CLOSING DOWN THE PAST
"For the first time in my life I could feel that the deep past was never my emotional weight to carry."
- Participant J39 -
PARTICIPANT RESPONSE
EARLY STAGE DESIGN TRIAL - 2018
Feedback suggested the "shape" and the "colour" of the room was important and that the "three wall design" allowed for a "pathway out". Additionally: "...it provided space for me to work through it by myself" and "...the trauma I held on to was a feeling not a thought".
This latter comment led to a consideration of an 'embodied cognition' as the participants voiced their experiencing of an unravelling of their narrative and a shift involving their whole self, with brain body and environment combined. The current study now builds on enactive theory, where perception can be regarded as a motivated activity where people make sense of reality by engaging with it.
THE COGNITIVE SYSTEM
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
'Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism... it forms within it a system.'
(Clark, C. (1999) Being There - Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, p.85