Background: This didactic/experiential presentation explores how creativity can be incorporated into any therapeutic process. Techniques from body-focused language, yoga and dance/movement therapy will be demonstrated and discussed. Attendees will be invited to expand their clinical intuition and attunement awareness to discover and gain access to their own creativity.
Objectives: * Explain the role of creativity in the treatment of eating disorders. * Learn three innovative techniques to creatively facilitate therapeutically attuned intuition * Identify three ways clinicians can help their clients move deeper into their own feelings
1.Introduction
Techniques culled from body-focused language, as well as yoga and dance/movement therapy,will be explained and explored to demonstrate how underlying eating disorder issues can be brought into clients’ conscious awareness, providing clarity and motivation for change.
2. Primary Concepts
- Creativity: brings to awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life
- Embodiment: to personify; transforming intuitive senses into active therapeutic skills
- Body Language: recognizing the power of emotion and action language embedded in the body and dimensions of language that have therapeutic relevance
3. Discussion,Demonstration and integration of the three mediums -- Body-focused language, Yoga and DMT --- how they are defined, why they are important, how they can be adapted creatively to maximize effective treatment outcomes.
A. YOGA - Incorporating the physical practice and philosophy of yoga into ED treatment provides a gestalt experiment in which clients can improve and integrate their awareness of what they are doing, feeling, needing, and experiencing. This awareness often can lead to ameliorating ED symptoms.
a. Provide and explore primary concepts
b Conduct demonstration experiences
c. Learn to integrate concepts into clinicians’ own skill set
B. DMT : DMT methods help clients recognize that communication is always present even when they are not speaking. Building on clients’ idiosyncratic movements, dance/movement therapists help clients experience feelings, express them through their expressive movements and identify the parallels to their lives
a. Provide Primary Concepts
b. Conduct demonstration experiences
c. Learn to integrate concepts into clinicians’ own skill set
C. BODY LANGUAGE: Dimensions of language that have therapeutic relevance include the rhythm and pacing of the delivery, idiomatic phrases, and emotion, action, and trigger words. While it is important that the clinician ask the client to explicitly define the meaning of the spoken words, it is equally important for the clinician to read between the lines to discern what is not being said
a.Provide Clinical Concepts & techniques
b. Conduct demonstration experiences
c. Learn to integrate concepts into clinicians’ own skill set
4. Closure: Review of major concepts presented and closing activity. Q & A
Rollo May wrote in his ground-breaking book, The Courage to Create, “Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life." When clinicians invite opportunities for creativity and spontaneity to emerge, authenticity, growth and connection are maximized; creativity can thus serve to move clients deeper into their feelings.
This didactic and experiential presentation explores how the transformative power of creativity can be incorporated into any therapeutic relationship or process. Techniques culled from body-focused language , as well as yoga and dance/movement therapy , will demonstrate how underlying eating disorder issues can be brought into clients’ conscious awareness, providing clarity and motivation. When these techniques are integrated into clinicians’ existing skill-sets a “whole” greater than the sum of its parts is produced and a more powerful and engaging treatment process emerges. Attendees will be invited to expand their clinical intuition and attunement awareness to discover and gain access to their own creativity.
Adrienne Ressler, an ED and body image specialist, is VP of Professional Development, The Renfrew Center Foundation, and past-president/Fellow of iaedp. With extensive training in gestalt therapy, psychodrama, bio-energetic analysis and Alexander Technique, her work is published in The International Journal of Fertility and Women’s Medicine, Social Work Today, and the Journal of the International Spa Association. She has contributed chapters for 2 ED textbooks and an entry, Experiential and Somatopsychic Approaches to Body Image Change, in the first Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance. Adrienne is Co-chairperson of the AED Somatic Therapies Special Interest Group.
Susan Kleinman, MA, BC-DMT, NCC, CEDS, is creative arts supervisor and dance/movement therapist for The Renfrew Center of Florida. Ms Kleinman is a trustee of the Marian Chace Foundation, Past President of the American Dance Therapy Association, and a past Chair of The National Coalition for Creative Arts Therapies. She has published extensively, presented widely, and is the recipient of the American Dance Therapy Association’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award and The International Association of Eating Disorders Professional’s 2014 Spirit of iaedp Award. Her work is featured in the documentary entitled Expressing Disorder: Journey to Recovery
and
Elisa Mott Jones, EdS, NCC, E-RYT 500
Elisa Mott Jones received her Masters and Specialist degrees in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Florida. She holds advanced certifications in Yoga, Spirituality in Health, Arts in Healthcare. She was awarded a Counseling Research Grant for "Using Yoga to Improve Wellness: Exploring the Effects of a Four-Week Luna Yoga Program on Female Counselors". She is the author of the chapter Three Approaches: Client Perspectives on Strong, Restorative and Partner Yoga Classes in the book Yoga and Eating Disorders and co-author of the chapter The Use of Holistic Methods to Integrate the Shattered Self in the textbook Treating Eating Disorders: Bridging the Practice-Research Gap.
