Truth, justice and bodily accountability: dance movement therapy as an innovative trauma treatment modality

Abstract

This study surveys contemporary approaches to trauma within dance movement therapy/psychotherapy (DMTP). 17 qualitative English-language studies (2010–2020) were examined using qualitative and embodied arts-based research methods. Trauma was conceptualised as a multi-layered, complex phenomenon for the lived and collective body, isolation, and adaptive survival, reflecting DMTP’s understanding of experiences of individual and systemic harm, the enactive self, dissociation, neurobiology, human rights and wider context. Trauma implicated bodily, intrapsychic, relational, communal, social, economic and structural realms. Goals were safety, freedom, pleasure and agency. Dance was a flexible, multimodal, gestalt container for simple-yet-complex interventions linking inner sensing, creative exploration and enactive movement to meaning-making and cognitive and identity restructuring. Therapeutic competence, ego and relationship to power shaped DMTP’s work with individual and collective trauma. DMTP might consider how to better communicate its approach to treating trauma, relevance of therapist/lived-experience, professional and collective identities and enactive healing-justice approaches to sexual violence.

Keywords:

• Trauma
• dance* therapy
• power
• embodied research methods

Acknowledgements

This paper is adapted from a Master’s thesis submitted in September 2020 in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Dance Movement Therapy) at the School of Therapeutic Sciences of SRH University Heidelberg with advisors Professor Christine Caldwell Ph.D., BC-DMT, LPC, NCC, ACS and Professor Dr. phil. habil. Sabine Koch, BC-DMT. I am grateful for the assistance, labour, time and insights of Bria Campbell, Rebekka Dieterich-Hartwell, Amber Gray, David Harris, Professor Rae Johnson and Cathy Malchiodi. I am grateful to Amber Gray for her profound insights and for modelling honour, respect and humility in clinical practice. I am grateful to Professor Christine Caldwell, Professor Rae Johnson, Professor Sabine Koch, Dr Patricia Leavy, Professor Shaun McNiff, Dr. Jennifer Tantia, PhD, BC-DMT, LCAT, and others for their work on embodied, arts-based research methods that is paving the way for the legitimisation of such methods. I am grateful to Profitraining Basel, Nkem Ndefo and Gillian Schutte and others as listed in the original thesis. Any oversights in this work are mine alone. This work was not funded by any funding or grant agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Statement of positionality

I identify as a person with lived experience of trauma, mental health privilege and vulnerability and neurodiversity. I have access to healthcare, medication and healing modalities. I have never been forcibly hospitalised nor lost accommodation on account of my mental health status. I identify as white and as someone who has benefitted from white privilege economically, educationally, somatically, emotionally, psychologically and in other ways. I have Turkish, Greek and British heritage. My father experienced prejudice on account of his nationality, ethnicity and immigration status. I have had access to information about my ancestry. Although I do not speak the language of the country I reside in fluently, I identify as a person with some economic, educational, immigration, class and linguistic privilege. I have had opportunities to travel, work, live and study outside of my country of birth and to explore functional movement and dance, obtain legal training and learn European languages. I was able to take unpaid leave after the birth of my children. I have access to clean water, food and safe accommodation and experienced hunger over the course of my life but rarely. I part-own the property I live in. I am a single mother of two children. I identify as cis, and a trans ally. I am smaller and thinner as compared with the average in the place that I live. I have access to nature and live in a flat with a shared garden. I recall my childhood experience as one of aloneness. My subjective psychological and emotional state during the research was variable. Global events that occurred during the research period included the Covid-19 pandemic, the response to the killing of George Floyd and racial injustice in the US and elsewhere, global political and climate instability and economic uncertainty. National events included tensions over Brexit in the UK. Personal events included marital separation, Covid-19 quarantine/lockdown and concerns about family members. I was resourced during the research by spirituality, relationship, plants, a garden, family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and online groups. I felt more connected to my local community at the start of the research process than at the end. I perceived the process of writing this paper as both generative (activating creativity) and stressful (somatic patterns such as collapse and immobility). The broad quantity of implicit ABR/EABR data generated triggered hope, intuitive ideas and traumatic stress patterns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olivia K. Nermin Streater

Olivia Streater is a Dance Movement Therapist and contemporary dancer. She studied DMT at SRH Hochschule Heidelberg and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She undertakes research at the Research Institute for Creative Arts Therapies (RiART). She was formerly a human rights researcher/campaigner in the UK, USA, Jamaica and South Africa, with a particular focus on torture, lethal force, anti-terrorism and refugee/LGBTQI rights. She is a Solicitor of England and Wales.