How does dance therapy help improve relationships and our ability to love?
By Orit Krug | November 17th, 2020
How does dance therapy help improve relationships and our ability to love?
If you experienced past trauma and it’s currently blocking your ability to let in your partner’s healthy love today, then you may need dance therapy to heal.
When we hold on to unresolved past trauma, it’s being stored in our bodies. This happens because the higher-functioning part of our brain goes offline during the traumatic event, making it impossible to verbally and cognitively remember most of what happened.
The part of your brain that uses and processes verbal language gets shut down during trauma, so we store the majority of traumatic memories and emotions in our non-verbal brain and body instead.
Just because we can’t access and remember most of our old trauma through words, doesn’t mean the memory disappears or the event didn’t happen. Obviously it did, but you can’t recall it by talking about it because your body doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in movement.
Trauma gets stored in the body in fragments of memories and sensations.
Subtle tastes, smells, and sounds will bring you right back to your old trauma. This is already happening to you on a consistent basis in many ways. For example, the way your partner looks at you a certain way when they’re mad might bring you RIGHT back to the abusive event you experienced with your father.
It’s not that your partner is going to abuse you. In fact, you KNOW in your mind that they’re nothing like the ones who hurt you in the past. But your body remembers that frustrated look from a long time ago and cannot tell the difference between your past trauma vs. your loving partner showing normal emotions today.
These flashbacks happen so quickly and so subtly that your nervous system reacts in a matter of seconds to protect yourself from getting hurt again. Your body gets hijacked and immediately goes into survival mode from the tiniest triggers.
When your body is constantly defending against perceived (not real) danger from these triggers, you live in a constant state of fear, unable to let your guard down and be present with your amazing partner today. This is how trauma blocks our ability to love.
Dance Therapy can help you access the trauma from your body and release it through movement.
Because your old trauma is trapped in your body, you have to do the healing work THROUGH your body.
My team and I have worked with tons of clients who spent 10-15 years in talk therapy, talking endlessly about their trauma without feeling a real shift. They often stay stuck in the same old stories from the past or feel worse from the therapy itself.
Talk therapy helps with cognitive awareness but words are not enough to heal trauma. The part of your brain that accesses words is that same part of the brain that shuts off when you experience trauma.
Dance Therapy, with the right practitioner, can help reconnect to your body in a gentle and safe way, which is an ESSENTIAL first step to fully healing trauma. Because you’ve been holding onto old trauma for so long, you’ve instinctively learned to disconnect, numb, and build an unhealthy relationship with your body, in an effort to avoid feeling the trauma that’s stored inside.
The story embedded in you right now is that it’s not safe to be in your body. The last time you were truly in your body, you experienced horrible pain and hurt. This isn’t just pertaining to physical abuse. This includes emotional trauma too because we feel emotions primarily in our bodies.
Reconnect to your body without ripping old trauma wounds so you can fully love again.
A lot of women have told me that they had negative experiences trying to release the trauma from their bodies. After a weekend-long retreat or even an hour-long yoga class, they ended up feeling more triggered and raw than before.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of unsafe body and movement-based practices out there with practitioners who are not trained in trauma release.
You may have had an experience with a body or somatic healer who pushed you way too far too fast and you felt more traumatized after what was supposed to be a healing experience.
What’s different about working with a dance therapist is that you can experience a safe and lasting release from the body & nervous system. To achieve this, it’s important to work with a dance therapist who is highly skilled & trained in trauma healing.
That way, you can gently and slowly expand your window of tolerance around your triggers that stem from old trauma. This helps you to physiologically and physically learn how to improve your relationship and let love in without a process that feels so heavy and traumatizing in itself.
This is the first step to being able to BE in your body without all the emotional charge of old triggers and fear of getting hurt. If you’re blocking sensations from your body, you’re blocking off emotions. This might have helped you not feel so much pain in the past, but it’s now blocking you from feeling the really good stuff, like your partner’s amazing love.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
