Reengage Aspects of Social Nervous System

Faces can be frozen with specific emotions embedded in them. When a face is frozen in fear the person is unable to feel safe. Reawakening the face enables reassessment of fear (i.e. orientating reflex gets into action).

Connection to feelings can be reawakened by moving face into positions that mimic the expression of these feelings [reprinted from Parker 2006, pg48] and then track the body sensations that accompany these feelings:

Imitating Sadness

• Drop your mouth
• Pull the corners of your lips
• While you hold those lip corners down, try now to raise your cheeks as if you are squinting. This pulls against the lip
• Maintain this tension between the raised cheeks and the lip corner‘s pulling down.
• Let your eyes look downward and your upper eyelids
• Pull the inner corners of your eyebrows just in the middle only, not the entire
• It may help if you also pull your brows together and up in the middle Imitating Anger
• Pull your eyebrows down and together: make certain that the inner corners go down toward your
• While holding those brows down, try to open you eyes wide, so that your upper eyelids push against your lowered eyebrows, staring
• Once you are confident that you are making the eyebrow and eyelid movements, relax the upper part of your face and concentrate on the lower part of your
• Press your lips together tightly and tense your lips, don‘t pucker, just
• Once you are confident that you are making the right lowerUface movements, add in the upper face, lowering your eyebrows, pulling them together, and raising you upper eyelids to produce a

Imitating Fear

• Raise your upper eyelids as high as you can, and if you are able, also slightly tense your lower eyelids: if tensing your lower eyelids interferes with raising you upper eyelids, then just focus on raising your upper
• Let your jaw drop open, and stretch your lips horizontally back toward your
• If you cannot do this after trying a few times, then just let your jaw open and don‘t try to stretch your lips
• With you upper eyelids raised as high as they can go, staring straight ahead, raise your eyebrows as high as you can\ try to see if you can also pull your eyebrows together while you keep your brows raised\ if you can‘t do both. Then just keep the eyebrows raised with your upper eyelids

Other methods for Reawakening Connection

There are several ways of encouraging the client to consciously reconnect with feelings:

• Observe the client closely and call out emotions that are seen on a client’s face – see if they can connect with
• Mimic their face see if they can describe the feeling they see in your
• Have them observe their face in the mirror and describe the
• Call out tonal changes that give understanding that they are engaging a particular nervous system.