I have always found it difficult to separate teaching, research and practice into completely distinct parts of my professional life.
Each brings a different perspective, but they continually inform one another.
My clinical practice gives me questions to think about. Research gives me new ways of understanding those questions. Teaching gives me the opportunity to explore ideas with other people, to hear different perspectives and, often, to reconsider things I thought I understood.
I am fortunate to have worked as an Associate Tutor with universities in the North West, alongside my clinical work, research involvement, supervision and professional training. These different roles have become an important part of how I continue to develop as a practitioner.
Learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom
When we think about teaching, it is easy to imagine knowledge moving in one direction: from teacher to student.
My experience has been rather different.
Of course, there is knowledge that I can share from my professional experience. But teaching also involves listening, responding and being willing to have your own understanding challenged.
Students bring their own experiences, questions and ways of seeing things. Sometimes a question from a student makes me realise that I have been taking something for granted. Sometimes explaining an idea to someone else reveals a gap or contradiction in my own thinking.
Teaching therefore keeps me curious.
It reminds me that knowing something and being able to explain it are not necessarily the same thing.
Teaching Dance Movement Psychotherapy
Teaching within Dance Movement Psychotherapy has particular meaning for me because it involves introducing students to a way of working that is fundamentally embodied.
It isn’t enough to understand the theory intellectually.
Students need opportunities to experience what it means to pay attention to movement, sensation, rhythm, space and relationship. They need to develop their own embodied awareness alongside their theoretical and clinical understanding.
This can sometimes be challenging.
We are accustomed to learning through words. Academic education largely requires us to read, write, analyse and articulate. But embodied practice asks us to learn in other ways too.
It asks us to notice.
To experience.
To tolerate uncertainty.
To become curious about what happens in our own bodies and in our interactions with other people.
These are not always easy things to put into words, particularly when someone is learning them for the first time.
The relationship between theory and experience
One of the things I enjoy most about teaching is exploring the relationship between theory and what actually happens in practice.
Theory gives us frameworks for understanding.
Practice complicates them.
A theoretical concept may seem straightforward until you encounter a real person whose experience doesn’t fit neatly within it.
That isn’t necessarily a failure of the theory. It may be an invitation to think more deeply.
I think this is particularly important in psychotherapy education. We need theoretical frameworks, but we also need to develop the capacity to remain curious when the person in front of us doesn’t behave in quite the way our theory predicted.
Good therapeutic practice isn’t about finding the right theory and applying it perfectly.
It is about developing enough knowledge, awareness and flexibility to meet the person who is actually there.
What research adds
My involvement in research has strengthened this relationship between theory and practice.
I have facilitated Dance Movement Psychotherapy within research projects involving women who had experienced breast cancer and children in primary schools, and I have worked with Arts for the Blues, a creative psychotherapy programme developed through research at Edge Hill and Salford Universities.
Being involved in research has given me opportunities to look at therapeutic practice from another perspective.
Research asks different questions.
What are we trying to achieve?
How might we know whether something has changed?
What evidence do we have?
What are the limitations of what we can conclude?
These questions are valuable for practitioners too.
They encourage us to examine our assumptions rather than relying solely on what we have always done or what feels intuitively right.
At the same time, my experience of practice makes me aware of how much complexity can sit behind a research finding.
That tension continues to interest me.
Bringing different perspectives together
My professional interests have gradually become broader than any one modality.
My foundation is Dance Movement Psychotherapy, but I am also interested in embodied and somatic approaches, movement practices, creative psychotherapy, supervision, teaching and research.
I don’t see these as competing areas that need to be kept in separate boxes.
There are important differences between therapeutic approaches, and I think those differences matter. But there are also interesting areas of overlap.
Teaching gives me an opportunity to explore those connections.
A student might ask how a particular idea relates to another therapeutic approach. A discussion might reveal that two modalities use different language to describe something that has a surprisingly similar underlying principle.
Or we might discover that two approaches appear similar on the surface but are based on quite different understandings of what is happening therapeutically.
Both kinds of discovery are useful.
For me, the aim isn’t to make everything fit together. It is to become more curious about where things connect and where they don’t.
Supervision as another form of learning
My work as a supervisor has added another dimension to this.
Supervision creates a space where practitioners can step back from the immediacy of their work and think about what is happening.
Sometimes that involves theory or clinical decision-making. Sometimes it is about the therapeutic relationship. Sometimes it is about the practitioner’s own response to a client or to something that has happened in the work.
It is another form of learning through reflection.
And supervision has reminded me that professional development isn’t something that stops once we qualify.
In some ways, qualification is the point at which we begin to discover how much more there is to learn.
What teaching has taught me about practice
Teaching has made me more conscious of the assumptions I bring to my own practice.
When you have been working for a long time, some things become habitual. You don’t necessarily notice all the small decisions you make because they have become part of how you work.
Teaching requires me to make some of those things explicit.
Why do I respond in this way?
Why do I consider this important?
What am I noticing?
What theoretical ideas underpin this?
Could there be another way of understanding what is happening?
That process has been valuable for me.
It has helped me to remain reflective rather than becoming overly certain about my own way of working.
The importance of not knowing
Perhaps one of the most useful things I can offer students and supervisees is not certainty, but permission to not know.
Psychotherapy involves uncertainty.
We work with people whose experiences are complex and whose responses cannot always be predicted. There will be moments when we don’t know what something means or what we should do next.
That can feel uncomfortable, particularly when we are new to practice.
There can be a desire to find the right interpretation, the right intervention or the right answer.
But sometimes the most therapeutic response is to pause, become curious and stay with the uncertainty for a little longer.
I think this is especially relevant to embodied practice.
Movement doesn’t always have a fixed meaning. A bodily response isn’t necessarily evidence of a particular psychological state. We need to remain open to the person’s own experience rather than assuming that we already know what their body is telling us.
Teaching and supervision give us opportunities to practise that kind of curiosity.
Continuing to develop
My different professional roles have gradually become part of the same process rather than separate strands.
Practice informs teaching.
Research informs practice.
Teaching raises questions for research.
Supervision creates space to reflect on all three.
And my own learning continues through all of them.
I don’t see professional development as accumulating more and more knowledge until eventually we become experts who have all the answers.
For me, it is more about developing the ability to ask better questions.
To remain curious.
To recognise complexity.
To listen carefully to people’s experiences.
And to be willing to reconsider what I think I know.
That feels particularly important in embodied psychotherapy, where so much of what happens in the therapeutic relationship is subtle, relational and difficult to capture completely through words.
The more I teach, supervise, research and practise, the more interested I become in the spaces between these different ways of knowing.
Perhaps that is where much of the learning happens.