Background: Sustained eating disorder recovery includes living peacefully in one’s own body. Expanding the clinician’s tool kit to include learnings from mindfulness, therapeutic yoga, Feldenkrais Method, and Somatic Experiencing can greatly facilitate the challenge of helping those with eating disorders and complex PTSD to re-embody. Exploratory movement, with an emphasis on physical sensation, can bypass the critical thinking brain and its inhibitory reactions. This presentation will engage participants in experiential tools to explore awareness, focused attention, affect tolerance, and expanding self-image through movement. Step-by-step techniques for expanding body awareness with ease and somatic techniques to manage PTSD triggers will be demonstrated.
Objectives: 1. Develop an internal awareness of the clinician’s own process of nervous system regulation and felt sense of their embodied experience, so as to be able to attend to the client’s nervous system dysregulation. 2. Intervene with exploratory movement approaches to stabilize the client’s nervous system arousal to reduce eating disorder behaviors 3. Facilitate working with and releasing highly charged traumatic material in a way that reinforces the client’s resilience, avoiding reinforcing emotional dysregulation
- Introduction to Using Exploratory Movement in Trauma and Eating Disorder Recovery
- Beginner’s Mind - Exploring resistance through curiosity
- Concepts
i. Focused Awareness
ii. Building Affect Tolerance
iii. Expanding Self-Image Through Movement
- What happens when doing exploratory movement
- With awareness, the more physical ease one experiences, the more emotionally comfortable one becomes
- Anxiety is reduced as the body releases tense, defensive posturing to manage upset.
- More ease and less tension costs less energetically and provides a more peaceful life experience
- With an innate sense of more peace, clients make better decisions in a more timely fashion, creating confidence and trust in themselves
- Being able to move through life with more peacefulness and self-confidence leads to better communication and more satisfying relationships
- Guidelines for Exploratory Movement
- Explore gently and slowly, using comfort as the guide
- Move easily while breathing, reducing any effort
- Explore to first barrier, as pushing through discomfort reinforces habitual defensive patterns
- Rest between movements, noticing any differences that invite attention
- Reduce any unneeded effort, do not move into pain or past pain
- Learning to trust that the brain can restore ease and pain-free function
- Use of Touch in Exploratory Movement
- Clinician is not directly touching the client
- Client using self-touch to enhance interoception and resourcing
- Explore boundaries with sensing physical proximity and safety
- Experiential Exercise #1 – Promoting Interoception
- Listening with the whole self
- Discovering comfortable ways to tune in
- Experiential Exercise #2 –Developing Affect Tolerance
- Noticing safety
- Listening for internal signals of Yes and No
- Constriction and Expansion
- Exploring physical boundaries
- Experiential Exercise #3 - Expanding Internal Self-Image
- Exploring range of motion
- Anchoring a felt sense of healthy nervous system regulation
- Group Discussion and Questions
Constricted affect tolerance is often manifested in the body as chronic tension or pain and gastro-intestinal symptoms. Focused awareness during exploratory movement can greatly expand interoceptive awareness. Interoception is key to the development of affect tolerance. This happens by tracking one’s “felt sense” through a wave of sensation and noticing how it peaks and subsequently subsides. Using these somatic tools improves one’s ability to tolerate intense feeling states, learning to no longer fear these sensations or emotions, thus extinguishing PTSD triggers and eliminating dependency on eating disorder behaviors to cope.
Clients’ self-image determines their actual physical range of movement in the world and vice-versa. This is a perpetuating feedback loop the therapist can intercede by using exploratory movement to give clients a way to experience themselves in their body as it is, with curiosity, rather than behaving with a perceived intention or goal in mind. Exploratory movement clarifies and expands one’s self-image and the ability to discover and challenge distorted perceptions or habitual ways of responding to stress. As clients are able to non-judgmentally observe constrictions and releases in the body, it can facilitate cognitive awareness of how those same constrictions in behavior or self-image are being manifested in relationship with self and others.
This presentation will engage participants in experiential tools to explore awareness, focused attention, affect tolerance, and expanding self-image through movement. Step-by-step techniques for expanding body awareness with ease and somatic techniques to manage PTSD triggers will be demonstrated.
Susan Richter MFT, CEDS, SEP is co-owner and Clinical Director at The New Beginnings Center in Camarillo, California. Trained in EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Comprehensive Resource Model, and Cortical Field Re-education, Susan has over 30 years experience providing individual and group psychotherapy treatment to those with eating disorders, trauma, anxiety and depression. Susan is an IAEDP Approved Supervisor and oversees the Center’s therapeutic movement programs. Susan presents at national conferences on eating disorder treatment, and served on the faculty of the Rosewood Institute. As the founding President of the Central Coast chapter of IAEDP, she remains active in training local professionals.
Sean Baker MFT, SEP is co-owner and CEO at The New Beginnings Center in Camarillo, California. Combining training in Cortical Field Re-education with certifications in Somatic Experiencing and Gestalt therapy, Sean uses body-mind approaches to resolve clients’ distress related to trauma, eating disorders, and medical conditions. Sean served as President of IAEDP Central Coast and presents at national conferences on somatic approaches to trauma treatment. Sean advocates for transgender mental health care, provides staff sensitivity trainings and works with LGBT+ clients at the Santa Paula PRIDE Clinic.
