Accessing embodied experience & the risk of harm

9 Sept

Summary:
As therapists, we might struggle to help clients access embodied experiences, which can lead to unintentional harm. Recognising the importance of a client’s direct, personal experience in therapy fosters self-trust and avoids reliance on external interpretations that may exacerbate trauma or disconnection.

Sometimes we therapists - whether trained in IFS (or other parts work models), or whether we are verbal psychotherapists or somatic therapists - try to support clients to access embodied experience - without understanding ourselves how to do this — and without understanding why it is important to know how to do this (and how not to!). This can inadvertently cause harm.

In my opinion (for what it is worth!) one reason we usually do this is:

we do not understand, from the inside out, what embodied knowledge actually is.

It is fundamental to understand this AND it is NOT possible to understand this fully from reading about it in a book! Why, then, is this so hard to do?

Heart, spirit and body wisdom

All of us, not just our clients, can become ‘educated out of our bodies’. In his infamous Ted talk, Sir Ken Robinson made a hilarious joke about academics dancing awkwardly at a disco, using the body as a ‘brain taxi’. But in reality, in most cultures of the world, we are divorced at a very early age from our heart wisdom, spiritual wisdom and body wisdom. The ‘body as brain taxi’ lens is the only lens we have with which to understand and interpret our experience.

The directly experienced self/Self

Without pitting therapy modality against therapy modality, dance movement therapy/psychotherapy is one of only a few therapy modalities to be based upon phenomenology, or the study of direct experience, and it is the only one (so far as I am aware) whose use of phenomenology extends past the application of methods towards a more radical/philosophical conceptualisation of self/Self grounded in direct experience and embodiment (Lauffenburger, 2020). In this way, it differs from other phenomenological methods, such as Gendlin’s felt sense experiencing or Hakomi. This has (positive) implications for the ability to support access to embodied experience and knowledge (or should do)…

Enactive therapies and the dynamic enactive body-self

To explicitly conceptualise the self as a 'dynamic enactive body-self' (Lauffenburger, 2020) is to understand movement/sensation not as the 'representation' of self, but rather AS SELF, and to understand that the self/Self speaks through movement (as well as sensation, image and thought). Indeed, as Koch (2022) reminds us, recent research actually supports the premise that language and thought derive from embodiment. Movement is direct language that does not require translation ---- a language just like like English, French , or Xhosa.

(Side note: dance movement therapy needs to get its research out there!)

Sadly, as a profession, we have not done a great job at educating people about this while simultaneously complaining about this sorry state of affairs ;-) That is on us, and we can do better. Our colleagues have been urging us to do so for years (Meekums, 2010)!

Choreographing from the “outside in”

Sometimes, even us dancers, blessed with a form of intelligence which is sadly very much undervalued in our society, have professional training that removes us from the wisdom of the body, resulting in choreographic or teaching methods that also involve working from the 'outside in' rather than the 'inside out'.

What happens when we support clients to access embodied experience without knowing how to do that?

Specifically, I see that as therapists we may sometimes do all or any of the following:

tell clients what their embodied experience means in generalisable terms ('if you move like X it means you experienced Y' 'posture like A means you are B')
impose imagery upon clients, as meditation or therapeutic movement interventions, instead of supporting clients to access their OWN embodied experience ('imagine the upper left side of your heart', 'feel how your head is')
impose meaning upon experience, and/or, jump to meaning-making without first of all attending to 'embodied data' (Tantia, 2020) (interpreting not observing)
not understand how (or why) to hold space for the emergent --- whether in the form of images or 'subtle visceral sensations, posture or movement' (Tantia, 2020).
impose movement forms and link explicit movement forms with explicit results ( 'sit like this to access your safe seat’, 'breathe like this in order to feel safe')
communicate with/make alliances with the self/Self (or with ‘parts’) using verbal language when many parts of self/Self don’t speak words but rather speak movement or sensation (which could include behaviours like self-harm or other expressions of distress)

Consequences

Why does this matter? A few reasons (you may have others):

1. Furthering loss of self-trust and trust in life

If you have a history of trauma or addiction, you likely learnt to separate from your own intuition and wisdom. If you are encouraged to defer to the opinions of others, insofar as understanding your own bodily experience is concerned, you may become further separated from self-trust and trust in life. This is arguably a form of harm, and harms that occur in therapy can be understood as serious betrayals with the capacity to cause lasting damage.

2. Promoting reliance on other people's power instead of a Higher Power

A major premise of many addiction recovery modalities is connection with a "Higher Power". In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous for example, it is written that, "deep inside every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God" (the book was written in 1930s hence the language is old-fashioned with regards to gender) . Perhaps the Big Book was on to something here... namely, the idea that, even though a premise is that recovery requires finding a 'power' ‘“outside” the ‘habitual addict/unwell self’, that power may be “in there” and not “out there”. In other words, as somatic IFS therapist Susan McConnell puts it, the 'Self' (or Higher Power) is embodied'.

3. Increasing tension, stress and trauma

A therapist or coach might invite you to breathe or move in a particular way. They may not understand however that particular ways of breathing or moving might promote further disregulation, dissociation and disconnection for you. Conscious breathing practices, for example, have long been seen as the “royal road to physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual health and well-being” (Himmat Kaur and Caldwell, 2013), but without care this can too easily translate unintentionally into ideas of “good” or “bad” breathing which promote further tension and blockages in the body. Movements too may encode disturbing non-verbal memories or trigger unwelcome verbal ones.

4. Decreasing bodily autonomy (instead of restoring it)

Professor Christine Caldwell came up with the Moving Cycle body psychotherapy method because she recognised that a goal of therapy should be the “restoration of bodily autonomy” and that often clients needed support to access this. They needed 'midwives'. Using an applied version of systems theory and a lot of other influences, she observed how all healing systems follow similar continuums or cycles, and devised a method whereby therapists essentially function as 'midwives' by in-depth training to attune to their own/another's breathing, movement, images and associations in the moment such that they might hold space for, and intervene to support, a client's own healing process.

5. Imposing cultural harm

Imposing a frame of reference for movement or image may result in racism or other forms of harm. The self is collective as well as individual and particular cultures have their own ancestral/encoded/learnt movement patterns, that need to be respected.

6. Denying (inadvertently) access to restorative movements

For example, we tell a client that sitting still is necessary in order to access feelings of safety. Meanwhile sitting might promote dissociation for that particular person, and does not invite the completion of body movement sequencing that may be necessary for adaptive resolution of disturbance.

I have also just come full circle back to sitting meditation myself as a means to access stillness and peace. However, it has taken me years to find the words to language why sitting was not always the best way for me when instead I needed to have space to complete a movement sequence.

Conclusion: helping our respective therapy modalities build knowledge in service of clients

Most of the time, I have noticed that when a younger part of mine has got very activated by being asked to move or breathe in a particular way that feels wrong, or to adopt an understanding of the self which does not resonate, it is usually on to something. These days, she has got better at respecting the fact that, usually, this gut level response is to be trusted. It often requires sitting for a while with confusion while sifting through ideas, which is often uncomfortable.

We build upon knowledge - of all kinds - to foster knowledge. So, discovering that ‘this approach works for me” or “this approach doesn’t work for me”, is not necessarily a problem, and can still potentially be helpful and healing. Much depends upon the spirit we bring to our relationship with ourselves, others and spirit.

Invitation to therapists who are not dance movement therapists

Finally, I would like to orient those interested in this topic, particularly those for whom an IFS lens feels particularly helpful, to the work of colleagues, especially that of Professor Jennifer Tantia and Professor Christine Caldwell. I think you might find their work particularly validating, if you have struggled to make connections between cognitive conceptualisations such as ‘firefighters’, ‘managers’, ‘protectors’, ‘exiles’ or any other conceptualisation and your own embodied experience.

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