Embodied Approaches to Psychotherapy

The Client’s and the Therapist’s Body in Integrative Trauma Work

In this presentation Morit speaks about the role of the body in trauma work and present her integrative embodied model. She demonstrate how neuroscience, rather than prescribing some kind of objectifying therapeutic technique, informs her own self-awareness, and helps her regulate and hold her own bodymind process as it absorbs the client’s dissociated trauma and participates in its enactment. Awareness of the bodies and the implicit communication between them deepens her relational sensitivity, exposure and involvement and thus the intersubjective connection. Morit describes how the client’s sense of isolation as trapped within the trauma and at the mercy of it can only be healed through relationship with a therapist who is capable of putting her own bodymind on the line. She proposes that surviving, on both somatic and psychological levels, the identification with all the figures involved in the traumatization, is what qualifies the therapist as safe enough to become the regulatory object.