All the words are not enough.
My MA dissertation was titled “A feminist investigation of the facilitation of embodied agency in Dance Movement Psychotherapy with trauma survivors who have experienced external control.” It was 26,200 words over 67 pages plus a 10-minute solo dance performance exploring my research process and response to the material. I came in 2 words under the maximum allowance, and that was after cutting out pages and abbreviating and hyphenating at every possible turn. I have a lot to say on the topic.
My discussion and solo performance focused on the sense of body control/ownership and vulnerability on a continuum – the acceptance of the fact that we are constantly constructing and re-constructing the distribution of control/ownership and vulnerability we feel in relationship to others and our environment. The distribution changes depending on and contributes to our body politics and our lived experience (which have also been intra-actively[1] shaped by and with our body politics – it’s the whole never-ending reflection of a reflection in mirror concept).
I came to the project as a privileged, educated, white, American woman from stable home, where I had grown up with a strong sense of identity, safety, and control over my body. In my research process, I explored in movement what it might be like to ‘try on’ different experiences and constructions of body politics as described by my research participants (experienced DMPs who have worked with survivors of relational trauma). While the embodied experience I’ve described was enlightening, and at times emotionally difficult and scary, I still had the experience in the safety and comfort of my own body in a dance studio in my university. I improvised movement around ideas and descriptions presented to me by others. The embodied experience was very strong, but still one level removed.
Now I am face-to-face with the clients my research participants had experienced. I am not feeling the experiences of other DMPs, I am the DMP experiencing the clients. And while many of the sensations and embodied felt-sense experiences I’ve had remind me of and bring me back to improvised movement sessions I conducted with myself during my research process, it’s not in the safety of a university dance studio anymore. It’s full on feeling into the experience of a person who has had completely different life experiences than I have and trying to understand how to give them a sense of something else.
In my dissertation, I explored in movement the question, ‘How do I know my body is a home?’. I have over 26,000 words to discuss my engagement with this idea verbally and in movement. But now I am revisiting it in a new context, and the stakes feel so much higher. What would it really be like to have no sense of safety inside or outside of my body? It leaves me feeling completely empty, lost and like I could just blow away. This is an excerpt from an embodied movement response I included in my dissertation in response to the question:
But what if my body is not safe? And with this question, everything changed. The warmth and nourishment was gone, replaced with something foreign, toxic. I wanted to pull my insides out and scrape off my skin. I collapsed, feeling empty and nauseous. I felt helpless - heavy and weightless at the same time. And without any way to escape, I cried. Time and space ceased to exist. I tried to move my arms by throwing weight into them, but I no longer felt that I had permission to put them anywhere. This isn’t me, this isn’t my story. … Slowly, I used all my strength to drag myself somewhere else, somewhere safe, where I could come back to my safe body.
The words resonate now more than ever, but they also feel insufficient. It feels so real when I’m with a person who may feel that way all the time. And it’s still not my story. I can still bring myself back to safety; my body is still safe. But it takes more to bring myself back in this context, where I’m literally surrounded by those who may have a much more first-hand experience of what I have the luxury ‘try on’ and ‘take off.’
I’m still finding the balance in my self-care where I feel safe myself to try on this experience again in improvised movement and bring myself out of it, without feeling guilt that I can bring myself out of it. After all, what resources would I be able to offer the girls if I did not have the experience of bringing myself out of these sensations? But where I can get stuck is the embodied knowledge that I have a representation of safety in my body to return to. The girls here have a multitude of phrases and mantras reminding themselves that they are strong, healthy and beautiful. And while I fully believe in the power of mantras – telling yourself you’re beautiful every day will help you to believe you’re beautiful – still, they are words. And what I am asking these girls to do is to create an entirely new experience in their bodies, something they may have never felt before. What does safe feel like if you have no concept of safety? Having someone tell you you’re safe a million times can be meaningless if you don’t have an embodied understanding of safe.
It reminds me of the question people ask themselves to know if they’re in love with someone. The general response is that you ‘just know.’ But if you’ve never had the experience, how do you know it? How do you identify that some feeling or sensation you have is actually love? How do you trust yourself to know you’re right that the feeling is love? I know what safe feels like in my body, and I know how to get there. But many of these girls may not.
Academically speaking, I have so many to words about finding safety and body ownership, about reducing a sense of vulnerability. But I can’t exactly hand someone a feeling for her to hold and possess, and I can only understand how she is actually feeling through some embodied approximation of my own feelings. If you’ve never felt safe, a new feeling of ‘safe’ might be unsettling, and therefore scary to actually stay with long enough to know that you like it. The idea of a body ownership-vulnerability continuum is so big, but the actual facilitating of an embodied sense of a safe balance between the two is a much slower and more difficult process than 26,000 words can relay. The change has to be embodied, but it must also be able to be discussed and engaged with verbally. This does add an additional challenge in the language barrier. How to communicate embodied agency to a girl who speaks a different embodied and verbal language from me?
This makes me think about Beatrice Allegranti’s[2],[3] discussions of kinaesthetic intersubjectivity – the sharing of intersubjective processes in movement. But when someone is not yet empowered enough to engage in expressive movement for themselves, I turn to the kinaesthetic intersubjective relationship that happens on a neurological level through the Mirror Neuron System as explored by Vittorio Gallese[4]. In short, he and his team discovered that when monkeys view other monkeys performing goal-oriented movements, motor neurons in the witnessing monkey’s brain fire as if they are actually performing the same movement. (There is also evidence that a mirror neuron network exists in the human brain.)
This is not to say that kinaesthetic intersubjective processes are not happening already, even if the girls are not engaging in what I might view as expressive i movement. There is always movement happening, from our breath to our heartbeat, eye movements, and all other micro-movements. Kinaesthetic intersubjectivity is experienced in even the smallest levels of movement, and that is what I am working with in these instances now on a therapeutic level.
But it makes me wonder, how else can I perhaps use my ability to use dance and movement to ‘feel into’ and ‘move within’ the experiences of others to demonstrate and facilitate an embodied intersubjective experience of agency, safety, and ownership in a therapeutic context to help the client to have some kind of embodied understanding of an experience they have maybe never had? The answer is, I don’t really know; that’s probably the premise for my future PhD, the proposal for which I had every intention of completing while doing my work here before I had an embodied understanding of how much physical and emotional energy and time would be taken up by this work. Don’t worry (she tells herself), the proposal is coming, but must first be informed by this experience.
As always, if you would like to donate to help fund this voluntary work, please click here. All donations go to help me cover the costs of flights, visa fees, health and medical expenses, and professional supervision as required by the Association of Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK to help to support and hold the therapeutic work.
[1] Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28(3) pp. 801-831.
[2] Allegranti, B. (2015a) Corporeal Entanglements: Implications for the Therapeutic Relationship. In: Through the Looking Glass: Dimensions of Reflection in the Arts Therapies. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press. pp. 89-98.
[3] Allegranti, B. (2015b) Allegranti, B. (2015) Embodied Performances: Sexuality, Gender, Bodies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[4] For example: Gallese, V. (2009) Mirror neurons, embodied simulation and the neural basis of social identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 19 pp.519-36.