..."For much the same reason, body psychotherapy sometimes works well with sexual-abuse survivors, although it takes a well-trained and
sensitive therapist to handle such people. A few years ago a 46-year-old single mother in the San Francisco Bay Area named Terry
found herself getting worse rather than better in talk therapy. Terry (who prefers not to use her last name) liked her therapist. But
talking about the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child was making her feel overwhelmed. Spacy and disassociated, she could
barely prepare dinner for her child. As memories of being raped surfaced, her legs became so rigid she had trouble climbing stairs.
Unable to help her, Terry's therapist recommended that she try Bodynamic Analysis.
Developed in Denmark by Lisbeth Marcher, Bodynamics is one of a number of body psychotherapies recently introduced to the United
States from Europe. Marcher documented the psychological content and age of activation of each muscle in the body, creating a "map"
covering seven stages of childhood development. Using this developmental map, Bodynamics therapists pinpoint muscles in clients
that are "resigned" and have lost their impulses, and those that are rigid. They then retrain these areas and work to develop the lost
psychological functions they represent, thereby expanding individuals' capacities. The practice is grounded in the belief that people are
motivated by a deep drive toward mutual connection that is experienced through the body. Breaks in this sense of connection lead to
the developmental blocks that show up as stiffened muscles and lost psychological abilities.
Body psychotherapists typically move slowly with sexual-abuse survivors because bodywork can retraumatize them. In Bodynamics, Terry first learned how to experience her traumatic memories without being overwhelmed. "They taught me to tighten my legs when I'm standing in a certain way that gave me a sense of having a `container' around the feelings," she explains. The therapist established Terry's boundaries by having her tell him where to sit in the room. After six months of such groundwork, he began using body contact to re-establish resources in Terry that had been overridden by the abuse.
Muscle testing showed that Terry's triceps, the muscles in the arm used to push people away, were collapsed. Unable to push people away, Terry was afraid to let them in and therefore had trouble with relationships. In repeated sessions, she practiced pushing her therapist away, then processing the feelings that came up. Three months of such work gave her a new sense of confidence around people. "Now when someone is too much in my space, I can push them out with my voice and words," she says. "I can stay calm and don't get triggered with all the fear of people violating my personal space as I used to."
Two years into therapy, Terry reports that her life is back on track and that she's studying to be a Bodynamics therapist. She believes talk therapy failed to produce the same results because it left her body out of the process: "My body was what experienced the violation in the past, and my body needed to experience the ability to push people out."
The above excerpt is from "Listening to the Body" - article by Jennifer Bingham Hull, in the May/June 1997 issue of Common Boundary magazine.
or to return to About Bodynamics Page - 