The Benefits of Dance Therapy: How Can This Body Based Therapy Help You Heal?

Have you ever noticed how your body seems to "remember" certain emotions - how a particular stretch, posture, or movement can suddenly bring a wave of unexpected feeling?

That’s no coincidence.

Our bodies hold memories just as vividly as our minds do, and dance therapy taps into that powerful connection.

Dance therapy isn’t just about moving to the beat - it’s about moving through pain, emotion, and memory.

It’s where psychology meets rhythm, where healing takes the shape of motion.

Whether you’re dealing with stress, trauma, or just looking to reconnect with your inner self, dance therapy offers a path to express what words can’t always capture.

How Does the Body Relate to Our Memory?

Emotions are energy that is released through verbal language - and many other forms of expression.

Not all emotions or experiences manage to be adequately channeled and expressed. Some are very intense and remain recorded or associated with certain body regions.

This is what explains why you experience fear, anxiety, anger, sadness or joy when faced with certain body movements or certain situations that apparently should not affect you.

In other cases, this repressed energy manifests itself in:

• phantom pain
• illness
• functional limitation
• non-specific discomfort

Close your eyes, breathe slowly and try to contract all the muscles of your face or all the muscles of your back, do you feel any emotion?

If you answered yes, you have just experienced what is known as body memory or trauma memory.

Dance therapy is a way to learn to use movement to freely express what is represented in the person's psyche and associated with the body. It helps to integrate all the ways we have to process experiences and learn how to deal with them without getting sick.

What happens in a dance therapy session?

Dance therapy is a body-based therapy defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as,

"the therapeutic use of movement as a process that fosters the emotional, cognitive, social, and physical integration of the individual."

Dance therapy is a form of creative therapy led by a therapist specialized in this method. They use a wide variety of rhythms and techniques as the person requires.

Basically, the sessions are developed through exercises to work on:

• muscle tension
• correcting posture
• regulating breathing
• expressing emotions

Usually this is a contemporary dance, focused on creation and expression through movement. The purpose here is to help people integrate their internal world with the exterior, and to be able to recognize the bottled emotions, then transform them.

What is the method of dance therapy?

From its origins in the mid-20th century, dance therapy was developed through three methods:

• the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA)
• the Movement Psychodiagnostic inventory (MPI)
• the Kestenberg Movement Profile

Beyond the methods on which it was designed, dance therapy revolves around 4 main areas:

Dance technique.

This gives a framework for the user to feel comfortable with body expression. This is not about acquiring artistic skills, but about encouraging people to express themselves through authentic movement.

Imitation.

Imitation is a means to recognize through the other feelings that exist within one. The therapist can direct the user to imitate a movement to facilitate the expression of a feeling difficult for that person to recognize.

Improvisation.

Dance therapy is a way of disconnecting the user from the limits imposed by their intellect and allowing them to express themselves freely.

Improvisation is expected to facilitate the connection to the feeling and meant to lead to self-recognition and self-acceptance.

Creation.

Creation results from the combination of dance technique and improvisation.

It is a way of boosting self-esteem and bringing the internal world to the outside. This is when experiences and traumas stop being a burden because they are being released and transformed through movement.

How to motivate the therapeutic process through dance?

You may still have doubts about how to start a therapeutic process mediated by dance.

You may think that it will be difficult to take the first step - and this is a common concern when trying something new. The truth is, there is nothing to worry about!

You should know that not everything in dance therapy depends on the body.

The dance therapist will help you through the process by using motivators that will work as a fuel to get you moving.

Two of these elements are:

The word.

Each word is linked to an image that is unique for each person, related to their own experiences, with their subjectivity.

The therapist will use words to help the person connect with specific images and movements related to their process.

Imagine you're told to:

• grow as a tree
• flow as the air
• be the sun
• move as water

Each word or sentence will stimulate a movement response seeking a specific change in you.

Interaction with objects.

This helps the person reflect on what they’re sensing and feeling.

These objects can then provide sensory information (color, smell, texture, shape, etc.) that the person can integrate into their body game. This way, the person learns to express themselves and also take in and absorb things from their environment.

4 Benefits of Dance Therapy

Dance therapy is a form of self-knowledge guided by body expression that helps to work on specific conflicts and achieve benefits like:

1. Gaining awareness of the true body image.

Dance therapy is recommended for those people with distortions or concerns about their body image.

The process of connecting the inner world with their environment through movement helps people to develop a genuine perception of their own body.

2. Overcoming trauma.

As we mentioned above, intense emotions related to traumatic events tend to remain associated with body regions, in what some call “body memory” and others “trauma memory”.

Expression through movement favors the recognition of these emotions. It opens the possibility of transforming them into something bearable for the person.

3. Improve the quality of life of people with functional limitations.

Dance therapy is one of the best ways to promote body expression in people with functional limitations such as those with aftereffects from cerebrovascular disease, amputations, or physical trauma damage.

It gives them the opportunity to regain in some way the ability to use their body to create and enhance their psycho-emotional well-being.

4. Diversify and maximize communication capacity.

Dance therapy helps people to communicate and express through their body, which becomes a new way of communicating without anxieties or fears.

It's ideal as a complement to speech therapy in children and in treating people with conditions such as stuttering or social phobia.

Are You Ready to Try Dance Therapy?

Finally, in almost a century of history, dance therapy has proven to be a way to heal body and mind. Its therapeutic power is not limited to improving those who suffer physically or emotionally.

It also:

• improves physical condition
• prevents the appearance of diseases
• enhances the development of the individual

To explore this form of creative therapy, we recommend you find a specialist in the field who can accompany you in the process and help you get the most out of this practice.

Editor's note: This article was originally published May 24, 2023 and has been updated to improve reader experience.

Photo by Jansel Ferma