BODY PSYCHOTHERAPY

Psychotherapy offers you the chance to come into a deeper relationship with yourself. You will become aware of how certain life events have impacted you and how unconscious patterns may be influencing your life.

Every life event takes place not only in our mind, but also in our body. Our mental, emotional, and physical experiences are interdependent. Although our culture is thought-centric, the language of the body is our mother-tongue. The body is the home of feeling and to heal we need to access it.

Breath, movement, posture and nervous system regulation are procedural body processes that carry the legacy of how we learned to be in the world. For some of us this includes the legacy of trauma and impaired attachment dynamics (how we learned to be in relationship with others from our earliest relational imprints). Research in the fields of neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology confirm the power of body-oriented psychotherapy to access these deeper held layers of memory and self.

Body psychotherapy uniquely includes the body in the psychotherapeutic process as both a source of information and a focus for interventions. Body psychotherapy includes traditional ‘talking therapy’ but also uses experiential methods that open new dimensions for insight and growth. These may include exploring the felt experience of the body and movement impulses, psychotherapeutic bodywork/massage to address holding patterns in the body and exploring relational dynamics through the felt sense of the body.

Through body psychotherapy we are able to access what has been repressed and what wants to be expressed. There may be painful feelings of anger, shame, fear and grief but equally feelings of love, joy, pleasure, expansion and spontaneity that are buried under shallow breath, numbness, disconnection, tension or ‘body armouring’. By burying all of this we learned to adapt and navigate life with the best strategies available to us, but we may have cut off our true ‘aliveness’ and be carrying patterns of behaviour that no longer serve us.

My sessions offer an environment of acceptance and being truly listened to. In feeling fully accepted, we begin to develop self-compassion and a ground of trust in ourselves. Rather than doling out standardised advice or instruction, body psychotherapy supports you to come into contact with your own innate knowing and from there to find solutions unique to you. Any work with the body in sessions is trauma sensitive and ethical. I am a fully accredited psychotherapist registered with the UKCP, abiding by their ethical code and receive regular supervision.

Contact Jacqualene

Call Jacqualene today on 07772 699 010 or send an e mail to arrange a free 15 minute conversation to talk about your needs and questions.

07772 699 010

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