Body Psychotherapy Perth
What Is Body Psychotherapy
Body Psychotherapy is a style of psychotherapy that embraces the client’s body as part of what informs and is responsive to the overall psychotherapy process. It may also go under the name Somatic Psychotherapy, or Bodymind Psychotherapy as “soma” means body.
The importance of Body Psychotherapy in its scope includes the forms of sensations, feelings, impulses, reactions, and adaptation the body has made in response to the environments and influences that shaped it, and as part of what is informational and meaningful in each body psychotherapy process, additional to the mental aspects that are typically observed and entertained in classical counselling, psychology and psychotherapy.
Our Body Psychotherapy is both an expressive and experiential therapy based upon the principles and practices used in Integrative Body Mind Psychotherapy™.
What Are The Benefits Of Body Psychotherapy
A key benefit of body psychotherapy is that we all have a body and that body is integrated and a whole with the mind that accompanies it, so it makes sense that any form of therapy must include, and cannot exclude or discount the body and its reactions and produced responses in the therapy process.
Body psychotherapy is therefore a wider scope of inclusion, more directly relevant and aligned to how clients have their human experience, and the key informing aspects of what may be relevant, and where the issue may lie, are more likely to be found if the whole of self is welcomed into the therapy process.
For that reason body psychotherapy often is better able to uncover causes and dynamics missed by the conventional approaches, and so the healing of a client has a potentially higher rate of success using this approach.
What Techniques Are Used In Body Psychotherapy
Body psychotherapy starts with gathering from the client the reason they came to therapy, as well as their clinical history and background. Its departure from conventional approaches is this data gathering is interested in the body, past injuries or issues, and also the current state of the client’s body, their breathing, their Autonomic Nervous system, posture and voice and language are noted.
When a client has a history f trauma, abuse or accidents, we note where the body may reveal it holds a defence or presence for those shaping or formative events or patterns. The body is the doorway into the mind and the mind is a doorway into the body so we bring the body into dynamic body-inclusive processes as part of our Perth therapy body psychotherapy treatments. We may prepare clients via techniques such as:
- Grounding the persons consciousness in the body via movement and the legs
- Breath work to charge the system and bring on nervous system arousal
- Link the body and mind through visualisation and tracking sensations through the body
- Stitching disparate bodily reactions to images, memories, thoughts
- Physical release of anger, rage, grief, terror using body-centric emotional release
- Body touch to bring attention and awareness to a numb or tense area
- Bodywork to promote release of a defensive posture by musculature in body
- Symbolic touch such as a hand touch to signal support or sympathy
- Postural significant triggering such as outstretched hands to signal NO.
Are There Any Concerns Using Body Psychotherapy
Many clients come into therapy with either a history of abuse, trauma or poor personal boundaries. As such, touch of their bodies may trigger trauma or alarm. Body Psychotherapy must be selectively used by qualified therapists who are trained in abuse and trauma dynamics, and whom embody good personal boundaries themselves.
A client may also regress or dissociate and leave their bodies if touched and so caution is primary in the mind of a Body Psychotherapist. At the same time Body Psychotherapy can re-introduce a client to a body hardly lived in, felt comfortable in, or one lacking good personal boundaries with others, and be a critical part of healing the client. Both benefits and risks may exist with using our Body Psychotherapy in Perth.
