About
Marianne H. Hennigar CMT, SE, BSP
Contact 631-358-0546
I began my professional career in healing as a certified clinical sports massage therapist. Early on it became clear that body pain has an emotional and corollary physical component.
I began to develop a theory which I call Psycho-emotive Anatomy (TM). The theory posits that body pain is a call to action, a communication much like spoken language which tells of an emotional and relational problem in the life of the individual. I see the entire body as the repository of memory and experience. It is giant recording device, if you will.
*
There are some powerful modalities which specifically address trauma. I postulate that trauma is part of a broader system of unprocessed experience.
The Hennigar Method
A common approach to therapeutic serves is a blend of theories and methodologies, also known as an eclectic approach. My approach includes a blend of Somatice Experiencing (SE), Brainspotting (BSP), a form Internal Family Systems (EFS), body mobilization active and passive, and knowledge in how the body works.
Throughout our lives we have differing and evolving processing skills. The small and large things we experience throughout our day impact us on the spectrum of experience from low excitability on up through severe trauma. We store these experiences in our bodies, saving them for later review when we might have developed the capacity to complete the experiential cycle. Peter Levine PhD, author of Waking the Tiger, refers to this as completing the threat cycle.
Psycho-emotive Anatomy (TM) (P-e Anatomy) developed over 13 years of massage practice and was designed to help those in pain help themselves. I documented my own observations around the correlations between emotional pain and physical pain and was able to teach it to my clients so they could make the connections between the two and pain would reduce or leave all together.
In 2007 suffering from burnout I stopped seeing clients andI turned to my other love, art. For the next 11 years I did the art circuits, studied with 17 master sculptors, curated a gallery, taught and ran my own micro-gallery. Again life changing events and then the pandemic sent me back to the Healing Arts but this time blending modalities in the realm of body psychology and with what I know as a body worker. P-e Anatomy resumed in development and continues to grow today.
P-e Anatomy serves to identify emotional cofactors that express as physical pain. Sometimes in the absence of injury, body pain can make itself felt as a language for unprocessed emotional experience. Emotional trauma is also part of unprocessed experience but it does not have to be a life sentence .
It is my goal to offer individuals tools necessary to understand emotional experience expressed as body pain. P-e Anatomy can offer self empowerment for those seeking insight and relief. It allows one to gain greater agency over one's physical and emotional experience.
P-e Anatomy revealed itself to me in the form of patterns of pain from one client to the next. When a person would report a painful area they often would speak about their daily lives and past experiences. This is how I noticed the patterns. What was revealed is that specific areas of pain are often coupled with specific unprocessed emotional experience.
I noticed through my clients that these naturally occurring markers of pain were either universal in the reporting of experience, or unique to the individual. Additionally, clients would often reveal similarity of experience tagged to specific body parts.
There is also often a layered effect to unprocessed experience. I observed that bodily pain presents as a language reflecting unprocessed emotional experience from both the present and past. If unrecognized, pain and dysfunction can escalate. Conversely, when an accurate identification is discovered, the pain is alleviated or goes away completely.
At Insight Healing Inc I use touch work in combination with Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting techniques along with explorations in ones internal life through a form of Internal Family Systems (IFT). These talk modalities support processing through one's neurobiology and are well established as effective tools to assist clients to harness their own internal resources to support healing.
Client sessions are conducted in person or remotely, reflective of these sensitive times. Sessions are run through a Guided Focus. Some sessions are completed with a therapeutic touch and hands on healing component.
If in person, all Covid 19 precautions are observed and exercised. Because of my clinical sports massage training and background I may make suggestions for exercise or direct you to seek care of a health professional who can address any specific issue beyond my skill set.
If you are interested in a session please use the contact page or email me. I look forward to working with you.
**At this point you may want to rest your eyes and come back later.
The other thing I discovered
Guided Focus Experiential
My job is to help clients find relief from suffering mind, body, and spirit.
My original training as a pain management specialist began in 1994 when I earned certification as a clinical sports massage therapist. Early on it became clear the physical pain has emotional component. Like with hairdressers and bar tender’s, clients would share what was going on in their lives as I massaged and stretched their pain away. I noticed patterns and correlations as I came to know about their lives, trauma, and suffering.
Decades later my approach has grown and morphed into Guided Focus in the Hennigar Method which includes Psycho-emotive Anatomy. Through talk and Guided Focus, I support individuals to harness naturally occurring mechanisms in the body/brain to relieve, resolve and thrive. These can be traumas, unresolved emotional injury, illness, broken relationships, unhealthy behaviors, and negative outlooks.
I approach the triune self, mind, body, and spirit as all one and address each in relationship to the whole. In my view the entire body is the repository of memory and recorded experience including the mechanisms of our senses like touch and smell. We are basically a whole-body recording device with the brain as the sorting factor. Apart from how we reason through the neocortex (location of executive function in the brain), the systems of our body/brain act in concert with all other parts of the body/brain on autopilot of which we have little to no active control. We can purposefully alter our breathing, but the body will breathe on automatic as well. Guided Focus is a mechanism which can add purposeful processing to otherwise automatic biological responses. Healing can occur by harnessing the mechanisms of the threat response cycle by noticing body sensation, activating supportive movement or touch and focus.
Since we do not come with an owner’s manual there are mechanisms in our deeper brain structures designed to keep us alive, reptilian brain, and responsible for emotions, mammalian brain which do work on automatic but can be harnessed on purpose to help process old emotion and trauma to create greater sense of ease and increased quality of life.
This is where Guided Focus (GF) comes into the picture. With training in Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting I blend the techniques and exercises from both with what I know about how the body functions biomechanically. I have made my own reproduceable discoveries as pertains to the visual field harnessing the use of color and light to further client processing outcomes. The work is not therapy but does have therapeutic results. I characterize healing sessions as experientials rather than therapy. Clients gain emotional and physical shifts and improvements and are empowered by their own sense of personal progress.
Some of the physical improvements include clearing expression of eczema, lingering Covid symptoms such as nerve pain or persistent cough, fibromyalgia, headaches or even mystery pain in some area of the body. I believe body pain is a message, a call to action and form of communication about our emotional states. Many times, I have seen body pain improve or clear all together just by mentioning some common emotional correlations to that particular pain. When we are able to accurately acknowledge what the body pain-speak is related to, many times it reduces or goes away. I call this phenomenon, Psycho-emotive Anatomy and use it in conjunction with the other body-based care techniques I mentioned before. With this blend I collaborate with clients to create a customized orchestrated experiential.
How does GF help with emotional or psychological challenges? Different from standard talk therapy, I do not work from a psychological theory, diagnose nor do I create a treatment plan. Instead, together we harness the naturally occurring mechanisms in the body of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn survival response of the autonomic nervous system to help your mind and body sort through old hurts and unprocessed emotion. I do find working with internal family systems is a very helpful tool and actually have long used a version of it since the 1990’s before I even knew someone had coined it.
The work has all the desired affects expected from quality talk therapy with the added bonus of exciting creative self-discovery and clear measurable progress from one session to the next.
Guided Focus (GF)
In the Body:
Guided Focus is an approach which helps with emotional stress, anxiety, the effects of trauma and some body pain. The technique works by noticing and tracking body sensation while holding a fixed point in the visual field. As sensations move and shift in the client experience, the facilitator may offer body movement or specific exercises as the client experiences waves of processing and sensation. There is often deeper understanding of events from the past as the client begins to make cognitive connections. The client may sigh, breathe deeply, yawn or report greater calm and lessening of sensation.
When recalling events of the past, the client may report a decreased emotional charge around the event and experience greater peace. Many times, clients report a decrease or cessation in body pain that they were experiencing when they came into the session.
Guided Focus.
In the Visual Field:
Guided Focus in Technicolor (GFT Flow)
Pronounced Gift Flow, the phenomenon is part of the processing in the visual field. I discovered this GFT Flow as a processing mechanism in 2020. In my practice, clients reported seeing visual anomalies around the objects they were tracking. In my training in Brainspotting focus techniques I had frequently experienced a technicolor effect. I assumed this was normal but upon speaking to a colleague who employs similar focus techniques, I discovered neither she nor her clients see lights or visual anomalies when focusing. I realized I had stumbled upon something which is quite natural but often blinked away as a quirk of the eyes. I discovered a deep and meaningful process to help people help themselves using color and sensation.
What happens in GFT Flow? I explain what we will be doing in the Guided Focus. It has a mesmerizing quality to it which feels like a cross between open-eyed meditation and hypnosis. I ask the client if there is something specific, they would like to work on. After a brief share, we begin by noticing the body as it is seated on a surface. I invite the client to notice any body pain or sensation. At this point, we collaborate to find a position in the visual field (BSP) from which the client will commence the focus experience. To hold the visual point of processing I use a retractable pointer with a colored sphere of the clients choosing. Sometimes the client may prefer to hold the visual on some other object or point in the room. All sessions are a collaborative experience. I check in with the client to see if emotional or physical activation has increased or decreased as I move the pointer in the visual field. Together we decide whether to process from a point of greater or lesser activation.
What the client may experience in the body while processing:
Blinking
Sighing
Yawning
Watery eyes
Dry eyes
Salivation
Dry mouth
Tightening and loosening of parts of the body
Tightening and loosening of jaw, neck, shoulders
Small headaches moving around the skull
Tingling in the body
Heavy body or body parts
Lack of awareness of parts of the body
Increased sense of peace
Calm
Tears
What the client may experience in the visual range:
A dancing flame or colors which appear around the object of focus.
A mirage effect like heat devils on the hood of a car in Summer.
Clients sometimes report seeing flowers, people, or animals in the sphere.
Clients report a cloud, fuzziness, or haze as they gaze at the sphere.
Some report all things in their periphery go dark except for the sphere and its flame.
They report that I in their periphery become just and outline with no details.
As the practitioner, I normalize anything their eyes are experiencing in the visual range as I have theorized this is the activity of the subcortical brain. The visual effects can be disrupted with client attempts to make meaning of the visual play in their line of focus. I encourage curiosity and a return of fucus on sensation and eye position. Clients experience a sensation of being mesmerized or drawn in to the GFT Flow experience. I have experienced this as well when in GFT Flow. Clients report a desire or urge to process in this way and often report having periods of no thoughts and just sensation and GFT flow. The sensation feels like a cross between open eyed meditation and a hypnotic state.
Simultaneous to GFT flow, we collaborate to track shifts in body sensation and offer supportive exercises in movement or in pinning a place of activation with an implement. Both pinning and body movement serve to support processing and completion of threat cycle sensations. Some vocalizations support greater processing, and these can be encouraged by specific sounds or may be spontaneously found by the client. The client may or may not be able to share what they processed through, only that they feel better. Sometimes the event or events are clear as memories and sometimes the processing occurs from events from before the client had use of language as an infant.
If you would like to make an appointment or have a consultation, please see the opening page and click on the button.
Be Well,
Marianne
631-358-0546
**
Contact 631-358-0546
I began my professional career in healing as a certified clinical sports massage therapist. Early on it became clear that body pain has an emotional and corollary physical component.
I began to develop a theory which I call Psycho-emotive Anatomy (TM). The theory posits that body pain is a call to action, a communication much like spoken language which tells of an emotional and relational problem in the life of the individual. I see the entire body as the repository of memory and experience. It is giant recording device, if you will.
*
There are some powerful modalities which specifically address trauma. I postulate that trauma is part of a broader system of unprocessed experience.
The Hennigar Method
A common approach to therapeutic serves is a blend of theories and methodologies, also known as an eclectic approach. My approach includes a blend of Somatice Experiencing (SE), Brainspotting (BSP), a form Internal Family Systems (EFS), body mobilization active and passive, and knowledge in how the body works.
Throughout our lives we have differing and evolving processing skills. The small and large things we experience throughout our day impact us on the spectrum of experience from low excitability on up through severe trauma. We store these experiences in our bodies, saving them for later review when we might have developed the capacity to complete the experiential cycle. Peter Levine PhD, author of Waking the Tiger, refers to this as completing the threat cycle.
Psycho-emotive Anatomy (TM) (P-e Anatomy) developed over 13 years of massage practice and was designed to help those in pain help themselves. I documented my own observations around the correlations between emotional pain and physical pain and was able to teach it to my clients so they could make the connections between the two and pain would reduce or leave all together.
In 2007 suffering from burnout I stopped seeing clients andI turned to my other love, art. For the next 11 years I did the art circuits, studied with 17 master sculptors, curated a gallery, taught and ran my own micro-gallery. Again life changing events and then the pandemic sent me back to the Healing Arts but this time blending modalities in the realm of body psychology and with what I know as a body worker. P-e Anatomy resumed in development and continues to grow today.
P-e Anatomy serves to identify emotional cofactors that express as physical pain. Sometimes in the absence of injury, body pain can make itself felt as a language for unprocessed emotional experience. Emotional trauma is also part of unprocessed experience but it does not have to be a life sentence .
It is my goal to offer individuals tools necessary to understand emotional experience expressed as body pain. P-e Anatomy can offer self empowerment for those seeking insight and relief. It allows one to gain greater agency over one's physical and emotional experience.
P-e Anatomy revealed itself to me in the form of patterns of pain from one client to the next. When a person would report a painful area they often would speak about their daily lives and past experiences. This is how I noticed the patterns. What was revealed is that specific areas of pain are often coupled with specific unprocessed emotional experience.
I noticed through my clients that these naturally occurring markers of pain were either universal in the reporting of experience, or unique to the individual. Additionally, clients would often reveal similarity of experience tagged to specific body parts.
There is also often a layered effect to unprocessed experience. I observed that bodily pain presents as a language reflecting unprocessed emotional experience from both the present and past. If unrecognized, pain and dysfunction can escalate. Conversely, when an accurate identification is discovered, the pain is alleviated or goes away completely.
At Insight Healing Inc I use touch work in combination with Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting techniques along with explorations in ones internal life through a form of Internal Family Systems (IFT). These talk modalities support processing through one's neurobiology and are well established as effective tools to assist clients to harness their own internal resources to support healing.
Client sessions are conducted in person or remotely, reflective of these sensitive times. Sessions are run through a Guided Focus. Some sessions are completed with a therapeutic touch and hands on healing component.
If in person, all Covid 19 precautions are observed and exercised. Because of my clinical sports massage training and background I may make suggestions for exercise or direct you to seek care of a health professional who can address any specific issue beyond my skill set.
If you are interested in a session please use the contact page or email me. I look forward to working with you.
**At this point you may want to rest your eyes and come back later.
The other thing I discovered
Guided Focus Experiential
My job is to help clients find relief from suffering mind, body, and spirit.
My original training as a pain management specialist began in 1994 when I earned certification as a clinical sports massage therapist. Early on it became clear the physical pain has emotional component. Like with hairdressers and bar tender’s, clients would share what was going on in their lives as I massaged and stretched their pain away. I noticed patterns and correlations as I came to know about their lives, trauma, and suffering.
Decades later my approach has grown and morphed into Guided Focus in the Hennigar Method which includes Psycho-emotive Anatomy. Through talk and Guided Focus, I support individuals to harness naturally occurring mechanisms in the body/brain to relieve, resolve and thrive. These can be traumas, unresolved emotional injury, illness, broken relationships, unhealthy behaviors, and negative outlooks.
I approach the triune self, mind, body, and spirit as all one and address each in relationship to the whole. In my view the entire body is the repository of memory and recorded experience including the mechanisms of our senses like touch and smell. We are basically a whole-body recording device with the brain as the sorting factor. Apart from how we reason through the neocortex (location of executive function in the brain), the systems of our body/brain act in concert with all other parts of the body/brain on autopilot of which we have little to no active control. We can purposefully alter our breathing, but the body will breathe on automatic as well. Guided Focus is a mechanism which can add purposeful processing to otherwise automatic biological responses. Healing can occur by harnessing the mechanisms of the threat response cycle by noticing body sensation, activating supportive movement or touch and focus.
Since we do not come with an owner’s manual there are mechanisms in our deeper brain structures designed to keep us alive, reptilian brain, and responsible for emotions, mammalian brain which do work on automatic but can be harnessed on purpose to help process old emotion and trauma to create greater sense of ease and increased quality of life.
This is where Guided Focus (GF) comes into the picture. With training in Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting I blend the techniques and exercises from both with what I know about how the body functions biomechanically. I have made my own reproduceable discoveries as pertains to the visual field harnessing the use of color and light to further client processing outcomes. The work is not therapy but does have therapeutic results. I characterize healing sessions as experientials rather than therapy. Clients gain emotional and physical shifts and improvements and are empowered by their own sense of personal progress.
Some of the physical improvements include clearing expression of eczema, lingering Covid symptoms such as nerve pain or persistent cough, fibromyalgia, headaches or even mystery pain in some area of the body. I believe body pain is a message, a call to action and form of communication about our emotional states. Many times, I have seen body pain improve or clear all together just by mentioning some common emotional correlations to that particular pain. When we are able to accurately acknowledge what the body pain-speak is related to, many times it reduces or goes away. I call this phenomenon, Psycho-emotive Anatomy and use it in conjunction with the other body-based care techniques I mentioned before. With this blend I collaborate with clients to create a customized orchestrated experiential.
How does GF help with emotional or psychological challenges? Different from standard talk therapy, I do not work from a psychological theory, diagnose nor do I create a treatment plan. Instead, together we harness the naturally occurring mechanisms in the body of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn survival response of the autonomic nervous system to help your mind and body sort through old hurts and unprocessed emotion. I do find working with internal family systems is a very helpful tool and actually have long used a version of it since the 1990’s before I even knew someone had coined it.
The work has all the desired affects expected from quality talk therapy with the added bonus of exciting creative self-discovery and clear measurable progress from one session to the next.
Guided Focus (GF)
In the Body:
Guided Focus is an approach which helps with emotional stress, anxiety, the effects of trauma and some body pain. The technique works by noticing and tracking body sensation while holding a fixed point in the visual field. As sensations move and shift in the client experience, the facilitator may offer body movement or specific exercises as the client experiences waves of processing and sensation. There is often deeper understanding of events from the past as the client begins to make cognitive connections. The client may sigh, breathe deeply, yawn or report greater calm and lessening of sensation.
When recalling events of the past, the client may report a decreased emotional charge around the event and experience greater peace. Many times, clients report a decrease or cessation in body pain that they were experiencing when they came into the session.
Guided Focus.
In the Visual Field:
Guided Focus in Technicolor (GFT Flow)
Pronounced Gift Flow, the phenomenon is part of the processing in the visual field. I discovered this GFT Flow as a processing mechanism in 2020. In my practice, clients reported seeing visual anomalies around the objects they were tracking. In my training in Brainspotting focus techniques I had frequently experienced a technicolor effect. I assumed this was normal but upon speaking to a colleague who employs similar focus techniques, I discovered neither she nor her clients see lights or visual anomalies when focusing. I realized I had stumbled upon something which is quite natural but often blinked away as a quirk of the eyes. I discovered a deep and meaningful process to help people help themselves using color and sensation.
What happens in GFT Flow? I explain what we will be doing in the Guided Focus. It has a mesmerizing quality to it which feels like a cross between open-eyed meditation and hypnosis. I ask the client if there is something specific, they would like to work on. After a brief share, we begin by noticing the body as it is seated on a surface. I invite the client to notice any body pain or sensation. At this point, we collaborate to find a position in the visual field (BSP) from which the client will commence the focus experience. To hold the visual point of processing I use a retractable pointer with a colored sphere of the clients choosing. Sometimes the client may prefer to hold the visual on some other object or point in the room. All sessions are a collaborative experience. I check in with the client to see if emotional or physical activation has increased or decreased as I move the pointer in the visual field. Together we decide whether to process from a point of greater or lesser activation.
What the client may experience in the body while processing:
Blinking
Sighing
Yawning
Watery eyes
Dry eyes
Salivation
Dry mouth
Tightening and loosening of parts of the body
Tightening and loosening of jaw, neck, shoulders
Small headaches moving around the skull
Tingling in the body
Heavy body or body parts
Lack of awareness of parts of the body
Increased sense of peace
Calm
Tears
What the client may experience in the visual range:
A dancing flame or colors which appear around the object of focus.
A mirage effect like heat devils on the hood of a car in Summer.
Clients sometimes report seeing flowers, people, or animals in the sphere.
Clients report a cloud, fuzziness, or haze as they gaze at the sphere.
Some report all things in their periphery go dark except for the sphere and its flame.
They report that I in their periphery become just and outline with no details.
As the practitioner, I normalize anything their eyes are experiencing in the visual range as I have theorized this is the activity of the subcortical brain. The visual effects can be disrupted with client attempts to make meaning of the visual play in their line of focus. I encourage curiosity and a return of fucus on sensation and eye position. Clients experience a sensation of being mesmerized or drawn in to the GFT Flow experience. I have experienced this as well when in GFT Flow. Clients report a desire or urge to process in this way and often report having periods of no thoughts and just sensation and GFT flow. The sensation feels like a cross between open eyed meditation and a hypnotic state.
Simultaneous to GFT flow, we collaborate to track shifts in body sensation and offer supportive exercises in movement or in pinning a place of activation with an implement. Both pinning and body movement serve to support processing and completion of threat cycle sensations. Some vocalizations support greater processing, and these can be encouraged by specific sounds or may be spontaneously found by the client. The client may or may not be able to share what they processed through, only that they feel better. Sometimes the event or events are clear as memories and sometimes the processing occurs from events from before the client had use of language as an infant.
If you would like to make an appointment or have a consultation, please see the opening page and click on the button.
Be Well,
Marianne
631-358-0546
**