A Client’s perspective – Healing the Hurts

A client's perspective of DMP

It’s always good to have insight into the DMP process from the client’s perspective. Here is my client S’s story in her own words (used with permission).

Dance brings me joy.  It frees my body to move, to express how I feel. It also, like the well-known beer, reaches the parts other exercise doesn’t reach. It reaches old tensions, old hurts, allowing them to surface.  Old hurts tend to be the ones I’ve tucked away because they’re too hard to look closely at, the ones I need help with. Dance and Movement Psychotherapy gives me that help. Sometimes I know that I’m angry or anxious or sad.  Sometimes I even know why.  Sometimes I haven’t a clue what’s going on. It doesn’t matter because my body knows and DMP allows my body to explore, in a very safe way, what’s wrong and to let it out in some way, to let it go. Sometimes I know what I’ve let go of, sometimes I don’t. Again, it doesn’t matter because my body knows how much better it feels and that affects my mood and well-being.  Another knock-on effect is how much kinder I am to myself and how much more comfortable I am in my skin. I went to DMP initially because of delayed reaction to bereavement and it has helped enormously with that.  But it’s also helped me with chronic tension in my shoulders and hips and with those old hurts that I didn’t have the courage to look at.  I now have an understanding and affection for my body that I never had before.  I used to rationalise my problems away, thinking I’d dealt with them, unaware that they were being stored as tension in my body.  Now I know better and with DMP, I have a way of addressing them fully.

This is just one example of what can result from therapist and client working together in creative process. Every journey is unique to the individual.