Love and Sterling suggest that in order for the Dislodging to be used and Absorbed, the person must in phase five have a greater sensory memory of an experience before healing can begin. If we assume these correlations of structure are true in these two systems of the physical body and the emotional body, then it follows that a greater sensory memory as in phase five of the somatic emotional process would follow in the physical immune system as well. Memory T cells have their identifying ability because they are thought to have encountered antigens during a prior infection, a previous encounter with cancer, or a previous vaccination. The smarter and better trained the Memory T cell, the better the immune system is at identifying and ridding itself of foreign cancer cells. In the somatic emotional process, the thinking process about oneself actually changes and becomes more focused and intelligent about who it is and who it is not. Love and Sterling conclude that it is possible that like the T memory cell of the physical immune system, we could also identify and measure a feeling memory mechanism, possibly related to the gut feeling response, that affects our emotional immune system and actually changes one’s sense of self, our self-reflective ability and our emotional intelligence.