On regaining basic trust in life
Author: Lea Loeschmann
Category: Psychology,Trauma
Issue: No. 97
As a person affected by trauma, Lea Loeschmann became involved with therapy methods for the psyche early on. Today, she is an experienced therapist and therapist and helps people to free themselves from the emotional consequences of trauma with her self-developed method “The Moment Experience”.
Tattva Viveka: Lea, you are a psychotherapist, alternative practitioner and have been on the spiritual path for a very long time. We met here in Berlin in the park and immediately immersed ourselves in very spiritual and philosophical conversations.
Trauma is one of your main topics. You offer trauma therapy and have developed your own approach, which is a combination of psychotherapy and spirituality. It’s about how injuries that occurred in childhood trigger behaviors that accompany us into adulthood and that we can’t easily get rid of.
I would first ask you to tell us about your background. What spiritual experiences have you had? And what training have you had in your therapeutic work?
Lea Loeschmann: I come from a large family that has continued to grow. I’m the second oldest. It was one of the very early patchwork families with divorces, lots of drama, lots of chaos. I didn’t really feel like myself. I felt depressed and disconnected. That’s why I started going to therapy at the age of 21.
Gestalt therapy works with the moment. It’s not about changing the past, because it’s over. Nor is it about focusing on your own future, but about consciously being in the here and now in order to get to our blockages in this moment. If we can reach the feelings in the now, we can also dissolve them.
I trained as a Gestalt therapist at the Therapeutic Institute for Integrative Gestalt and Body Therapy (TIB) in Berlin. This was also the beginning of my Buddhist path. An important quality of a therapist is that they stay with themselves and don’t lose themselves in the other person. You learn this in meditation.
I came across “Dzogchen”, the mystical core of Buddhism. James Low was my most important teacher. I actually experienced the feeling of awakening, first for a few seconds and later over a longer period of time. This brought about a huge change in me, because at that moment I was completely free of fear and doubt, I felt I had arrived in the here and now. I no longer questioned myself, no longer talked to myself negatively and experienced a sense of relaxation that I had never known before.
Of course, when I came back from the retreat and everyday life struck again, I realized that the old blockages were actually all still there and that they were still easy to trigger. But I took a different perspective because I experienced that I am deeply safe and there is nothing to fear. So what triggers our fear?
The feelings that I couldn’t bear as a toddler and when I was born and that couldn’t be resolved, I had to repress. That is the nature of fear.
The more feelings we repress, cannot bear and cannot allow, the more anxiety grows. Often we don’t even know this and then, in the course of life, we simply become exhausted.
With Gestalt therapy, with this trust that we can achieve healing in the present, I have developed a method that goes deep down to birth and resolves the initial fear effects, i.e. this first trauma. Then you work on the further injuries that actually result from this first trauma, because you always use the old pattern in certain situations.
TV: How does psychology view human development? We are children first. We are born healthy and then things happen in our lives, such as violence, that affect us. You talk about a fear matrix, how it keeps us under its spell and how we become separated from ourselves.
Lea: Let’s assume that we are all-encompassing consciousness that permeates everything. Disembodied consciousness cannot die, our essence is invulnerable. But when we come into the world, we enter a different experiment. We come from the Tao, as it is often called, into this field of yin and yang: we have good and evil, day and night, strong and weak. We are in a duality in this world and we cannot change that.
We arrive in the womb. Then our body, senses, nervous system and so on and our hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, develop. It is a very intense experience to arrive in this world.
Our fear often arises in the womb, at birth or in the first years of life, because we are born as “premature babies”. Human children need to be cared for for longer than any other being on this planet. We are so incredibly dependent on how our parents see us, how our environment sees us, how we are cared for, how we are mirrored, that it is very easy to trigger survival fears. Freud said that the first anxiety effect is repeated in every anxiety we experience afterwards.
In addition to the birth process, some experience traumatic events in early childhood that cause psychological dysfunction or problems. You can find out how these are connected and can be resolved sustainably in the full article, which appeared in issue no. 97.
The interview was conducted by Ronald Engert.
About the interviewee:
For 40 years, Lea Loeschmann has been exploring the conscious and subconscious mind in order to arrive at flow and dissolve inner blockages and resistance. With “The Moment Experience” she treats primal wounds, discharges repressed feelings and relieves the fear matrix.
This article was originally published on the German website: Körperloses Bewusstsein kann nicht sterben
