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Dance therapy is a body-based therapy defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as,
"the therapeutic use of movement as a process that fosters the emotional, cognitive, social, and physical integration of the individual."
This form of therapy is based on the expressive nature of dance and its power to transform the individual.
Are you open to the possibility of healing through body expression and trying new ways to transform traumatic or painful experiences?
Then this article is for you.
Emotions are energy that is released through verbal language and many other forms of expression.
Not all emotions or experiences manage to be adequately channeled and expressed, some are very intense and remain recorded or associated with certain body regions.
This is what explains why you experience fear, anxiety, anger, sadness or joy when faced with certain body movements or certain situations that apparently should not affect you.
In other cases, this repressed energy manifests itself in:
Close your eyes, breathe slowly and try to contract all the muscles of your face or all the muscles of your back, do you feel any emotion?
If you answered yes, you have just experienced what is known as body memory or trauma memory.
Dance therapy is a means to learn to express freely and through movement what is represented in the person's psyche and associated with the body. It helps to integrate all the ways we have to process experiences and learn how to deal with them without getting sick.
It's a form of creative therapy led by a therapist specialized in this method. It uses a wide variety of rhythms and techniques as the case requires.
Basically, the sessions are developed through exercises to work on:
Usually it is a contemporary dance, focused on creation and expression through movement and whose purpose is to integrate the internal world with the exterior to recognize emotions and transform them.
From its origins in the mid-20th century, dance therapy was developed through three methods:
Beyond the methods on which it was designed, dance therapy revolves around 4 main axes:
It gives a framework for the user to feel comfortable with body expression. This is not about acquiring artistic skills, but about encouraging people to express themselves through authentic movement.
It is a means to recognize through the other feelings that exist within one. The therapist can direct the user to imitate a movement to facilitate the expression of a feeling difficult for that person to recognize.
Dance therapy is a way of disconnecting the user from the limits imposed by their intellect and allowing them to express themselves freely. Improvisation is expected to facilitate the connection with the feeling and lead to the self-recognition and self-acceptance.
Creation results from the combination of dance technique and improvisation. It is a way of boosting self-esteem and bringing the internal world outside. This is when experiences and traumas stop being a burden because they are being transformed through movement.
You may still have doubts about how to start a therapeutic process mediated by dance.
You may think that it will be difficult to take the first step - and this is a common concern when trying something new. The truth is, there is nothing to worry about. You should know that not everything in dance therapy depends on the body.
The dance therapist will help you in the process by using motivators that will work as a fuel to get you moving.
Two of these elements are:
Each word is linked to an image that is unique for each person and is related to their own experiences, with their subjectivity.
The therapist will use words to connect the person with specific images and movements related to their process.
Imagine you're told to grow as a tree, to flow as the air, to be the sun or to move as water. Each word or sentence will stimulate a movement response seeking a specific change in you.
This is a way of stimulating the introspection of sensory stimuli.
The objects provide sensory information (color, smell, texture, shape, etc.) that the person can integrate into their body game. So that the person not only works on exteriorizing but also on introjecting and integrating elements of their environment.
Dance therapy is a means of self-knowledge guided by body expression that helps to work on specific conflicts and achieve benefits like:
Dance therapy is recommended for those people with distortions or concerns about their body image. The process of connecting the inner world with the environment through movement helps people to develop a genuine perception of their own body.
As we mentioned above, intense emotions related to traumatic events tend to remain associated with body regions, in what some call “body memory” and others “trauma memory”.
Expression through movement favors the recognition of these emotions. It opens the possibility of transforming them into something bearable for the person.
Dance therapy is one of the best ways to promote body expression in people with functional limitations such as those with aftereffects from cerebrovascular disease, amputations, or physical trauma damage.
It gives them the opportunity to regain in some way the ability to use their body to create and enhance their psycho-emotional well-being.
Dance therapy helps people to communicate and express through the body, which becomes a new way of communicating without anxieties or fears. It's ideal as a complement to speech therapy in children and in treating people with conditions such as stuttering or social phobia.
Finally, in almost a century of history, dance therapy has proven to be a way to heal body and mind. Its therapeutic power is not limited to improving those who suffer physically or emotionally.
It also improves physical condition, prevents the appearance of diseases and enhances the development of the individual. To explore this form of creative therapy, we recommend you find a specialist in the field who can accompany you in the process and help you get the most out of this practice.
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