What is Relational Body Psychotherapy? According to Body Psychotherapy, when feelings are repressed or dissociated there is a corresponding “armouring” in the body. Body Psychotherapists have theorised that without addressing the underlying ‘body armour’, people may understand their patterns but remain unable to change them and may feel condemned to endlessly repeat the issues that have brought them into therapy. We work with the assumption that humans are energetic beings, i.e. energetic processes are fundamental to all human functioning. These processes link the various levels of body, emotion and mind into an intricate, interdependent whole. We work on the assumption that change happens when there is integration between intellectual understanding and bodily perception/sensation. This facilitates a corresponding freeing of the body and energy patterns that have previously held old and painful psychic structures and defences in place.
Modern neuroscience addressing psychotherapy for trauma has recently given scientific validity to body psychotherapy insights. These findings have enabled much fuller and deeper understanding of the psychological and physical bases of human experience. They have shown that the body does indeed ‘remember’ traumatic experiences from an early developmental period that the intellect alone cannot recall because of the way that traumatic memory is embedded and stored. Working with the body’s sensations and body ‘memory’ can free energy previously bound up in holding down frozen or dissociated memory.
Modern Body Psychotherapy is relational, which means that it sees the development of the individual within a social context of the family, the group and the social environment. Real change only happens through relationship with another human being, because the original formation of habitual patterns occurred in the dynamic with people in an individual’s early environment. So while body treatments work from a medical model in which the practitioner as an expert treats the patient, Body Psychotherapy sees the relationship between the client and the therapist as the important vehicle and crucible of change. Body Psychotherapy is not a technique or a treatment ‘done’ to the client. No particular technique is considered therapeutic in itself, but only as an integral part of a therapeutic relationship.
Trauma can be associated with massive invasion such as sexual abuse but may also arise in a more subtle form as a result of less than optimum care by early care givers or later life events such as bullying at school . Attachment theory shows that such events can leave the developing human with a life time legacy of ineffective resources for dealing with the ups and downs of life. These patterns are imprinted physically and can be investigated and maybe changed by Body Psychotherapy for trauma.