Healing by Accident Using Dance Therapy

Mind-body connections become much more apparent when non-verbal methods of expression are introduced early on in the therapeutic journey. In my own observation of people of all kinds, I have learned how creative arts therapy of which dance therapy is one part, can be useful for encouraging poignant therapeutic moments of revelation, sharing, or mere self-expression often not immediately possible in verbal means. Artists of any kind know this from personal experience when their art sometimes speaks back to them, intrigues them, and along the way informs them of their own less understood life themes. A few weeks ago, I came across a talk about dance therapy by Dr. Sherry Goodill. While thinking about this therapy afterwards, I could find a stark difference in how using dance forms serves different therapeutic purposes, compared to simply expressing yourself using words. In dance, the client gets to experience and express what they couldn't put together in words.

I'm a social-personality psychologist by training with a focus on positive psychology, not a clinical psychologist or a counsellor by any means. With this clarification out of the way, I think similar to art therapy, dance therapy can be useful during opportune moments or stages of therapy. Here are examples of possible prompts during therapy.

1) Can you express a dance or body posture for how you felt in the darkest moment of threat or your lowest time?

This isn't supposed to be judged for any artistic talent and is supposed to be mere expression for better understanding. After a compassionate observation, the therapist can help the client construct a dance pose that reflects the opposite of what the client expressed. This is rooted in one of Charles Darwin's principles of how emotions become visible through bodily postures and due to embodiment, alternative emotions may be introduced to empower the client, enable a sense of control, and gradually corrode the damage of the initial response to harm felt.

2) The therapist can then encourage the client to improvise the dance movement into something that feels more personal and relevant. An example of improvising dance movements can be found here, expressed by Kathryn McCormick's 3 steps. Though unrelated to my idea here, the same can be used to improvise from moment or moments of helplessness to something more stabilizing. My prediction is, with other cognitive and emotion based verbal therapies continuing alongside, this can encourage healing from within, from the body to the mind. An example of this could be a dance movement to heal being imprisoned or locked could be generating steps in which after exploring an entire room, the client opens the door and walks out in the end (e.g., break dance and other forms of modern dance are possible genres for inspiration for movement). Another example is using dance gestures to remove obstacles or any oppression and getting out of the situation safely. Through improvisation, the client can feel some agency in how they can change their own experience. Such expression should unfreeze the lingering psychological impact of the trauma, minimize ruminative tendencies, and enable some agency. See talk by Candy Lo for how she responds to a grumpy client in the hospital using postures.

The typical psychotherapist is generally interested in disentangling knots of discomfort and distress bothering a client, some of which may not even be clear to the person seeking help. Dance therapy, ironically, serves both a distancing purpose (in the beginning stages when you may feel that you don't have to exactly talk about the issue) and then the exact opposite later when unsaid significant revelations become instantly clear. By this time, the therapist and client have already arrived under the same roof, trust has developed due to some unusual expression, and chances of targeting the real issues become better.