What does a client’s posture say
about their resilience? Dr. Pat
Ogden suggests that we all have
a “Movement Vocabulary”. And
your clients’ body language may
be giving off clues as to how
they’ll react to adversity. Pat
tells the story of a client who
suffered a lifetime of abuse,
and how one small change to her
physicality helped her find hope again.
Resilience to me in terms
of a somatic perspective has to
do with movement vocabulary. I
think that we lose our
resilience when we lose options
and when we lose options in
response to whatever’s coming
our way. Ron Kurtz used to say
two things influence the quality
of our experience: one is what
happens to us; and two is how we
react. So, in terms of
resilience, I like to look at
actions that are familiar and
easy to clients, and actions
that are difficult or
unfamiliar, because I know that
the more options a person has in
their movement vocabulary, the
more options they’ll have in
responding to life’s stresses,
and thus the more resilient they
will be. But I’m working with a
client who has a rigid posture,
for example, you know when they
get stressed they’re not all of
a sudden going to become fluid
and be able to respond in a
multifaceted way, because the
patterns will exacerbate under
stress. So, if somebody’s rigid,
they’re going to respond with
more rigidity; if somebody’s
collapsed, they’re probably
going to respond with more
collapse. So, I want clients to
be able to have more
possibilities in their body, to
have the possibility of being
very definitive and assertive
and even forceful, but also have
the possibility to yield and
receive and open, you know - to
have the possibility to reach
out in a variety of ways for
help, but also to grasp, to be
able to take and pull something
for yourself. So I think of
actions: I think of Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen’s work where
she defined five developmental
actions of yield, of a restful,
receptive stance; push, which we
do in a variety of ways we push
- we can push just with our
eyes; reach; grasp; and pull.
And clients develop habits of
response in that vocabulary, and
those habits limit our
resiliency. I’m thinking of one
client in particular because it
was a fairly recent session and
it touched me so much because
she’d had such a tough life: she
was a sex worker at the time
that I was working with her and
she had had terrible abuse and
had allowed herself to, as she
said, “I allowed myself to be
abused by my boyfriend, like
shut in the closet” - horrible
stuff, horrible sexual abuse.
And she was just sobbing that
she had, what she said, “Allowed
all that.” And she didn’t want
to live. She said, “There’s no
hope.” She said, “If a bus hit
me tomorrow, nobody should shed
a tear.” There was one point in
the session where her hand went
up just a little bit - and in
terms of the body we’re always
looking for these preparatory
movements - that we could have
predicted from her history that
she, again, was not able to
protect herself. So her movement
vocabulary was limited. She
didn’t have that push. She
couldn’t assert, she couldn’t
protect, she couldn’t stand her
ground. So, I wanted to expand
her vocabulary by creating a
context in which she could push,
and she felt, she said, “For the
first time, this feels like hope
- like maybe there’s some hope
for me” - because we’d expanded
the movement vocabulary. And
when we’re doing that, expanding
the vocabulary in that way,
we’re changing the present
moment of how she lives in her
body, but we’re rewriting
history. We’re rewriting history
and we’re also changing the
future, because when she gets
this capacity in her body, she
will be more resilient. She will
be able to use that in her
world, in her relationships.
Now we’d like to hear from you.
How have you used body language
and movement in your work with
clients? Please leave a comment below.
And thanks for watching.