About the Workshop:
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.
Learning Objectives:
1. To learn how to use somatic utterances to enhance treatment
2. To identify somatic manifestation of psychic structure and begin to think holistically about psyche/soma.
3. To stay connected to and make use of the therapist’s somatic self even if working virtually, in a 2 dimensional medium.
4. To apply enhanced clinical observation skills for recognizing and interpreting embodied communication patterns.
Instructors:
Aleksandra Rayska Ph.D is a New York State Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Body-Mind specialist, Supervising Psychologist at Therapists of New York, a group practice in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Her approach to psychotherapy is rooted in her training as a dance/movement therapist (she holds a master’s degree in Dance/Movement Therapy from Pratt Institute) and a deep awareness of the connection between mind and body. Dr. Rayska has written and lectured on mind-body integration for 20 years. In her clinical practice, she facilitates a group for individuals with chronic pain and chronic illness, and sees individuals navigating complex somatic experiences.
Andrea Gitter MA, LCAT, BC-DMT is a psychotherapist and dance/movement therapist specializing in the treatment of eating and body issues, and how one’s psyche manifests in somatic states, with a special interest in somatic cognition and somatic countertransference. She is in private practice in Manhattan and Belle Harbor (Rockaway), Queens. She is on the Board and Faculty of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, where she has been affiliated since 1982. She is co-author of Eating Problems: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model, and several articles on the topic of food, eating and body.