Experiencing in movement psychotherapy

Abstract

Experiencing is a process variable in psychotherapy which deals with the manner with which individuals use their internal, ongoing bodily-felt flow of experience to gain self-awareness and to communicate about themselves. A consistent finding across research process studies in psychotherapy is that successful clients start, continue, and end therapy at higher experiencing levels than do less successful clients. The implication of this finding for all therapists, irrespective of their theoretical framework, is that they need to help their clients process the content they raise in therapy at a high level of experiencing throughout the course of therapy. This paper discusses and demonstrates several body movement based procedures that enhance clients’ experiencing level while working within the context of experiential movement psychotherapy, a form of psychotherapy which emphasizes the acquisition of personal meanings by clients from any of the following three experiential and expressive modalities: body movement, kinetic imagery, or verbal communication.