The movement in personal change: the practice of dance therapy

“The person is a form of movement” as Kelly says. If we go beyond the traditional dichotomy between mind and body and we consider the person as a whole we can try to describe his/her experience in terms of movement itself, that is also in terms of dance. One aspect may serve as a general example –the question of trust. If I don’t trust my legs to support myself, but I trust another person to do it for me, perhaps I will put all my weight onto that person. This implies a particular kind of experience of relation: the “other” is the only support for me and is just that, nothing else (preemptive and often impermeable construction). How many clients you know have experiences like that? How is it possible to help them to change? Perhaps one way is to experience diverse forms of support: there are different ways I can put my weight onto the other, so the other may be seen in different ways; maybe other things can be used as support, for instance the ground. You can help the person to experience all these things in therapy with some simple experiments to create and validate alternatives.