Truth, justice and bodily accountability: dance movement therapy as an innovative trauma treatment modality

Abstract

This study surveys contemporary approaches to trauma within dance movement therapy/psychotherapy (DMTP). 17 qualitative English-language studies (2010–2020) were examined using qualitative and embodied arts-based research methods. Trauma was conceptualised as a multi-layered, complex phenomenon for the lived and collective body, isolation, and adaptive survival, reflecting DMTP’s understanding of experiences of individual and systemic harm, the enactive self, dissociation, neurobiology, human rights and wider context. Trauma implicated bodily, intrapsychic, relational, communal, social, economic and structural realms. Goals were safety, freedom, pleasure and agency. Dance was a flexible, multimodal, gestalt container for simple-yet-complex interventions linking inner sensing, creative exploration and enactive movement to meaning-making and cognitive and identity restructuring. Therapeutic competence, ego and relationship to power shaped DMTP’s work with individual and collective trauma. DMTP might consider how to better communicate its approach to treating trauma, relevance of therapist/lived-experience, professional and collective identities and enactive healing-justice approaches to sexual violence.