Beyond the Movement: Knowing What to Do Next

A therapist told me about a client who desperately wanted connection.

She wanted relationships and people close to her.

And the therapist could see something important:

This client needed more capacity for reach.

So she tried a reach exercise with her.

Makes perfect sense, right?

Except it went terribly.

The client flooded, and instead of leaving the session feeling more capable of connection… she left feeling like she had failed at that too.

This is the part of Movement Vocabulary I’ve been thinking about constantly since teaching the first workshop.

Because the therapist wasn’t wrong.

The client did need reach.

But after asking a few more questions, something else became clear: there was old loss underneath the intensity with which this client approached connection.

So asking her simply to “reach” was almost like asking the most wounded part of her to perform the very thing it had never felt safe enough to do.

The movement was right.

The timing was wrong.

And there’s a world of clinical work inside that distinction.

What state is actually trying to perform the movement? 

What needs to be grieved first? 

What needs to happen inside the therapeutic relationship?

And how much preparation does the nervous system need before the intervention becomes something the client can actually metabolize?

This is why I didn’t want to simply teach you five movements and leave you there.

Seeing the movement changes the way you perceive a case. But knowing how to work with what you see is where the real clinical skill begins.

That’s what we’re doing in the Movement Vocabulary Implementation Workshop.

We’re taking this out of the realm of:

“Oh wow, I can see it.”

And into:

“I know what to do next.”

That’s really the shift I want to help you make now.

Not just being able to say, “I know what this client needs.”

But being able to think through everything that determines whether they’re ready for it, what has to happen first, and what the intervention should actually look like when you get there.

We’re doing that together on Thursday, August 27 at 12:00 PM Eastern in the Movement Vocabulary Implementation Workshop, and its $97

You’ll also get the recording if you can’t be there live.

After the workshop, the recording will go separately for $147

Join us here:

buy.stripe.com/5kQ7sL4OxceG7mWgAh73G3i

Esther