Somatictao

SOMATIC TAO – The home of BEN, Babyhood Emotional Neglect

SOMATIC TAO is the home of BEN – Babyhood Emotional Neglect – and a developing therapeutic framework for understanding how insufficient emotional attunement and co-regulation during babyhood can shape the developing nervous system and affect emotional, psychological and physical health throughout life

This website exists primarily to EDUCATE, EXPLORE and DEVELOP understanding of BEN and its potential lifelong consequences, and to provide information about the developing Somatic Tao framework for adults seeking to understand the impact of their earliest emotional environment.

Somatic Tao content is provided for educational and informational purposes. It is not intended to provide individual medical, psychological or therapeutic advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor should it replace appropriate professional healthcare.

Somatic Tao’s central proposition

At the centre of Somatic Tao is the proposition that emotional neglect is not simply the absence of good parenting. During babyhood, when the nervous system depends upon caregiver co-regulation, insufficient emotional attunement can result in internally mobilising emotion becoming organised as threat within the developing nervous system.

Somatic Tao is an integrated, emoto-somatically aware therapeutic framework

Somatic Tao explores how this early adaptation may influence our later capacity to remain embodied with emotion, regulate autonomic state, experience aliveness, maintain relationships and respond flexibly to the demands of life.

Central to the framework are:

• BEN – Babyhood Emotional Neglect: the developmental problem
• Emotology: understanding emotion as embodied energy and information
• Emoturity: the nervous system's capacity to remain embodied with emotion while maintaining coherence, flexibility and flow
• BEA – Babyhood Emotional Attunement: the relational conditions through which emotional capacity can develop

Somatic Tao brings forth meaningful connections, understanding, empowerment and transformation.

Somatic Tao integrates contemporary understanding of developmental trauma, attachment, affective neuroscience and nervous-system regulation with the embodied understanding of emotion and health found within classical Taoist medicine.

The framework is informed by, amongst others, the work of John Bowlby, Peter Levine and Stephen Porges, alongside emerging research into early development, emotional neglect, trauma and nervous-system organisation.

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