Dance-Movement Therapy (DMT) Overview

“Gradually, I came to see that movement is one of the great laws of life. It is the primary medium of our aliveness, the flow of energy going on in us like a river all the time, awake or asleep, twenty-four hours a day….It is life that dances.”

- Mary Starks Whitehouse, Dance-Movement Therapy pioneer

Dance-Movement Therapy (DMT) integrates body awareness, movement, and expressive arts with talk therapy. It brings fun and creative self-expression into the therapy process and teaches people how to befriend and move through more difficult feelings. In DMT, a person’s non-verbal expression through posture, gesture, breathing, and movement, is given equal attention to what a person is saying. DMT is for all ages, types of problems, and movement ability.

Matching movements to build relationship

This approach to psychotherapy draws from neuroscientific theory and grew from the recognition that movement fulfills human needs. Feelings are designed to move through pathways in the body. Neurologically, movement evokes sensation, emotion, memory, thoughts, and images. Through its integrative effect on the body-mind, movement can be healing in and of itself.

When you feel “stuck” in your life, body awareness and movement can help to bring back feelings of flow and clarity, help you to know what you want, to de-stress, and to choose how you wish to compassionately respond, rather than automatically react to other people or situations. If you have experienced trauma, through movement therapy, natural self-healing responses in your body can be activated to release post-traumatic stress symptoms. Persons in addictions recovery are also finding greater success through movement and body-centered psychotherapy.

Some of the education involved in Dance-Movement Therapy is:

• Learning to breathe
• Learning to be with what is, what is true for you
• Learning to open to the flow of emotions through you
• Learning to create boundaries
• Learning to open your heart
• Learn to connect with and heal cut-off or disowned parts of yourself

Cultures around the world for thousands of years have employed movement in physical, emotional and mental healing rituals as well as for group cohesion. Dance-Movement Therapy continues this wisdom lineage.

“Dance-Movement Therapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement
to further the social, physical, psychological and mental integration
of an individual”.

– American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), founded 1966