Why Study Body-Oriented Psychotherapy?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Body-oriented therapy (TOT) or its "sister" - body-oriented psychotherapy, today is almost the only integrated and adapted to modern living conditions methods. Despite the objective difficulties associated with its teaching, the absence of any reasonable propaganda of the method among the general population, as well as many other obstacles, bodily therapy continues to slowly but surely win the respect of specialists, the trust and hearts of people. Let's see why?

What is TOT and where is it used?

Calling the TOT method, we, of course, greatly underestimate its real scope. Today in the world there are several hundred officially recognized methods that can be combined under one name - body therapy. From this, it becomes clear that no one can be considered a 100% trained body therapist, and no one has the right to claim that they have mastered it all. It probably would have taken no life to do this.

At the same time, united by one single principle of "the unity of bodily and mental manifestations", various TOP or TOT schools coexist organically and practically without conflict, developing their technologies, training specialists and providing services within their capabilities.

Thus, a person, in principle, interested in development, health improvement, improving the quality of life, expanding the range of psychophysical capabilities, and perhaps in doing all this as his professional orientation, can choose a school and teachers for himself according to a set of specific requests and interests. And to be professionally in demand in almost any service sector where the ideas of beauty, education and development, mental and physical health are only promoted.

Where do body therapists work?

Body Therapy Body therapists apply their knowledge and abilities in a wide variety of settings. I know a girl who conducts TOT trainings at a marriage agency, after which all potential brides go on dates with potential grooms, internally relaxed, inspired and confident in their irresistibility. Naturally, because THAT classes return a person to his original, natural grace. I know a fitness trainer who leads TOT classes with expectant mothers right within the walls of an ordinary sports club. I know an acting teacher who can't think of working with students without physical therapy exercises. When one of my students, the leader of Mary Kay, began doing body therapy with her team, sales skyrocketed. The clients wanted to be like girls, whose faces did not have the usual "business grin", but played with a calm, benevolent smile.

It happened that the trainings on TOT took place in places where it is difficult even to imagine. In nursing homes, colonies, and even in Chechnya, in the war zone, in a camping tent, literally under the whistle of bullets. And although the overwhelming majority of body therapists are still people with a classical psychological or medical education, and therefore most of the TOT-therapists can still be found in psychological, pedagogical and medical centers, rehabilitation clinics, there are many people who conduct an appointment at home. or practiced in esoteric schools, under the guise of a medicine man or healer. In short, I want to emphasize that the field for realizing the skills and abilities of a body therapist is so vast that having received the proper knowledge and provided a reasonable amount of hard work and imagination, it is simply not possible to remain unclaimed. I would say you have to try very hard to make this happen.

Why do we love body therapy so much?

First of all, for that high efficiency with absolute freedom of choice, both the way of working with the client and the degree of openness in the therapy itself. In our completely open age, where no one is surprised by family, almost intimate photographs displayed on the Internet, people, nevertheless, are very careful about their personal life and history. Probably, this is the wrong side of the "public nudity" to which the Internet forces us.

In a way, this same "nudity", in which a huge number of real and pseudo-psychologists, "took care" to create psychology and psychological counseling not the most handsome face in the press and the Internet, led to the fact that the authority of classical psychology is inexorably falling. People no longer want to go to psychologists, because they are not sure that they will receive quality help. And those few who still retain respect for psychology, as a science that helps people, try to look for a specialist on the recommendation and are very careful about the formation of their requests.

So, a person for whom high-quality psychological assistance is important, sooner or later faces a choice. She will turn to a classical psychologist and, possibly, spend weeks and months analyzing situations of the past, shaking up her own and loved ones "dirty laundry" in the so-called "mode". "therapeutic conversation" annoying with its pretentious neutrality and indifference to what is happening, unwillingness to accept the real life situation of a person, in which it is not always possible to "accept, let go, realize and so on" than psychological counseling is so "strong", or look for an alternative.

However, all this - and excessive abuse of analysis, and excessive distance, the use of sometimes completely unreasonable techniques, does not come at all from the fact that all psychologists and psychotherapists, except for bodily ones, do not know how to work or are insufficiently trained. The reason is different.

The fact is that the Slavic mentality itself, with its endless throwing to extremes, from turning the soul inside out in front of a random fellow traveler on the train, to the fear of opening up even to their own loving parents, from the desire to get everything at once (in therapy - to solve all problems for one visit) to the tendency to smear even the most insignificant grievances with a thin layer throughout life, and so on, etc. in the West and tends either to orthodox psychoanalysis (say little and listen a lot), or purely manipulative methods, so to speak, the rejection of the products of all kinds of special services and political institutions.

There are, however, still a small number of psychotechnologies, which were the fruits of the painful vision of the world of their creators. Like any painful and sublimated one, it quickly gained popularity among its own kind and is now no less successfully practiced in the field of psycho-creativity and esoteric healing. You can find out these schools and directions on the basis of an extremely narrow theoretical base, the "personality cult" of the creator or creators, strict frameworks in training new specialists, the desire to conquer the masses (this is how the hero of "Moscow does not believe in tears" is recalled - "soon there will be one continuous television") and solve all their problems at once, by means of one, maximum three to five psychoactive methods.

Against this background, body therapy has always stood apart. She never tried to get into the front rows and become a panacea for all troubles and suffering. But for some reason, when no one or nothing else could (lo) cope, they resorted to her. "Therapy with eyes wide shut", therapy, as we sometimes laugh with love, "muzzle on the floor" (akin to the traditional Russian "muzzle in a salad"), therapy where no one asks you "how did you come to life like this and Aren't you ashamed? ", where you can be silent and talk, cry and laugh, dance or, curled up in a ball, suck your finger and whimper, as in your distant childhood, about something of your own, with all its incomprehensible (either Western, or oriental) roots, turned out to be very "our", very understandable and very dear. They fell in love with her even for the lack of a format in which no one tells you that you must certainly go through ten sessions and that you cannot be late for one, otherwise everything will go down the drain and only at the end of the tenth session, you will receive the long-awaited cure.

In general, body therapy is extremely respectful and reverent, I would say, even too reverently, refers to the person's self. She accepts anyone, and it is somehow felt a priori by everyone who gets into her field. Moreover, here I want to sharpen your attention, she really accepts any person, and does not play it. Therefore, real body therapists (this is a strange thing, huh?), More often seem to be focused and a little emotional people. They (real!) Will never throw themselves on your neck, thus portraying how glad they are to you. They will not be sugary to tell you how to love yourself and the whole world. Or it is false to nod to the beat of your words with an absent gaze, which is the sin of those psychologists who came into the profession, as it was fashionable, "to solve their problems."

With the attention of a devoted dog, ready at any second to serve its master, the body therapist, without violating either his own or your boundaries, remaining extremely tactful and unobtrusive, is ready to give you exactly what you really need. And to support you in this desire, making it clear that everything is good, everything is correct, everything is exactly as it should be.

How do they know what you need?

Read from your body! Remember, they are body therapists!

How do they do it? And how, for example, does a professional hairdresser at first glance determine whether you need a small correction in the length of the bangs and how long ago did you last cut your hair? How will an old coach tell you right off the bat, does your child have any chances for a sporting future? How can a good shoemaker tell by your gait that your instep support is broken? So is the body therapist! By the micromovements of the body, by your breathing, or by how you restrain it with all your might so as not to burst into tears …

By the way, the gestalt therapist in this case will say: "Do you realize that you want to cry? Cry! Let yourself cry here and now!" The body therapist will not say anything, he will just gently place his hand on the back of your head, or with one flick of his fingers, he will smooth out the wrinkled eyebrows and tears will flow by themselves. No stress. And, by the way, without any awareness and permission. And you realize something completely different. Namely, why are you crying. At this time, the body therapist will already move his hands over your body so that by gently pressing or lifting some part of it, where it is hidden, insidious tension lurks, help you take a deep breath that you have been carrying in yourself for maybe years, or will be freed from something pulling inside …

If at this moment you will be given to realize something, you will rather remember a series of seemingly completely insignificant situations. They will flash before your eyes, like stills from a movie. A movie about your life. It will suddenly become clear where it all started and why it was so. And it won't matter. Because a deep exhalation in the next minute will free you from years of accumulated pain, and you will begin to remember what hurt before with a slight sadness and a sad smile on your lips. No one wants to suffer, but this does not mean that it is easy to free oneself from suffering, right? Of course, what I described is a completely typical, classic picture and I would not want you to get the impression that body therapists are magicians who make mysterious passes with their hands, as a result of which the client, magically, goes through everything at once. … I just want to answer with this description the question why people love body therapy. For the opportunity, without martyrdom self-examination and excessive ritualization of everything that may be associated with psychotherapy and the person of the psychotherapist himself, he will be freed from a particle of tension and mental pain. Why particles? Do you still think that a person can be cured "of everything"?

How do body therapists work and why does therapy work?

1. Strictly speaking, all training in body therapy, to which you can devote days, months and years, is the answer to this question. Moreover, every time, at a new level of difficulty, it is more and more interesting.

2. But if you do not go into details and nevertheless open the veil of secrecy, then all bodily therapy rests on the "three pillars".

3. Knowledge about the peculiarities of the bodily-mental response.

4. Knowledge about the problematic map of the body, namely, the connection between body parts and the tension arising in them with the characteristics of a person's response to certain, usually external, influences of the surrounding world.

And, finally, the knowledge, how by combining both, this tension can be removed, thereby making the human body freer, and the attitude to life - easier.

Now imagine that a nuclear physicist is explaining to a child in a sandbox the structure of a nuclear reactor, and you will understand at what level I have now answered the question of how body therapists work. We just study the rest at seminars …

However, I don’t want you to get the impression that body therapy is very difficult to learn and master. No! It's pretty simple. But you need to understand the principles. Knowing them, you, without straining at all, will be able to master, even remotely, from records, descriptions and video views, almost any TOT methods (you, I hope, do not think that all several hundred inventors managed to invent something completely different from each other. friend?).

And, without knowing the principles, you will not be able to do anything, because each process of each client will be new to you, there will be no understanding of the commonality of many processes and phenomena, and, most importantly, you will absolutely not know what to do with it …

Therefore, some helluva lot of anxious "inventors" are very afraid to reveal their secrets, fearing that high-spirited students will overtake them in the professional field. Poor fellows do not always understand that their "secrets" are not much different from the secrets of other masters. Because God created the human body in his own image and likeness, which means that everyone is the same. There are minor differences, it is them that the science of psychology selflessly studies, however, it also tends to systematize and generalize, as a result of which various typologies are born. But, in fact, exceptions only proves the rules.

There is no difference in how the bodies of different people react to this or that message. Moreover, I will tell you that according to the same principles as for man, God created the whole world. However, jokes aside, I repeat: all people normally react with their bodies in the same way, because nature created the human body as a universal system, and endowed each part with a set of functional features. Realizing this, and building their knowledge on universal systemic laws, body therapists, just like most doctors of oriental medicine, study a person in interaction with other systems (man, microenvironment, society, etc.), and by deviation from the norm in the aggregate reactions, it is judged for what reason the healthy interaction was impaired.

Unclear? Example?

If they shout at us sharply, we will sit down slightly and shrink. If a stranger to us, with an unpleasant body odor, tries to come close to us and hug us, we will automatically turn our head to the side in order to avoid the annoying smell and move the pelvis back so as not to come into contact with intimate parts of the body with someone with whom we would not want to. … Most people will do this, and only very few can give out a slightly different reaction, which will alert, surprise and give reason to suspect that something is hidden behind the inadequate reaction.

The reason may be either a distorted perception of the situation (we would call it a gap in the picture of the world or a violation of the system of value coordinates, including those related to a person personally). The second possible reason is that the stress distorts the body itself and physically cannot react as it should to protect itself.

In the first case, we will suspect the presence of a systemic failure at the level of the psyche and try to "debug the mechanism" through working with the body. In the second, we will rather suspect the presence of psychological trauma, so long ago that it has already led to the formation of a stable tension in the body. We will assume that at some point a person was influenced with which he then could not cope, and after - he could not survive what happened, he will be freed. The body took the blow on itself and now wears this pain or fear, rejection or horror on itself, like a cross. Without giving a person the opportunity to remember and relive the event again physically and emotionally (on the one hand, the body itself is "afraid", on the other hand, it kindly protects the psyche from shocks, because it understands that it cannot withstand the skiff already for him, the body).

And this can go on for a very long time. A person will walk on the earth, inventing and realizing his fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood and the Gray Wolf or, well …, Cinderella and the Prince, thinking why everything is not quite as he would like, and not even guessing what is on his body, like on a street billboard, with these letters it is written - I HURT! And a lot of small clarifications, why it hurts, from what time it hurts, how he tries to defend himself so that it doesn't hurt very much …

When it becomes completely unbearable, a person goes to a psychologist.

- Tell us about your childhood. - Says the psychologist. - How did your mother treat you? And dad? And at school? And in kindergarten?

“Oh!” The man says. - Is it possible without it? - But a person is given memory, and now he is already beginning to remember, finds, of course, some unpleasant moments, talks about them, maybe even cries. But the tension does not go away from the body, the trauma remains trauma, memories remain memories, and as a result of the conversation, the mood only worsens. And then, one day, a client who has already been "therapied" but has not improved his life, falls into the hands of a body therapist.

- I had a difficult childhood, - he "charges" the usual "hurdy-gurdy".

“No more than others,” retorts the body therapist, who already “sees” the complainant through and through. He also sees his habitually hunched shoulders, a bulging weak abdomen, an immobile pelvis and concludes that the reason for the client's depression is not at all in childhood, more precisely, not only in him. This is evidenced by a lot of other signs, which I, let me say, will keep silent now.

The therapist sees how the inner grid of tensions is tied, as if by straps, and realizes that a person's card of values is in principle violated, he is weak, weak-willed, he does not know and never really tried to find out what, in fact, he wants from life. He straightens his shoulders, with dexterous movements of his fingers "turns on the spine" (it is not for nothing that the spine is called the "pillar of will"), he gently stretches the numb joints, and at the same time tells the person how this world works, that one is impossible without the other, that everything is a cause-and-effect series, and even such a "trifle" as an eternally lowered head can be the reason for the constant refusal of promotion …

A little later, feeling a strangely renewed, as if revived, body, the client, of course, will say: "Strange, you don't seem to know anything about me, I didn't tell you anything, and you gave abstract examples, but spoke as if my book of life I do just that, at first I plan for a long time, then I strain, then I doubt, then I do, but it's too late and nothing happens again. " "And there is a feeling of guilt!" Adds a body therapist, who sees the famous "mound" in the region of the 7th cervical vertebra more and more straining as the client's story progresses. In common people - "the hump of guilt".

By the way, further, it is absolutely not necessary to find out who is to blame for the fact that a person has become like that. It is quite obvious that everyone participated in the formation of the model of behavior. The whole environment. But most of all, the man himself. Therefore, it is necessary to work with him now, and not engage in endless digging of family history. Dozens of methods are suitable here, but all of them will be aimed at teaching a person to act on his own volitional potential, to understand that you can suffer endlessly, but you have to live now.

And with another person, some quiet downtrodden girl, you will need to discuss the topic of early childhood, when dad beat mom with a mortal fight in front of the baby, and she grew up and became a "punching bag" for her own husband. Psychologists, social services worked with her, she was taken away by ambulance, she wrote a statement to the police, but she still took it away. “Why?” The public yelled. The body therapist knew none of this. They didn't speak at all. The therapist just saw a terrible spasm in the solar plexus area - the zone of physical violence. And the whole body was, as if, twisted around him. The therapist began to unwind this body, this "ball", in the end, she cried, then burst into tears, then she vomited, and then she just got up, went home, packed her things and left. After 11 years of beating.

So body therapy is very different

One is one. You see, you feel, and you KNOW! You know the reasons too … You can generally speak with the body in its language, through the hands. Touches; vibration; pressure; squeezing; stretching. These are not just actions, these are words. I am here, next to; stir; hey, how much can you ?; phew, how much I got into myself!; look how you can …! "And how many different shades! And what massages we have! And what about the fact that five sessions of micro-modeling therapy have an effect equal to a surgical circular facelift? Using not a single tough trick? And to perform a "miracle" when after your work a woman who has been striving for this for 10 years becomes pregnant? The main thing is to put your hands up.

Masseurs come, twenty years at the table and cry: "I don't understand, I don't feel!"

Here you need a special kind of sensitivity - the ability to listen within yourself, to observe. No sudden movements, no fuss. Body therapists are usually calm people. Try, hold on one outstretched hand the hand of a person lying in a trance for 10 minutes and do not even flinch. But who will master - everything! Consider - you are a superman! Well, see for yourself. You feel and understand a person at a glance! Observation develops, intuition develops, colors, smells are getting sharper! You start to feel the aesthetic form well. "Here is the slope of the roof at a large angle. The pressure will be" - "Girl, are you an architect?" I also need a physical form, but it is being developed. You need endurance, but you can do anything. You often work asymmetrically and asynchronously, respectively, you train the right and left hemispheres. We are all talented. Someone begins to write poetry, someone draws. You seem to help others, but you yourself also relax, you relax and even grow younger. I touched a person with a pen and that's it - he's yours! Since we know how to touch, few people can. It's time to open a geisha school. You can agree on everything with your body. Look at me! Are you still in doubt?

Elena Shubina Institute for Professional Training ©