Women's Therapy Centre Institute

The Body Was Never Off-Screen: Rethinking Nonverbal Presence in an Era of Telehealth

What if the most important communications in your therapy room are happening below the level of words? This workshop invites you into the fascinating territory where psychodynamic understanding meets embodied wisdom/somatic cognition. We delve into how early attachment patterns continue to live and breathe in our clients' idiosyncratic postures, gestures, prosody, cadence, and the very way they inhabit space. Attention will be paid to how body/psyche develops, including how family history, gender, class and culture are written on and expressed through the body/self.

Through compelling theoretical insights and experiential discovery, you'll uncover how breathing patterns, postural shifts, and movement quality and other somatic utterances are already telling you stories about your clients' inner worlds as well as your own. This workshop opens a doorway to recognizing the profound intelligence of the embodied self and how it can become an ally in the therapeutic process.

We invite you to explore your own embodied awareness/somatic cognition and how to make therapeutic use of that awareness. Together we'll discover a thoughtful framework for gently introducing movement concepts into your current work. Whether you're drawn by a sense that something important is missing from purely verbal approaches, intrigued by clients who seem unreachable through words alone, or simply curious about honoring the full richness of human experience in therapy, this workshop offers a space to explore how the nonverbal realm of experience might deepen and expand our practice.