Therapy Wisdom – Engaging the Body in Psychotherapy 2024

The body holds many clues to one’s past and present state of being. Decoding those clues is a strategy therapists can use to help clients unlock emotional pain, blocks, and patterns that keep them from fully enjoying life.

If therapists don’t know how to translate what they are seeing — or know what to look for — it can feel like looking for hidden treasure without a map.

Bioenergetics is a specific approach that unlocks one’s hidden story and understands their personality via the body and its energetic processes. By observing one’s mood, posture, and way of moving, therapists are able to see how the unconscious works on the somatic level and explore beyond the client’s verbal story to reveal their full history.

You may be familiar with “The Body Keeps The Score,” van der Kolk’s work on trauma and the body, which advocates going beyond “just talk therapy.” Bioenergetics differs from talk therapy in that it combines analysis of personality and character with body techniques and physical exercises to recognize and release chronic muscular tension.

Chronic tension detracts from life. It draws upon the body’s energy which could be available for pleasure and joy instead. Bioenergetics offers space for the body to heal itself, helping people to be more free, more relaxed, and more alive.

This therapeutic approach helps clients connect with their body and enjoy life to the fullest degree possible.

And the impact of bioenergetic therapy goes beyond the client.

Everything the therapist learns to do with their client they also learn to do with themselves. They can translate verbal concepts into somatic concepts, and use their own body awareness to discern and provide interventions in the moment. Bioenergetics helps therapists reconceptualize their relationship with clients.

Join us on an adventure in self-discovery, beyond somatics and into a new world of psychotherapy. Bioenergetics will help you further explore the unbreakable link between the body and the mind.

Bioenergetics is especially helpful for difficult and resistant clients; those who are defensive, angry, or depressed; clients who sabotage or won’t do their homework); and clients who frustrate you with overtalking and complaining.

Everyone has a piece of history that connects to their presenting problem; that connection can be seen in the ways a person moves in their body. People tighten their bodies when they are in emotional pain. They tighten in different places than others, depending on their character style. They use their body to help defend against emotional pain they can’t tolerate. Each of these presentations provides clues to how you can help your clients most.

The bioenergetics approach combines psychoanalytic theory with somatic focus within a relational matrix.

In just the first hour, you will learn exclusive breathing techniques you can use with yourself and your clients. You will begin watching your clients’ ways of standing and moving. You will practice simple grounding and boundaries exercises, and see depression, anxiety, and sexuality in clients from a new perspective. Finally, you will be able to consider character traits and trauma in the body.