Embodied Relating

Embodied Relating offers a contemporary theory of body psychotherapy; one which above all is founded in lived experience. It suggests that body psychotherapists have learnt enough from verbal psychotherapy - in some cases, rather too much - and can now usefully focus on teaching verbal therapists that embodiment is central to what they, as well as we, are trying to do. Embodiment and relationship are inseparable. If we explore one, we encounter the other. Effective therapeutic work depends on following and supporting the interplay between these two aspects of being human, and the shifts of charge from one to the other. 'Embodied countertransference', for example, is not a special sub-category of a wider phenomenon; it is the thing itself. We might more usefully call countertransference which is not experienced in the practitioner's body 'disembodied countertransference', and ask why and how it has become dissociated. Embodied Relating challenges therapists to unlearn their privileging of the verbal and mental over other spheres. As practitioners and as client, we are disconnected from relationship if we are disconnected from our bodies, and vice versa. It's time to reverse traditional thinking, and recognise embodiment as the matrix of human relating.