Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

Sensorimotor psychotherapy is an experiential approach to trauma treatment that explicitly brings the client’s embodied awareness into the counseling session. Utilizing the client’s mindful processing of traumatic relational or physical experience, it includes awareness of body sensations, spontaneous movement impulses, and habitual movement patterns as foci of attention. Sensorimotor psychotherapy may be used as the principal method of treatment or in combination with other theoretical approaches. Because trauma deeply affects the body, sensorimotor psychotherapy offers access to unconscious or implicit traumatic material. Bodily awareness serves as a portal through which the unconscious can move into consciousness, offering access via language and new movement patterns; the potential transformation of the client’s understanding of trauma, its attendant affective dysregulation, and imbedded beliefs; and ultimately a more unified ...