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Embodied healing: dance therapy, therapeutic dance, and the Traumascapes approach

Writer's picture: Dylan ReddishDylan Reddish



Our brains and our bodies are in constant, reciprocal communication and both are hardwired to try to keep us safe. Our emotions are rooted in the body; they are felt, experienced, processed, and expressed through the body. Therefore, to understand how we’re feeling and how to tend to our feelings, we have to be in touch with what’s going on in our bodies. This is what it means to be embodied – to be aware of how the body and the brain interact, and to make conscious choices based on this interaction.


For many trauma survivors, being embodied may feel particularly overwhelming or even dangerous because our bodies hold our traumatic memories.This can cause many of us to dissociate from bodily sensations, and this coping mechanism can often become the norm. It can be confusing and painful to try and figure out what bodily input is coming from the legacy of a traumatic experience and what is coming from the present moment. When you get to a point where you feel safe enough and ready, you may decide you want some help to reconnect with your own body.


Help for me, a person with a dance background, looked like seeking ways to be a more aware, intentional, and embodied mover. Dancing to music is when I feel most myself, most alive, and most able to connect to other people. Dance has been, and always will be, a form of therapy for me.


Most of us have been in a conversation with someone who has said ‘oh, this is therapy for me’ when talking about something that doesn’t involve a qualified therapist. It’s very human to feel relief and healing from the things that give us joy. Embarking on a healing journey can be intimidating and scary, so it makes sense that we find ways to heal within our natural strengths. As humans we are drawn to a variety of artistic pursuits, sports, games, nature, and other recreational activities because they allow us to feel our lively, embodied selves. In a fast-paced capitalist world that prioritises efficiency and productivity, play and creation are the disruptions that can heal us.


Dance has been a healing act for millennia. But is the joyful act of moving your body always therapy? The simple answer is no. A dance teacher is not the same as a dance therapist, even though the distinction can be marginal. This blog can serve as a road map on your quest for embodied healing through dance and movement.


Therapeutic dance


Therapeutic dance is the practice of using movement to restore and positively impact some aspect of your daily life. Exercising creates happy chemicals in your brain – dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin – and dance provides an outlet for emotional expression. This means even your local drop-in dance class could be therapeutic for you.


In a class, you are guided through movement without being prompted to consider how your subconscious emotions are affecting the dance or, in reverse, how dancing is affecting your emotions. Even in a somatic awareness workshop you are directed to focus on physical sensations without attaching psychological meaning to the sensation or the movement that the sensation influences.


If you’re feeling that your dance class is therapeutic for you, you can support your healing by leaning into your intuition and what feels good on the day. A dance teacher that explicitly works in a therapeutic way would help facilitate this.


The person leading a therapeutic dance session may or may not be a qualified therapist and, in either case, they may or may not be trained in trauma-sensitive practice. Because of this, sessions probably won’t include in-depth verbal reflections.


Be prepared for a therapeutic facilitator to offer minimal feedback about emotional/unconscious reflections, or even leave silence after sharing. Depending on the facilitator or teacher, reflection time could even occur in the form of other artistic mediums. Drawing is a particularly common reflection tool used in classes and workshops alike.


Using another artistic modality in addition to the movement allows you to continue to creatively engage with your emotions and process them on a bodily level, while maintaining psychological distance from these. This distance provides safety for you, and also for anyone else in the group.


Dance therapy


While movement classes typically focus on a desired aesthetic, expression, or goal, therapy allows participants to define their own expressions as they go. In a therapy setting, the movement is a vehicle to both access and explore deeper emotions or sensations, instead of simply moving the body being the primary aim. 


When trauma is stored in the body, uncovering sensations in an embodied way can be distressing or triggering. Engaging in deeper emotional and physical processing will inevitably bring up some icky feelings, but think of it this way: a skilled therapist trained in trauma-sensitive practice, with a comprehensive toolkit, is best placed to help you when you are triggered and to make this an opportunity to process your experience and support your healing. This could not always be said of a dance class or a rehearsal process. Therapists are specially trained to hold the creative process with you (or the group) while asking you to dip into your subconscious emotions.


Improvised dance as an artistic practice historically prioritises the ‘yes, and’ mentality of going with an idea. Therapists may encourage you to say ‘yes, and’ but, more often than not, they might suggest slowing down and staying with one feeling or sensation for longer. This is one way therapy sessions are contained; we consider the pacing and often suggest slowing down the input of sensations. When we think about trauma-sensitive practice, finding the right pace is particularly important. 


One of the best pieces of wisdom I have ever received as an artist and burgeoning therapist was to ‘make fewer, wiser decisions’ (said to me by Bill T Jones in 2019). A dance therapist may fully ask you to pump the brakes, pause, or even dip out of the process in order to stay safe. With training in movement observation and psychological formation, a dance therapist becomes very skilled in sensing when enough is enough and play is about to tip into big time distress.In a therapeutic dance experience, in contrast, you are typically expected to be able to hold yourself a bit more than you would in therapy.


It’s worth noting that, depending on who facilitates a session, there may be overlaps in strategies used. For example, a dance therapist may also have markers and pens for you to use to engage with your unconscious mind artistically. A therapist who facilitates therapeutic dance sessions may also allow more space and time for verbal unpacking because they have the skills to hold you through it. Life is a beautiful, messy greyscale, remember? 


And in that greyscale, we need to remember that a qualified dance therapist isn’t necessarily better at holding space for trauma survivors than someone who is not qualified. A therapeutic dance facilitator who is trained in trauma-sensitive practice may be much better at creating a safe space to support trauma healing. When looking for trauma-specific support, a therapist or facilitator that has experience working with trauma and trauma-sensitive practice specifically is essential.


Our approach at Traumascapes


As survivors, we’re aware of the harm that can be experienced in clinical spaces; many clinical structures were historically oppressive and few are the approaches today that truly meet our needs on our own terms. Too often are we talked about and not talked to, or made to feel like we need to be cured or fixed.


At Traumascapes, we follow a dance therapy model but locate it in non-clinical contexts. This means our therapeutic dance sessions are rooted in dance therapy practices, with research to back them up and thorough trauma-specific training – but they are led by trauma survivors,  practitioners, and survivor clinicians – and explored, experienced, and expressed therapeutically through creativity. We sit along the thin line between therapeutic and therapy, draw from both, and create a new holistic space that is trauma-sensitive and that honours healing through a survivor-led, relational, creative, and embodied approach.


We understand just how powerful creative expression can be to healing, and we want to make sure you can access that deep space if and when you want to. Our survivor-led sessions explore healing through connecting to the body, moving, exploring and expressing emotions, and reflecting through creative expressions and group discussions (though everything is invitational and many options are offered). Different sessions may have different focuses, but usually a key aim is to reconnect with the self through movement, with themes such as boundaries, self-soothing, and understanding bodily signals. One particular approach (Trauma-Focused Movement Language) may also explore embodied memories and their reprocessing.


When working with the body in particular, it is important to approach things carefully, sensitively, and with the aim to foster safety. Distressing emotions and traumatic memories may come up, and these can be especially difficult. This is why everything that we do is done in a trauma-sensitive way and we have spent years defining what this means and what this looks like in practice. Our approach focuses primarily on grounding and nurturing embodied safety, and organically includes elements of reconnecting with ourselves and with others. Rooted in curiosity and play, therapeutic dance is a gentle, guided journey to allow participants to begin to understand trauma and explore your options in embodied healing.


While working in a group offers peer support and allows for healing to happen relationally and internally, we’re also aware of the need for individual processing at your own pace. We offer individual space to participants within the group dynamic and one-on-one sessions are also an option. All our activities are offered through invitation, so that, as participants, you can choose how little or how much you wish to do and how you want to do it, and you can take breaks or stop at any time. But rest assured that our sessions are embedded with frameworks and tools to sensitively be present and explore embodied healing in response to triggers and difficult-to-express emotions.


Finally, our therapeutic dance support honours exploring these emotions and experiences on our own terms. Whether as a one-off or cumulative, the sessions are designed to support your needs for embodied healing as they come. After all, when we move forwards with curiosity we never really know what can come up – but we’re ready to tread gently onwards and discover being in the body, connecting to the present, and processing trauma together.


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You might be thinking, ‘Does it really matter what’s therapy, what’s not, and what’s in between?’ It all goes back to giving survivors choices. In traumatic circumstances, choice is taken away from us. Reclaiming agency over how to engage with our own healing can be the most therapeutic step we take.


When we understand what is available to us and what the different options mean, we can make an informed choice about what path we’d like to take on our healing journey.


— Dylan Reddish, with contributions from Isaac Ouro-Gnao and Laura E. Fischer



References and further reading

Association for Dance Movement Psychotherapy. (n.d.). What is Dance Movement Psychotherapy? [online] Available at: https://admp.org.uk/what-is-dance-movement-psychotherapy/.

‌American Dance Therapy Association (2014). The Difference Between ‘Therapeutic’ Dance and Dance/Movement Therapy. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCFRcDhfKDI.

Cox, L. and Youmans-Jones, J. (2023). Dance Is a Healing Art. Current Treatment Options in Allergy. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40521-023-00332-x.

Dieterich-Hartwell, R. and Melsom, A.M. (2022). Dance/Movement Therapy for Trauma Survivors : Theoretical, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

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