I have always been interested in the relationship between research and practice.
As a practitioner, I value research. It gives us opportunities to ask questions, test ideas and develop our understanding of what might help people. But sitting alongside research has also taught me that what happens in therapy is rarely as straightforward as a research paper can make it sound.
My involvement in research projects has included facilitating Dance Movement Psychotherapy with women who had experienced breast cancer, working within a feasibility study exploring DMP in primary schools, and working with Arts for the Blues, a creative psychotherapy programme developed through research at Edge Hill and Salford Universities.
These experiences have given me the opportunity to see research from the other side of the page.
I’ve been involved in delivering the interventions, observing how people respond, adapting my practice to what is happening in the room, and contributing to the process of turning therapeutic experience into something that can be described and studied.
It has made me increasingly interested in the space between research evidence and lived therapeutic experience.
The research protocol and the person in front of you
Research needs structure.
If we want to understand whether an intervention is effective, we need to know what the intervention actually involved. We need some consistency so that outcomes can be meaningfully considered.
Therapy, however, happens with people.
People don’t arrive as research participants neatly organised around the characteristics described in a study. They arrive with their own histories, personalities, relationships, bodies, hopes and fears.
This was particularly apparent to me in the Dancing With Health project. The research involved a structured dance intervention, but my role as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist was to work with the women who were actually in the room.
That meant paying attention to what was happening for each person and within the group.
A movement that felt comfortable for one person might feel very different for another. Something that looked simple from the perspective of a written protocol could have a completely different significance depending on someone’s physical experience, confidence or relationship with their body.
The research framework was important. So was the ability to work responsively within it.
I’ve come to see these not as opposing requirements, but as two things that need to be held together.
Translation is part of the work
One of the things I have found particularly interesting about research projects is the process of translation.
An intervention may be described on paper in a way that makes perfect sense. But then someone has to take those words and create an actual therapeutic experience.
What does an instruction look like when it is given to a real person?
What happens when someone responds differently from what was anticipated?
How do we maintain the intention of an intervention while remaining attentive to the person experiencing it?
This process of translation is especially interesting in movement-based and creative therapies.
Movement is difficult to capture entirely in words.
A research paper can describe an activity, but it cannot fully communicate the quality of a movement, the atmosphere in a room, the hesitation before someone moves, the moment when another person responds, or the subtle shift that takes place within a relationship.
Those things matter therapeutically.
Research necessarily simplifies experience in order to study it. That doesn’t make the research inadequate. It reminds us that a description of therapy is not the same thing as the experience of therapy.
What outcome measures can tell us
Outcome measures are valuable.
They allow us to ask whether something has changed. They can help demonstrate improvements in areas such as wellbeing, functioning, symptoms or quality of life. They can provide evidence that an intervention is worth investigating further.
The research I have been involved with has produced encouraging findings.
The Dancing With Health study found physical and psychosocial benefits for women who had experienced breast cancer. The primary-school feasibility study reported improvements in areas including wellbeing, life functioning, sleep and emotional and behavioural difficulties. Arts for the Blues has similarly been developed and evaluated as an evidence-based creative psychotherapy intervention.
These findings matter.
But an outcome measure can tell us that something changed without necessarily telling us everything about how it changed.
It cannot always capture the experience of discovering that you can move differently.
Or the significance of being understood by someone else.
Or the gradual development of trust within a therapeutic relationship.
Or the moment when a child discovers a different way of responding to a difficult feeling.
Those experiences are harder to measure, but that doesn’t make them unimportant.
Listening to people’s own experiences
This is one reason I particularly value qualitative research and the inclusion of people’s own accounts.
In the primary-school research, for example, interviews with children suggested outcomes including greater self-expression, emotional regulation, mastery and acceptance of emotions, confidence, reduced stress and positive relationships.
These findings add something different to numerical measures.
They begin to tell us what the changes meant to the people experiencing them.
There is a richness in people’s descriptions of their own experience that can sometimes get lost when everything is reduced to a score.
I don’t see this as an argument for choosing qualitative research instead of quantitative research. I think we need different ways of asking questions.
Numbers can tell us one thing.
Stories can tell us another.
Observation can tell us something else.
And therapeutic practice gives us access to yet another kind of knowledge.
The body is difficult to measure
This becomes particularly interesting when we are talking about embodied psychotherapy.
Our bodies are constantly changing. They respond to our environment, our relationships and our emotional states. We communicate through posture, gesture, rhythm, facial expression, proximity and movement, often without consciously deciding to do so.
But these subtle processes don’t always translate easily into conventional research measures.
We might be able to measure someone’s level of anxiety before and after an intervention. That’s useful.
But what about the experience of gradually feeling safer in your body?
What about discovering that you can tolerate a sensation that previously felt overwhelming?
What about learning, through movement, that you have more choices than you thought?
These are meaningful therapeutic developments, but they can be difficult to isolate and quantify.
That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. It means we need to be thoughtful about the kinds of knowledge our research methods are able to capture.
Evidence doesn’t replace clinical judgement
There is sometimes a tendency to talk about evidence-based practice as though research evidence should determine exactly what a therapist does.
I don’t think that is how good therapy works.
Evidence is one part of the picture.
So are clinical expertise, the individual needs and preferences of the person receiving therapy, the therapeutic relationship and the particular context in which the work is taking place.
A research study might tell me that an intervention has been helpful for a particular group of people. It doesn’t tell me exactly how every individual will respond to it.
As a therapist, I still need to be curious.
I need to notice what is happening, listen to the person, pay attention to my own responses and make decisions about what might be helpful next.
Research can inform that process without replacing it.
The value of uncertainty
One of the things research has perhaps taught me most is to become more comfortable with uncertainty.
Research can give us evidence, but rarely gives us absolute certainty.
A study may have promising findings while also having limitations. A feasibility study may suggest that an intervention is worth developing without being able to demonstrate its effectiveness conclusively. One person’s positive experience doesn’t mean that the same intervention will be helpful for everyone.
I think acknowledging this is important.
There can be a temptation, particularly when communicating research to the public, to turn nuanced findings into simple claims: this works, this changes lives, this is proven to help.
Real research is usually more complicated.
For me, that complexity isn’t a problem to be hidden. It is part of what makes research useful.
It gives us questions to keep asking.
When research and practice inform each other
The relationship works both ways.
Research can influence practice by giving us new ideas, challenging assumptions and providing evidence for approaches that might otherwise be overlooked.
But practice can also raise questions for research.
Working with people can make you notice things that aren’t necessarily captured by existing measures. It can highlight differences between individuals. It can reveal unexpected possibilities or difficulties within an intervention.
This is particularly relevant to creative and embodied therapies, where the lived experience of the work is such an important part of the therapeutic process.
The questions I have encountered through practice have often led me back towards research.
And research, in turn, has given me new questions to take back into practice.
Beyond the boundaries of individual modalities
My involvement in research has also contributed to something that has become an increasingly important area of interest for me: the overlap between therapeutic approaches.
My professional background is in Dance Movement Psychotherapy, but my interests extend into embodied and somatic approaches, creative psychotherapy, movement practices, supervision and teaching.
I am curious about the places where these approaches meet.
Not because I think they are all the same. They aren’t.
Each modality has its own history, theoretical foundations, language and way of understanding therapeutic change.
But there are also interesting questions about what they share.
How do different approaches understand the relationship between body and mind?
What place do movement and sensation have in psychological change?
How do different therapies work with emotion, relationship and regulation?
What happens when ideas developed within one therapeutic tradition are viewed through the lens of another?
These are questions I am continuing to explore through my academic writing, practice and research interests.
Keeping the conversation open
I don’t think research and practice should sit on opposite sides of a divide.
Research needs practitioners who can bring their experience and questions to it.
Practice needs research that helps us examine our assumptions and understand what might be helpful.
And both need the voices of the people who actually experience therapy.
For me, the most interesting work happens in the conversation between these different forms of knowledge.
Research can give us evidence without giving us the whole story.
Practice can give us rich experience without necessarily telling us what will happen for everyone.
Neither is complete on its own.
Perhaps the aim isn’t to choose between them, but to keep bringing them into conversation — with enough rigour to take evidence seriously, and enough curiosity to recognise everything that evidence cannot yet tell us.
That is the space I continue to be interested in exploring: where research meets practice, where body meets mind, and where different ways of understanding psychotherapy meet one another.