Body Psychotherapy
What is body psychotherapY?
A modality grounded in the mind-body connection, body psychotherapy is the largest branch of somatic psychology. Body psychotherapy seeks to consciously and actively integrate the experience of your body in the psychotherapy process. There is no hierarchical relationship between the body and mind, both are functioning and interactive aspects of the whole.
Body-oriented psychotherapy helps people deal with their concerns not only through talking, but also by helping people build a deep body awareness of their physical sensations as well as their emotions, images and behavior. Clients become more conscious of how they breathe, move, speak, and where they experience feelings in their bodies.
-Adapted from USABP
How does body psychotherapy work?
A wide variety of techniques are used within an integrative body psychotherapy practice, including those involving touch, movement and breathing depending on the specific needs of each client. Such interventions can include: developing ‘mindfulness’ and greater awareness of one’s physical and emotional presence using relaxation and meditative techniques; movement, in order to promote a deeper physical awareness and to expand one’s capacity to feel and express emotions; breathing techniques to increase awareness of and improve functioning of the breath.
-Adapted from USABP
“The body always leads us home...if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling.”
How can body psychotherapy help me?
Body-oriented psychotherapy can help by shifting dysfunctional or chronic body postures, energy and thinking patterns to more functional and healthy expressions of energy, thought, movement and behavior. This shift of greater awareness and expression is more likely to move you in the direction of psychological health. Mind-body practices can help to gather and re-story existing limited or rigid personal narratives. Somatic therapies can help to expand limited movement patterns and promote the unrestricted flow of energy throughout the body system in order to affect change within the bodymind.
You will become more fully aware of your body, thoughts, feelings and way of functioning. Body psychotherapy is about restoring flexibility, mobility and awareness in the bodymind and consequently, in life. By releasing tension and freeing energy flow, the body can regain balance and begin to heal itself.