Body-oriented interventions… - FOCUSING

Leijssen M., Nagels A. & Dekeyser M.: Body-oriented interventions in psychotherapy.
refer to body-oriented behaviour. The resulting observations imply three perspectives:
personal experience, verbal communication and nonverbal interaction. “What words refer to
someone’s body?” turns out to be a central question for both the discussion and the
research of body-oriented interventions.
3.1 Introduction
The concept of a body-oriented intervention is usually typified by examples. This concept is
rarely demarcated formally and the examples most often serve as an illustration of a
particular account of psychotherapy. First I will attempt to define the body-oriented
intervention in terms neutral to various theories of psychotherapy. Next I will show how this
demarcation allows for the empirical study of body-oriented interventions, independent of
therapeutic orientation.
Transcript 1: Body-oriented behaviour in a fictitious therapeutic session
C: You tell me to go ahead and talk about this problem. But where shall I start?
C waves hands.
C really has no clue.
T imitates C’s hand movements while listening.
T gets a sense of disorientation from the movements.
T: Look at how you wave your hands. You really don’t know where to start.
T repeats and exaggerates C’s hand movements.
3.2 Definition
Body-oriented behaviour – exemplified in
Transcript – is any behaviour that directs the attention of the client or the therapist to either
person’s body or their bodily interaction. I would like to include in this category all behaviour
that one assumes to direct the client’s or therapist’s attention.
I use the word intervention in it’s broadest possible sense – the act of influencing a process
– applied to the context of a therapeutic session. An intervention is a type of behaviour that
is performed by a therapist in a therapeutic session. The term includes behaviour in the
sense of verbal statements, nonverbal style, incidental gestures, unconscious changes in
posture, etc. The influenced process can be the client’s process, the therapist’s process, the
process of their mutual interaction or the process of any ongoing interaction for that matter.
Whether some therapist behaviour can be considered as an intervention is to be decided by
the therapeutic practice. Note that this definition of an intervention allows for the initial
inclusion of all therapist behaviour as a candidate for the title of “body-oriented
intervention”. For the present, a body-oriented intervention is any body-oriented behaviour
performed by a therapist.
© 2003, Leijssen, Nagels & Dekeyser (U. Leuven, Belgium)
Proceedings of the 15th International Focusing Conference 2003 Pforzheim/Germany, ed. by HJ Feuerstein,
FZK Verlag, Weingarten (Baden), Germany
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