Bioenergetics
What affects the body affects the mind, and what affects the mind affects the body. The psychological defenses one uses to handle the pain and stress of life are also anchored in the body. They appear in the body as unique muscular patterns that inhibit self-expression. These patterns can be identified and understood by bioenergetics psychotherapists who know how to look at the structure, movement, and breathing patterns in a person’s body.
Bioenergetics psychotherapists, like other psychotherapists, focus special attention on the muscular patterns in a person’s body. They are interested in these patterns and their relationship to movement, breath, posture, and emotional expression. Every physical expression of the body has meaning.
As these repressed emotions emerge, clients begin to realize that these patterns inhibit their capacity for spontaneity and creativity in self-expression. They begin to understand that as these defenses became chronic, so did the muscular patterns in their body. As clients progress in bioenergetics psychotherapy, old ineffective patterns that block connection, pleasure, spontaneity, and joy slowly dissolve. Through the physical and emotional release in the body, the client can begin to experience safe, healthy, supportive connections with him/herself and others in new, more satisfying ways.
Bodily Traces
Traumatic incidents in early life, such as accidents, abuse, or severe illnesses, leave their traces in the muscles of the body. The emotional reaction to early life trauma often cannot be expressed at the time and so a “stored emotional charge” is held in the muscles awaiting expression at some later date. This is how the developing body deals with these incidents. Unless these holding patterns are released so they will continue to dominate thinking and behaviour as the mind avoids encountering them through increasing fear.