Integrating Daniel Quinn's cultural criticism with body psychotherapy perspectives.

We, in the field of body-oriented therapies, seem to agree that an adaptive bodymind connection is essential for the maintenance and restoration of health, and that socio-cultural effects can strongly damage it. Some traced back the historical origin of chronic body suppression to the beginning of civilisation (Fogel, 2013). Cultural criticism provides a model to explain the properties of civilisation, defined here as a complex socio-economical system characterised by totalitarian agriculture, settled lifestyle, mass-size population, constant exponential population growth and territorial expansion, and social stratification (Quinn, 2009a). Civilised lifestyle could lead to a discrepancy between biological and cultural evolution, and abandonment of evolutionarily adaptive self-regulatory (Bárdos, 2003) and social (Von Rueden & Van Vugt, 2015) strategies. We suggest that the consequent homeostatic dysregulation together with the pattern of domination might contribute to a damaged body-mind connection in the civilised culture, and interact with personal and family stories of trauma. We propose for the therapists an affirmative approach: explore the part of the clients' suffering that originates from civilisation, reveal it and empathize with it. We also suggest that the process of helping clients get in touch adaptively with their body resonates with helping society get in touch sustainably with the ecosystem, and that the two approaches could fruitfully interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]