How Can Dance/Movement Therapy Help You Heal from Trauma?

Dance and Movement can be a nonverbal way to express the trauma stored in your body. Henri Matisse: The Dance.

Are you aware of the ways traumatic events in your life have shaped your body’s movement? Have you considered the ways trauma can become stored in your body and affect your thinking, feeling, and actions? The involvement of body awareness and movement is a growing field within psychology, and can deepen your healing experiences from post-traumatic stress. Dance/movement therapy is part of that paradigm shift.

Whereas traditionally, psychotherapy focused on traumatic effects on the mind, the field is starting to investigate how the body and mind interact with each other to produce PTSD and other mental illnesses. This post summarizes my discussion with Sara van Koningsveld, MA, BC-DMT, NCC/LPCC, GL-CMA, RYT 200, who is a certified dance/movement therapist and explains how dance/movement therapy can facilitate deeper trauma healing for you and other trauma survivors.

Dancing Through Difficulty: The Origins of Sara’s Dance/Movement Therapy Journey

Sara explained that she used dance since childhood as a therapeutic outlet and coping tool for the difficulties she had growing up. This led her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in dance, and an advisor at her college asked her what she would do with the degree when she graduated. She had an interest in psychology and chose to emphasize this in her studies, which began her path to becoming a dance/movement therapist. She obtained a masters of arts (MA) in Dance/Movement Therapy and Clinical Counseling, which made her eligible to be a licensed therapist. Currently, she works online and is licensed in California, Utah, and Wisconsin.

A Little History of Dance/Movement Therapy.

She explained that dance therapy has been around for many decades, starting after World War II with veterans. In the 1960s, the American Dance Therapy Association came into existence and has been around since. Known for developing the Polyvagal Theory, Sara noted that even Stephen Porges is trained in dance/movement therapy as part of his research in the field. She uses polyvagal concepts in her understanding of the mind-body connection.

Sara also explained that dance therapy was a discipline, but we could also consider it as part of expressive arts therapy. She explains more here:

…There's kind of two categories, there's the Expressive Arts, which really looks at them as an integrative use of art and expressivity, and then independently they form the creative arts [therapies] umbrella. So, if you're using art therapy, music therapy, dance therapy, [et. al], they are seen as independent, requiring different certifications. And so there's actually a National Coalition of Creative Arts Therapies [NCCATA.org] for all of the art therapy, music, dance therapy, drama therapy,... [Their] boards, they meet and they discuss advocacy and accessibility to our fields.

What Distinguishes Dance/Movement Therapy from Exercise and Dance Instruction?

The intention and approach to movement is what is special about dance/movement therapy versus regular exercise classes. One of the intentions of dance therapy is to integrate the mind and body, from the bottom up. This means that instead of focusing on intellectual understanding of your psychological issues (which happens in the cortex, the top of the brain), the limbic system and lower parts of the brain are actively involved in dance therapy.

This increases the connection between the top of the brain and the lower parts of the brain.

She emphasized that while all movement and exercise have value in healing from trauma, therapeutic movement aims specifically at processing traumatic stress so you can heal from it. This also leads to a greater level of acceptance of what happened in the past.

How Can Dance/Movement Therapy Help with Post-Traumatic Stress?

Sara talked about the mind-body connection and how it plays a part in dance therapy:

We know that the brain and the body are connected. We know that we can't really, just cut it off at the neck, right? But recognizing this bi-directional communication, that polyvagal theory talks so much about, is just the foundation of the work. So when using dance/movement therapy, often we're using the movement to access the felt sense in the body, but also when we think of like primal brain and lack of access to vocabulary or that,... prefrontal cortex, intellectual, visual, kind of memory, we need to go into the felt sense of the trauma.

And so, the movement and the body are then used to explore that felt sense... in some ways, the language of dance/movement therapy, in practice, is similar to [the language of] somatic experiencing, or somatic psychotherapy. --What are the sensations you're having in the body? Where do they live in the body? Do they move in the body, and then facilitating [movement] from those places….

Sara van Koningsveld, MA, BC-DMT, NCC/LPCC, GL-CMA, RYT 200

You can address trauma through dance/movement therapy in a variety of ways, according to Sara:

• It is a way of expressing and releasing energy that’s trapped in the body with traumatic stress;

•   It is a gradual way to gain control and regulation of your feelings, like exposure therapy;

• It builds a body-based vocabulary for self-expression and self-understanding, thus increasing awareness of your own experience;

•   It allows you to tolerate more stress, since your window of tolerance is bigger;

•   It allows you to tell your story through movement and bodily expression, which can help you gain more connection through your mind and body.

Additionally, it assesses how you currently hold stress in your body, the habitual patterns that inhibit you emotionally, physically, and mentally. For example, if you tend to become easily disturbed and your movements are quick and reactive (a sign of hyper-arousal), dance/movement therapy can help ground you and slow you down. If you tend towards hypo-arousal (you move slowly and feel stuck), it can help activate you and release that stuck energy.

Dance/movement therapists use assessment to tailor their approach to your unique habits, which allow you to gradually expand your range of physical and emotional expression. It can be helpful integrated with or as an add-on to talk therapy, especially if you struggle with putting feelings and sensations into words.

If your mobility is limited by pain or disability, you can still participate.

For people with chronic pain or illness, it can also help you be aware of how your trauma and chronic pain influence each other. As Sara explained about a client with chronic pain,

…she can learn to recognize when she has flare ups when her trauma response and stress is higher. And so, we're working on specifically staying regulated, staying calm, creating healthy ways and places to move, even when there is pain... so that her nervous system, her auto immune system can recognize and take care of itself.

People with any physical ability level can participate in Dance/Movement Therapy, and it has been used with a wide variety of people, from senior citizens with dementia in rehab facilities and also in water with physical assistance.

Intrigued about Dance/Movement Therapy?

To watch the whole video, please visit my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/p_RkR6pKK70.

want to get in touch with Sara, please find her on Instagram or through her website https://wholeyouhealth.org. For ongoing integrative counseling services that emphasize the mind-body connection and expressive arts therapies, contact her associate, Lexi Traub, to schedule a consultation.

If you want to try EMDR therapy, Flash Technique, or Ericksonian hypnosis as trauma therapy, please call 661-233-6771 or click the button below.