Free Workshop on “Movement Shadow in Diagnostics & Intervention: Use of Movement in Therapeutic Work with Trauma”

Based on the recent PhD research project outcomes on use of movement diagnostics in therapeutic process and enriched by insights from my practice as EMDR practitioner and subsequent dive into the movement representations in processing trauma, the workshop will invite participants into combination of practical exploration and theoretical frameworks exploration.   

Movement is one of the information channels through which conscious and unconscious is being manifested. How is my own unique movement profile? Which movement qualities are my “cup of tea” and which lay in my “movement shadow”? What does it mean for my psychological life and personal tendencies? How does it feel to experience the movement profile of a person experiencing psychotic episode or eating disorder? What happens to our movement self during and after an event of trauma? What to do with the introject of the perpetrator in my body? What did the Eastern European totalitarian regimes do to the movement profiles of us, people of the second and third generation?

The underlying research is theoretically based on the principles of body-oriented psychotherapeutic schools and uses the analytical tools of Laban movement analysis (LMA) and process-oriented psychology (POP). From the prospective of enactivism, cognition arises not from passive processing of information but through active, embodied interactions with the environment. Psychotraumatology has already discovered the body. Movement is still in the blind spot. Trauma dissociates the person from emotions manifested through body. Trauma is not the event, but what happens in the body. Movement expression then offers a safe space for starting a process of re-connecting with one’s self. It serves as a bridge between dissociated inner representation of the trauma story and the outer world.

We are not born traumatized – trauma comes from the world – and the healing is not possible without inviting the context of the world. While moving all aspects of the trauma story, we are giving back to the world what belongs out there.