hat is body therapy

Body psychotherapy aims to integrate body and mind, and works with both in the therapy session.

Body psychotherapy can include a very wide range of techniques, from subtle body-awareness exercises to expressive and active movements, from visualisation and meditation to working with a breathing roll. Whichever technique is used, the focus is on increasing your awareness of the sensations and feelings that arise. Time is given to exploring any memories or insights that come up, and to making the connections with your family history and background.

There is a growing body of recent research in psychophysiology and neurobiology that has demonstrated that there is such a thing as somatic memory (a body memory), and that the impulses and responses of our minds and bodies are deeply interconnected. Feelings, emotions and memories are not mental activities, but involve our body and mind, working in concert. For example, research into the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder recognises the need to access and integrate somatic memories with the client's conscious recall of the traumatic event.

Although there are many different schools and methods of body psychotherapy, they share a basic concept of the unity of body and mind: that you are your body. My training has been in bioenergetic psychotherapy, a form of body psychotherapy developed by Alexander Lowen. The exercises and techniques not only increase your energy and sense of vitality, but gradually persuade your body to give up its secrets, revealing sometimes long-buried memories, old feelings, childhood convictions, beliefs and decisions that don't fit any more, and which are holding you back from living your life fully in the here and now.

At the heart of this method is a positive belief that our main impulse in life is to reach for pleasure and joy - to experience the things that make us expand, give us energy, and that inspire us - and that ultimately we come to therapy because we want to make the transition from simply surviving to actually living.

Body psychotherapy differs from other sorts of body therapy (such as massage therapies, therapeutic yoga, or reiki for example) in its use and emphasis on the traditional tools of psychotherapy: analysis of resistance, transference and counter-transference, projection, and regression, relating these to the body as well as to the personality and mind of the client. It is usual for the client's current situation and therapeutic objectives to be analysed within the larger picture of their life history, and especially their childhood experiences.

Central in body psychotherapies like other forms of psychotherapy, is the safe, healthy relationship built up between the client and the therapist, providing a safe environment to explore difficult or troubling feelings and emotions. Like other forms of psychotherapy, body psychotherapy is guided by current knowledge of human psychological development, and by theories about the formation of the personality and the self.