Guiding principles
The Bodynamic system has been developed for about fifty years, and emerged from a multidisciplinary team in Denmark. The core of the system is about fostering the pillars of Dignity and Mutual Connection. In other words, “can I be all of me, can you be all of you, and can we be in connection with each other?”
That’s the ideal we work toward. The reality usually looks like either “There needs to be less of you so that I can be present,” or, “There needs to be less of me to be in connection with you.” These internalized beliefs can show up as young as around birth, and how we meet the challenge of mutual connection through each developmental stage of life becomes our unique pattern of resources and lack of resources. These resources also impact the way we connect to our dignity or remain out of touch with our dignity.
Some key parts of Bodynamic theory
Developmental Stages
The system can be organized around the following themes, the core developmental challenge, and the common age range of navigating that theme:
- Existence (The right to exist; perinatal-3mo)
- Need (the right to have needs and be satisfied; 1mo-18mo)
- Autonomy (The right to be autonomous; 8mo-2.5y years)
- Will (The right to be intentional, directed, and willful; 2-4 years)
- Love/Sexuality (The right to have loving and sexual feelings; 3-6 years)
- Opinion (The right to have your own opinions; 5-9 years)
- Solidarity/Performance (The right to be a full member of a group apart from performing; 7-12 years)
Ego Functions
Each developmental theme can be experienced and expressed through eleven “ego functions,” or themed sets of skills. These skills are where much of the active work of therapy happens, informed by the developmental themes listed above. These can be assessed and expressed both through language and through body cues, and are where the work of somatic psychotherapy gets really active.
- Connectedness
- Positioning
- Centering
- Boundaries
- Grounding / Reality Testing
- Social Balance
- Cognitive Skills
- Management of Energy
- Self-Assertion
- Pattern of Interpersonal Skills
- Gender Skills
Trauma
The Bodynamic approach to working with trauma is resource-focused and is understood through helping a person come from an instinct-dominant approach to life (fight/flight/freeze/fawn) back to a social-emotional dominant approach to life. This is done by understanding how each client’s resources are challenged through their developmental and ego-function themes.
Almost every shock trauma impacts the ego functions of grounding, centering, energy management, and boundaries. And since trauma so often happens in interpersonal contexts, our connectedness skills are also often impacted.
Working with trauma is slow, intentional, and resource developing. It is about restoring contact with your sense of dignity and meeting you in mutual connection. It is about giving you confidence in meeting your triggers and having a sense of ability to endure them and re-integrate them. It is not about healing, but about post-traumatic growth. We bear our traumas in our stories for life. Our goal is to have develop the resoures to bear the story with dignity, with agency, and with as little disruption to our daily life as possible. Through the support of therapy, this can often even mean that traumas transform into (unasked for) opportunities for growth we might never have otherwise had. Or, in the words of the renowned Viktor Frankl,
He who has a why can endure any how.
There is much more to the Bodynamic system than the brief intro I’ve outlined above. If you want to read more before we work together, let me point you to their theory page here.