Partial Body De-Armoring (or Partial Emotional De-Armoring), in contrast to Full Body De-Armoring (also called Whole-Body De-Armoring), focuses on De-Armoring work that only takes certain body parts or areas of the body into account.
Partial De-Armoring may be (and is often) part of a broader Full Body De-Armoring treatment, the latter being divided over several sessions.
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For instance, Segmental De-Armoring such as proposed by Wilhelm Reich starts with the Ocular level (around the eyes, let’s say on the level of the head) and works down to the Pelvic level, typically in the course of seven sessions (because of Reich’s division of seven armor-segments).
In this case, the entire body will be De-Armored (so that would imply Full Body De-Armoring), but then carried out in seven different sessions (which could be on seven consecutive days, but more likely implemented as one session per week or so).
The reason to this is that De-Armoring takes time (it would be almost impossible to De-Armor the entire body in just one session), but moreover, it gives time to the client/patient to digest and integrate emotional and trauma release in a gradual way.
Nevertheless, it’s not uncommon that therapists and practitioners offer clients just Partial Body De-Armoring, such as Sexual De-Armoring, Abdominal De-Armoring, Genital De-Armoring, Prostate De-Armoring or Vaginal De-Armoring, and so on, which could be carried out in one or several sessions.
The idea here is that the Emotional Body Armor, and this really depends very much on the individual client, has only manifested itself (or is most present and strong) in certain body parts or body areas, or that only certain types of repressed emotions or trauma will be (or must be) treated.
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If the above is feasible or even realistic is very much the question, because an Emotional Body Armor often manifests itself in different body parts, and besides that, releasing the Armor in one part of the body may result in (stronger) Armoring of other body parts because of the client’s subconscious or unconscious emotional defense mechanism.
Let’s take an example to illustrate this. Say that a child was sexually abused and today as an adult suffers from trauma. The repressed emotions could (and most likely would) manifest itself in different body parts; not wanting to see the abuser (creating an Armor around the Ocular level), holding the breath or by contrast hyperventilating at the moment of abuse (creating an Armor around the Thoracic level), and finally not wanting to feel the physical part of the abuse (creating an Armor at the Pelvic or Genital level).
Hence, in view of the above, it would in any case always be desirable to finally engage in Full Body De-Armoring in order to make sure that the client’s Armor has been completely dissolved instead of having moved (and hiding) or being reinforced into other bodily areas.
