The core principle underlying SP is that the body’s intelligence is largely an untapped resource in psychotherapy.  Few psychotherapy or counselling methods incorporate the body’s healing potential to support therapeutic change, leaving therapists dependent on the client’s verbal narrative.  Yet the story told through gesture, posture, tone of voice, facial expressions, gaze, and movement is more significant and more accurate than the story told by the words.  And this “somatic narrative” implicitly conveys early experiences encoded in the brain and body long before the acquisition of language.  To omit drawing upon the wisdom of the body deprives clients of a much-needed avenue of self-knowledge and change.

Although SP incorporates body-oriented interventions common to other somatic psychology approaches – it is its own unique methodology in the way that it combines somatic psychology theory and practice with interpersonal neurobiology, neuroscience, trauma and attachment research. Dr Ogden’s approach for this webinar is that the techniques that underpin SP can be adapted by therapists in conjunction with their primary modalities – to support the unique needs of each client and the dynamics of the therapeutic dyad. At the webinar, she uses lecture, case examples, and brief experiential exercises to demonstrate how we can actively incorporate the body to change the physical actions and reactions that keep clients stuck in the past and support a more unified approach to the treatment of the effects of trauma and attachment.

Understanding the need that adapting Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to an online format presents particular challenges and opportunities, this webinar will also address these difficulties including managing office set-up, use of props, tips to maintain an emotional connection and special considerations in working with posture and movement in a telehealth format. 

© nscience 2020 / 21