Movement with Touch

Movement with Touch introduces the movements which healthy children experience as part of natural growth. It is a therapeutic, non-invasive way of working with people whose disability has deprived them of early movement experience. In this way the opportunities for building trust, exploring relationship, building self-esteem and solving problems that might be available for the able bodied child have been lost. Movement with Touch offers the person a chance to experience and make up for what has been missed in their development.

Aims of Movement with Touch

• To build trust slowly and foster relationship between client and practitioner.
• To create a feeling of shared enjoyment and oneness between them.
• To develop a sense of self through body awareness.
• To allow people to become aware of their centre and emotions.
• To encourage communication through the language of movement, touch, sound and stillness - the sound supports and encourages the client's experience and expression.
• To introduce the controlling and organising of energy so that the client has a variety of experiences of herself.

Theory

Three strands of thinking inform Movement with Touch.

1. Eric Erikson's Human Development stages and the tasks that he names as being necessary for each individual to successfully fulfil in reaching adult potential.

2. Carl Jung's theory of the unconscious. Jung shows how people contain opposites within the conscious and unconscious. These must become integrated for the individual to become more whole. Movement with Touch offers clients who have a set and restricted movement pattern to develop an opposite to what is habitual. Thus the movement vocabulary is extended.

3. Rudolf Laban cites that when you change the outer body movement, the inner emotional life is affected. By working with the outer being, the inner world has new access for expression and so is able to make change.

It is perhaps most importantly informed by what Marian Lindkvist calls the 'informed instinct' of the therapist. This requires the synthesis of the gut response, which happens uniquely between client and therapist each time they meet, with the thinking rationale - each contributing to the content and quality of the relationship. It asks for sensitivity, courage, spontaneity and full attention from the Practitioner.

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