Learning from Experience

12 Empathic Resonance

The Role of Countertransference

OUR MOST PRIMARY understandings are nonverbal. Although language helps us to grapple with complexity, it can also obscure some of our more primary understandings of self and world, which are based, not on rational logic, but rather on our deepest sense of what it means to be human. These primary understandings are derived from the regularities and disregularities of sensory experience that are integrated as patterns that come to have meanings over time, whether or not we are conscious of them (Charles, 2002a).

From our earliest moments of being, we begin to develop a "language of the body" (Charles, 2002a). These primary ways of knowing self and other continue to have an impact on our understandings, ...