Dance Movement Psychotherapy in Primary Schools

Children don’t always have the words to tell us how they are feeling.

Sometimes distress shows up in behaviour, relationships, difficulty sleeping, withdrawal, restlessness or simply a sense that something isn’t quite right. Sometimes a child knows that they are struggling but doesn’t know how to explain it.

This is one of the reasons I have always been interested in what movement can offer children.

I had the opportunity to facilitate Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) sessions as part of a feasibility study exploring the use of DMP in primary schools. The research was interested in whether a movement-based therapeutic approach could support children’s emotional wellbeing and everyday functioning within the school environment.

For me, the project provided another opportunity to explore something that sits at the heart of my practice: what becomes possible when we give the body a place in psychological therapy?

When talking isn’t enough

Much of the support available to children is centred around talking. Of course, talking can be enormously helpful, but it isn’t always the easiest or most natural way for a child to communicate what is happening internally.

Children communicate through their bodies all the time.

They move towards people and away from them. They become still or restless. They hide, run, jump, curl up, reach out and make contact. They play out experiences through movement and imagination.

Movement is not separate from emotional life. It is one of the ways children experience and express it.

Dance Movement Psychotherapy builds on this understanding. Rather than asking a child to sit still and explain how they feel, DMP can offer opportunities to explore experience through movement, play, creativity, rhythm and relationship.

This doesn’t mean that every movement has a hidden meaning waiting for the therapist to interpret. It is much more about creating a safe space in which movement can become another form of communication and exploration.

Bringing DMP into the school environment

Schools are interesting environments for therapeutic work because they are such an important part of children’s everyday lives.

Children spend a significant proportion of their time there, and difficulties with emotional wellbeing can affect much more than how a child feels. They can influence concentration, relationships, behaviour, confidence, participation and learning.

The feasibility study explored DMP as an intervention within primary schools, looking not only at emotional and behavioural difficulties but also at broader aspects of children’s functioning and wellbeing.

Working in this context meant thinking about therapy slightly differently from how we might work in a traditional therapy room.

A school is busy. It is social. There are routines, expectations, other children and adults, transitions and interruptions. A therapeutic intervention therefore needs to be able to exist within the reality of school life.

At the same time, the school environment can provide opportunities. Therapy isn’t completely separate from the child’s everyday world. What happens in the therapeutic space can potentially influence how a child manages feelings, relationships and challenges beyond it.

Making space for different ways of communicating

One of the things I value about movement-based therapy is that it doesn’t require a child to have a sophisticated emotional vocabulary before they can begin to explore their experience.

A child might not be able to say, “I’m finding it difficult to regulate my emotions when I feel overwhelmed.”

They may, however, be able to show us something about what overwhelm feels like through movement.

Perhaps movement becomes fast and chaotic. Perhaps the child wants to hide or make themselves very small. Perhaps they need to push against something, jump, stamp or move repeatedly.

Within a therapeutic relationship, these experiences can be noticed without judgement.

The therapist can join, mirror, contain, introduce rhythm or offer a different possibility. Over time, the child may begin to discover that they can experience a strong feeling without being completely overtaken by it.

This is one way in which movement can support emotional regulation: not by telling a child how they should feel, but by helping them develop an experience of having feelings and being able to remain with themselves while those feelings change.

What did the research find?

The feasibility study produced encouraging findings.

The researchers reported improvements in children’s life functioning, wellbeing, duration of sleep, and emotional and behavioural difficulties following the intervention.

The interviews with children were particularly interesting because they gave some insight into how the children themselves experienced the work. They described outcomes including greater self-expression, emotional regulation, mastery and acceptance of emotions, improved self-confidence and self-esteem, reduced stress, and the development of positive relationships.

These findings are important, but I think it is worth being careful about what a feasibility study can tell us.

A feasibility study is not the same as a large-scale trial demonstrating that an intervention works for every child. It can, however, provide valuable evidence that an approach is acceptable, practical and worthy of further investigation.

And the children’s own accounts matter.

Research measures can tell us whether something has changed. Children’s voices can sometimes help us understand what that change meant to them.

The body as a resource

Working on this project reinforced my sense that the body isn’t simply something that therapists work with when talking therapy has failed.

The body is already involved in emotional experience.

When we are frightened, our heart rate changes. When we are angry, our muscles may tense. When we are anxious, we may become restless or want to escape. When we feel safe, our bodies can soften.

Children often experience these changes very directly, even when they don’t yet have the language to describe them.

DMP can provide a way of becoming curious about these experiences.

Through movement, children can experiment with different ways of being. They can discover that a movement can change, that an interaction can be repaired, that there can be more than one way of responding, and that they have some choice in what happens next.

These are small experiences, but they can have significance.

The importance of relationship

It would be easy to focus on the movement itself when talking about Dance Movement Psychotherapy.

But the movement doesn’t do the therapeutic work on its own.

The relationship between the child and therapist is central.

The child needs to experience the therapeutic space as one in which they can be themselves, experiment, take risks and sometimes get things wrong without being judged. The therapist needs to be attentive to the child’s cues, respect their boundaries and respond to what emerges rather than imposing an interpretation.

Movement becomes meaningful within that relationship.

A therapist might follow a child’s movement, introduce something different, create a shared rhythm or simply stay alongside them. These interactions can offer experiences of being seen, responded to and understood.

For a child who may be experiencing difficulties in relationships elsewhere, that experience can be important in itself.

What I took from the project

The primary-school research strengthened my interest in the relationship between embodiment, emotional development and psychological wellbeing.

It also reminded me that children are not simply smaller versions of adults. Therapeutic approaches need to recognise the ways children naturally communicate, learn and make sense of their experiences.

Play, imagination and movement are not distractions from the therapeutic work. They can be the work.

This is one of the reasons I continue to be interested in embodied approaches to psychotherapy. They offer another way of understanding what happens when we bring the whole person into the therapeutic space rather than treating thoughts, emotions and the body as entirely separate things.

From research into practice

My involvement in this project was part of a wider period of work in which I was able to move between research, clinical practice and teaching.

I value that relationship.

Research can give us frameworks for asking important questions and gathering evidence. Practice brings us into contact with the complexity of individual lives. The two don’t always fit neatly together, and I don’t think they should.

The challenge — and the opportunity — is to allow each to inform the other.

The work in primary schools left me with a continuing curiosity about how children use their bodies to communicate, regulate and relate, and about how therapeutic spaces can support them to develop greater freedom and choice in those processes.

Sometimes, before a child can find the words, the body already knows how to tell the story.