Dance therapy for relationship issues – how it works better & faster than traditional therapy
By Orit Krug | March 7th, 2022
Dance Therapy for relationship issues works faster, deeper and better than any traditional therapy.
Dance Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that gets straight to the root of your relationship issues by accessing and releasing trauma stored in the body.
You don’t actually need to know how to dance. There’s no requirement to move your body in any certain way.
A skilled Dance Therapist will help you to safely and gently reconnect to your body. Then, your body will guide you to move through your trauma in whatever way it needs to.
Dance Therapy helps you access the part of your brain and body where trauma is stored, which traditional therapy & talking doesn’t allow you to do.
In traditional therapy, you will spend YEARS talking about the different ways you want to feel and behave. With Dance Therapy, you get to move your body to feel alive, confident, free, and joyful.
You also learn new behaviors through movement that almost instantly shift the way you interact in your relationships.
That’s because behavior begins with the body and movement. Your body is the vehicle for which you act and interact with everyone around you.
So you can spend thousands of dollars and hours talking about how to communicate more calmly, or feel secure in your relationship. But if your body doesn’t know how that feels, or is too scared to let down its guard, those things will never happen.
The truth about your relationship issues.
Most relationship issues stem from unresolved past trauma, so you need to heal the underlying trauma to heal your relationship issues.
If you have anxiety about your partner not being good enough for you, that stems from trauma of being emotionally neglected or unmet.
If you have a persistent fear that your partner is TOO good for you that they’ll leave you, that stems from trauma of abandonment.
If you’re often irritable and flip out on your partner, that’s your overactive fight response, indicating a dysfunctional nervous system due to old trauma.
See the pattern here?
We COULD talk about all the labels: attachment styles, diagnoses, and all the new age terms that are ever more popular on social media. But it all boils down to having unresolved trauma.
In fact, if you often find yourself going down a rabbit hole of research about your own “labels,” please stop. It usually just makes you more stuck in your head, and you really need to be connected to your body in order to heal.
How Dance Therapy heals your nervous system.
Dance Therapy is by far the most well-rounded and effective therapy for relationship issues AND trauma.
Once you begin to safely move your body with a Dance Therapist, you’ll access non-verbal trauma memories. Trauma memories are stored as fragments of sensation inside your body, like taste, smell, touch, etc.
For instance, you may smell a certain cologne and immediately have a traumatic flashback or trigger. It’s the same smell your body remembers from your abuser. More simply put: your abuser wore the same cologne.
Now, when you move your body in Dance Therapy, it inevitably stirs up sensations in your body that you’ve been working so hard to not feel by numbing, disconnecting, and escaping.
When you connect to these sensations in session, your Dance Therapist helps you feel them and access memories without dissociating. You’ll get the experience of staying connected to your body and the therapeutic relationship, even when fear comes up in your body.
This is CRUCIAL, because your relationship issues make you disconnect or push away your partner whenever you feel triggered or an uncomfortable emotion.
Dance Therapy heals your triggers and allows you to move through them, while staying in connection with yourself and your therapist.
This process is called rewiring your nervous system. Being able to stay calm and regulated through conflict and fear creates new neural pathways that allow you to tolerate and navigate difficult interactions in your relationship.
Dance Therapy is the fastest way to create new and healthier relationship patterns.
Trauma is stored in BOTH your nervous system AND physical body.
There are plenty of alternative therapies that serve to rewire your nervous system, like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing. But NONE of them engage your body through movement to release trauma stored in your physical body!
We see so many clients who’ve been successful in reacting less impulsively in their relationships, but still repeat the same old behaviors. This means their nervous system is less reactive, but their body is still stuck in the same movements.
For example, let’s say you have a pattern of becoming silent and freezing up through conflict. After rewiring your nervous system, your nervous system no longer reacts in a freeze response. You’re able to be more present and connected to your partner.
However, you still remain quiet. You don’t speak up and you often find yourself dwelling on the things you should have said.
Why? Because your physical body is SO used to freezing up and it continues to do what it automatically has always done. Your body still gets tense, small, and frozen, prohibiting you from really speaking your truth and getting your needs met.
With Dance Therapy, you learn how to allow your body to safely open up, take up more space, and be seen.
Please don’t mistake this for other forms of dance-based hobbies: this isn’t the same as dancing in your room, Ecstatic Dance, etc.
This is THERAPY. When dealing with trauma, you must release trauma from your physical body within a safe space. There’s a reason why your body is stuck in old patterns. It doesn’t feel safe to change them!
Dance Therapists are highly skilled in seeing your micro body movements and body language that allows us to safely guide you to learn new behaviors in a non-threatening and LASTING way.
Is Dance Therapy right for you and your relationship issues?
There are a few key questions to ask yourself before working with a Dance Therapist.
1. Is the Dance Therapist highly experienced in rewiring the nervous system and releasing trauma from the body?
Not all Dance Therapists are trained equally.
My client Julia came to me last year because she was struggling with a lot of heaviness and hurt from unresolved childhood abuse. It affected her marriage and every aspect of her daily life.
She’d actually been working with a local dance therapist for several years already, and she was still SO stuck. She had told me that dance therapy exacerbated her freeze response since she would literally freeze through the movement.
It was clear that her dance therapist tried to help Julia heal her trauma without realizing that Julia was missing the necessary foundation of trust and safety in her body.
Even though her local dance therapist was–in her words–way cheaper, Julia spent more money
on “cheap” local dance therapy for YEARS than in my online Let Love In program for 3 MONTHS, where her life & marriage completely transformed.
Please, don’t just find the cheapest therapist for your trauma. That’s like finding the cheapest surgeon for heart surgery. Pretty risky.
2. How much do you already understand about your own patterns and past trauma?
One of the reasons my program works so quickly for clients is because they already have a deep intellectual understanding of their past trauma & current relationship issues.
Yes, I mentioned earlier in this post that talking about your issues won’t heal your trauma. That’s still true! But you still need to have some level of cognitive understanding of your “stuff” so that you can integrate this awareness with the incredible shift you’ll feel in your body through Dance Therapy.
This is such an important prerequisite for my Let Love In program that I don’t accept any applications from people who said that they’ve never been to any type of therapy before. You need some kind of foundation of understanding for Dance Therapy to help you quickly & deeply!
3. Do you believe in yourself and your ability to heal, no matter how long you’ve been trying to?
You can work with the BEST Dance Therapist in the world and have ALL the cognitive
understanding about your relationship issues, but if you don’t believe in yourself, it won’t work.
If you’re constantly doubting yourself, second-guessing the entire process, and trying to figure everything out through the incessant thoughts in your head, it won’t work.
You’d just be repeating the same patterns you’re wanting to heal: deep insecurity and keeping up your guard.
It’s okay and totally normal if there’s a part of you that’s worried or skeptical if you can heal, but there’s got to be a much stronger part of you that deeply believes that it is POSSIBLE for you.
Learn more about how Dance Therapy can heal relationship issues.
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.
