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Within our bodies are embedded the stories of our lives…so far.
It’s not easy being human, having a constantly changing physical body, navigating relationships, making sense of things and keeping it all together. Winnie the Pooh remarked, life is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved. Biodynamic Psychotherapy does not aim to solve our sufferings but it can help to find new inner and outer resources so that we can enjoy the pleasures, manage the pains and create a more spacious and resourceful inner atmosphere.
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Biodynamic Psychotherapy belongs to the broader field of body orientated therapies (sometimes called somatic therapy), which introduces the body into the therapeutic relationship to compliment the counselling. Body therapies all share the basic idea that everything we experience is from the perspective of having a body, and that even our cognitive and emotional faculties are distributed across a range of interconnected biological systems. The option of touch allows our early, or traumatic experiences which lay the deep in the body, to be accessed and articulated.
History
Biodynamic Psychotherapy was developed by Gerda Boyesen (18th May 1922 – 29th December 2005). While working as a clinical psychologist and physiotherapist in a psychiatric hospital, she discovered that those patients who received regular massage underwent a change in both their physical appearance (breathing, posture, skin pallor, muscle tightness) and in their psychotic symptoms. Eventually, Boyesen developed her observations into a psychotherapeutic model, introducing some innovative contributions, such as the role of the gut in processing emotions and the gentle, encouraging midwife approach to the therapeutic relationship.
Many who come to Biodynamic Psychotherapy already suspect there is a connection between their mental pain and physical symptoms, and the issues they have cannot be reached by words alone. Biodynamic Psychotherapy is a method to help us navigate beyond the limitations of language and into the experiences we had before words were available or where experiences were too painful or confusing to be made sense of, yet still holding us captive.
Biodynamic Body Psychotherapy 