Body Psychotherapy

What Information Does Your Body Reveal In Therapy?

There is a vital, inherent connection between body and mind; gently listening to somatic signals and body responses helps inform a more complete, nurtured healing. In the words of Dr. Peter Levine, “no one can heal effectively from emotional, physical, or spiritual pain and suffering without involving the body.”

Consider how we move through life: acquiring information through our senses; processing, digesting, and moving it; prioritizing and executing our decisions based on safety, well-being, goals; remembering and recasting ourselves in subsequent moments. All of these are functions of our body-mind.

This enormously faceted tool at our disposal—our embodiment—is available to contribute vast enrichment to our experience of self-knowledge, to deliver early warning when we’re getting activated, to let us know intuitively when we are doing something that’s good for us (or that’s off the mark), to provide an endless array of messages about which we can make subtle or major changes. It can be our most intimate relationship. 

The body is a resource continually providing information that, when we learn to listen, can often suggest a clearer path. Body psychotherapy enrolls the body directly in therapy, whether it’s directly through authentic movement or Somatic Experiencing, or more subtly through opening to the intuition of the nervous system, mindfulness work, of becoming aware of the unique signals your body had developed to communicate with you.

The body also holds our trauma. The most common idea about trauma is that it results from a single disruptive incident, however developmental or relational traumas that may not have been life threatening can be every bit as debilitating. Examples of these include exposure to physical, emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse or neglect, woven through the relationships within a family or other caregiver situation. Trauma resulting from loss, betrayal, abandonment, and the like, can be more difficult to trace because often the events are less definable, can be minimized by family members or perpetrators, or are so incremental as to go unnoticed.

Trauma impacts the brain neurology, our body physiology, our nervous system and our relationships. Working with the body is the most direct means of healing trauma because the nervous system is the mechanism that is designed to process traumatic events. 

Trauma, in one form or another, is often a part of life; but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence. Those who engage in body psychotherapy often accomplish a deeper, more integrated and thorough healing that gets to the core of the original disruption to well-being. They tend to discover a spiraling, deepening refinement of the body experience that informs a deeper, richer life and an ever-growing library of responses to the world.