How to Work with a Client's Body to Release Anxiety, with Pat Ogden

Описание: When a client struggles with anxiety, it can keep them trapped in an anxious loop of reactivity.

Pat Ogden is the creator of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and is one of the world's top experts in treating trauma.

In this client story, Pat describes a 13 year-old girl who was withdrawn and didn't talk much at school. But her posture seemed to be telling much more than what she was saying verbally.

As a body therapist, Pat knew that this was where she wanted to focus her intervention. Through their work together, Pat discovered that her painful experience at school had left insecurity and anxiousness to take hold in her body.

The girl had been continually bullied over her weight and ethnicity. But there was one particular incident at eight years old that seemed to destroy her confidence. In order to help free her client from her defensive posture, Pat knew that the girl had to reconcile with her terrified eight year-old self.

Once she was able to work through that part, Pat focused on her posture. But then something else happened. The body work that Pat was instituting with her client was triggering her into painful anxiety.

Pat was then able to pinpoint where in her body that the client was feeling the strongest anxiety. This helped her to better target her treatment with a specific bottom-up strategy.

By the end of their work together, Pat's client had shifted the way she approached school life in one key way. And this would reveal a lessening of the anxiety that was holding her back, and a strengthening of the confidence that she lacked.

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