I have held a Body Psychotherapy practice since 1996, having completed a five-year training at The Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy, and am accredited with UKCP and ACHPP.
Contemporary Body Psychotherapy is an integrative approach that not only draws upon techniques and perspectives from other disciplines but seeks to unify them into a cohesive relational model of psychology that embraces neuro-science and physics.
Fundamentally, I understand and seek to experience the psyche as a body-mind, holistic system of many interwoven processes. Thought and cognition, emotion, sensation, body posture and language, intuition, imagery, energetic presence, respiration, hormones, neural pathways, digestion, muscular patterns and skeletal structure, and so on.
The psyche is relational, systemic and inter-generational. We are distinct, but also of each other, and to know our selves we must know our selves in these dimensions. This is especially so because our wounds and traumas are generally relational and systemic in their primary nature, and the psyche has a reflex to re-enact its storylines in present-day relationships.
This can be seen as a re-traumatisation, and often it is, the same patterns repeating and repeating. But they are doing so in order that they might be seen and experienced in a real-life here-and-now, rather than in the abstract of remembered experience. The psychotherapeutic relationship offers a containment of these dynamics so that they might become known in greater depth and detail, their adaptation and lessons of old re-written in the present day.
Change can be avidly sought, but whilst knowledge can be taught and experience can be facilitated, most often real change occurs spontaneously. We are Complex Systems, and as such we need establish an environment from which change will emerge.
And I believe that change does want to emerge. We undergo a process of change in the quality and structure of our consciousness from the process of birth onwards, and this change emerges. A baby’s inclination to walk comes from within. It’s innate and it unfolds. We become dependent and independent, merged and separate, form moral codes, seek a tribe, turn away from the tribe, and continue on through life with an ever-unfolding process of consciousness that some believe leads ultimately to enlightenment.
It is always in my intention, along with any other therapeutic work we will do, to support a client with re-connecting with their own inherent developmental process.
Body Psychotherapy can be effective for working with any emotional, psychological, or relational issues, and is particularly useful for addressing trauma. However, many people choose Body Psychotherapy also to more generally deepen their experience of the body-mind and spiritual process.
Currently I am working online only, and it’s important to note that the principles of Body Psychotherapy absolutely work without immediate proximity. Every expression of a wounded story carries within the totality of the story, every gesture, word or image, and energetic contact and exchange certainly does not rely upon immediate proximity.
Having been engaged in one form of therapeutic work or another for thirty years, and for over twenty five as a psychotherapist, it’s rare that a client comes to me with issues that I have no previous experience of working with successfully; although I receive each client as an absolutely unique individual who I will seek to be fascinated by.
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