Body-Centred Psychology
Body-centred (or somatic-based) approaches to therapy, including a broad emphasis on a “bottom-up” pathway to change and transformation and a new sense of self.
This means awareness and insight are gained by contacting, sensing, and tracking physical sensations. This includes what is happening in the body in the therapeutic container, as well as bringing consciousness to these deeper ‘felt’ experiences as they occur when you move about your life, interact with others, or encounter difficulty, pain, ease and joy.
It is based on the notion that your body is a doorway between the conscious, what is known, visible, and tangible, and the unconscious, what is unknown, hard to see, or grasp.
As such, the body can hold unconscious information, “memories”, and a kind of wisdom that the rational and intellectual mind can have difficulty making sense of because it relies on language, thinking, surface emotions, and deliberate action.
I find body-centred processes like Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and DBR particularly powerful for trauma therapy.
Body-centred approaches help to build a deeper relationship to your body by learning its language, and build deeper trust in its messages through experiments and play using different postures, gestures and movements.
Body awareness and somatic practices are one of the most direct ways to establish nervous system health, shift your energetic and emotional state, and create a sense of vitality and empowerment without the need to articulate the “why” first.
Integrating body-centred processes with traditional psychology [hyperlink here] means that a new mind can result through tending to the sensing and feeling functions of the psyche. However, new perceptions, recalibrated thinking, connections to meaning, and templates for new action are arrived at through the wisdom of the body.
Your body-mind is sometimes considered more soul-aligned than your logical mind, so use this doorway for revelation and new awareness - aaa-ha-a-a! - can feel like you are speaking and operating from a place of truth and depth.
In sessions, I may use more general references to body and embodiment [hyperlink] or draw specifically from the medicine of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Level 1 & 2) and Deep Brain Reorienting [hyperlink](DBR—Level 1-3). Also in the landscape are philosophies rooted in neuroscience, Hakomi, Mind-Body Centring, trauma-focused movement and yoga [hyperlink] practices.
You can read this article [hyperlink] for a piece I’ve written on Substack on Body as Resource.
