A 90 Minute Live Masterclass
The hidden movements
that change therapy
Why expanding your movement vocabulary may change the way you understand trauma, your clients, and yourself.
You have a client who has done everything right.
She has the insight, the years, the language for all of it. And there is one pattern she cannot move. It is in how she works, how she loves, how she sits in the chair across from you. She can name it. She understands where it began. And it does not shift.
She is not resistant. You know she is not resistant. And you have quietly run out of language for what you are actually looking at.
For a long time, I had no language for it either. Then the question I found myself asking changed. Not what is the diagnosis, not what is the trauma, not even what is the right intervention. Something far simpler.
What movement is missing?
Two clients arrive with the same diagnosis and need completely different treatment. The symptoms are identical. The organization underneath them is not. I was never treating the anxiety. I was sitting with a nervous system that had learned its own way of moving through the world, and I had no words for the part that mattered most.
What This Masterclass Does
After ninety minutes, that client looks different to you.
Not because you have a new technique. Because you can finally see the thing that was there the whole time, and you know which part of it to reach for first.
This is not another protocol. It is a vocabulary, a way of seeing that does not switch off once you have it. Once you can read these patterns, you cannot go back to seeing symptoms alone. Every session organizes itself differently.
Why This Gap Exists
Nobody built the alphabet.
Graduate school taught us to track what is said.
EMDR taught us protocol and targeting.
Somatic therapy taught us activation, titration, pendulation.
No one built the language for developmental movement. We were handed a rich vocabulary for symptoms, and almost none for how a nervous system actually develops, or fails to.
So the pattern that formed before your client had any words for herself goes unnamed. The treatment stalls. And it gets filed under resistance.
A vocabulary is not more theory.
It is the difference between seeing something and being able to work with it.
What You Already Know And Cannot Name
You have language for everything your client says.
You have almost none for how she moves.
- The client who has sat in that chair for a year and has never once let it hold her.
- The client who reaches toward you every session and never quite arrives.
- The client whose processing keeps looping, and every protocol you know says it should not.
- The client who can want something out loud and cannot keep it.
You notice these. You have noticed them for years. You write around them in your notes, because there is no word for the thing you are watching.
Two therapists watch the exact same session.
One sees resistance.
One sees a push that never completed.
They ask different questions. They build different treatment plans.
Only one of them is treating what is actually there.
You are not missing a technique.
You are missing a vocabulary.
What you are actually looking at.
The client who spends her life performing is not struggling with perfectionism. She never learned the safety of settling into support.
The client who cannot say no does not lack boundaries. Push never became an embodied capacity.
The client who clings to relationships is not too needy. Her grasping compensates for a nervous system that never learned to rest in itself.
When we begin seeing movement instead of only behavior, the entire treatment plan changes.
The Vocabulary Problem
You already have a movement vocabulary. Every clinician does. The only question is how many words are in it.
Imagine describing every shade of blue using only the words light and dark.
The blues have not disappeared. You simply have no words for them. Most of us were given a handful: fight, flight, freeze, collapse. But a nervous system organizes through far more than four states. It yields, pushes, reaches, grasps, pulls, orients, protects, and begins a hundred movements that never finish.
Your clients are always communicating.
The question is whether your vocabulary is large enough to hear them.
The Five Patterns
Five movements, in the order
the body learned them.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen mapped these through Body-Mind Centering. Linda Hartley and Susan Aposhyan carried them into clinical work. Ruella Frank brought developmental movement into the therapy room. Each one rests on the one before it, which is why the sequence is the whole tool, and why treatment stalls when you work them out of order.
Yield
Push
Reach
Grasp
Pull
The question that changes the session
Stop asking what is wrong with this client.
Ask which movement never fully developed.
You have been watching these for years.
On the day, you will finally have their names, and know which one to reach for first.
This was not just information. It gave me an entirely new way to organize what I was seeing in the therapy room.
Dena Michnowich, LCSW, EMDR
And This Is Not Only About Our Clients
It is about us.
As therapists, we do not simply bring our knowledge into the room. We bring our own nervous systems. We bring our own movement vocabulary. There are movements that feel natural to us and movements that feel foreign. There are places where we instinctively know how to guide a client, because that capacity lives inside us. And there are places where our own history quietly narrows what we notice.
Perhaps yielding has never felt safe. Perhaps reaching has always carried the possibility of rejection. Perhaps pushing feels uncomfortable, because somewhere along the way we learned that taking up space threatened connection.
We do not leave those patterns behind when we become therapists. They shape the questions we ask, the interventions that feel intuitive, and the moments we choose to follow or overlook.
I do not see that as a flaw.
I see it as one of the greatest invitations of our profession.
Because every time we expand our own movement vocabulary, our clinical world expands with it. We recognize possibilities that previously did not exist in our awareness. We see different treatment targets. We tolerate more complexity. We become less attached to symptom reduction and more curious about development. Most importantly, we stop asking clients to make choices their nervous systems have never had the capacity to make.
Instead we begin helping them build the capacities that create entirely new choice points.
I came looking for more depth in my somatic and parts work. What I found was much deeper than another technique. As my own embodiment expanded, the way I held space for clients changed. My clients began responding differently, because I was responding differently.
Gul Khan, Therapist
Inside the Ninety Minutes
Body first. Concept second.
You cannot read a pattern in a client you have never found in yourself. So we begin with your body. The framework arrives after, to name what already happened.
First 20 minutes
Orientation, before it is named
You do the exercise before I tell you what it is. You feel neuroception in your own body first, then we name it. That is how the whole ninety minutes runs.
Next 15 minutes
Story and storyteller
Gendlin's felt sense, worked directly. You will watch what happens in you when the content stays the same and the storyteller changes.
Next 40 minutes
The five patterns, in your own body
Yield, push, reach, grasp, pull. Each one located, moved, and then read. You will find the one that is incomplete in you before you go looking for it in anyone else. Humility, humility, humility. That is what the body asks of us.
Final 15 minutes
Clinical integration
Which pattern to look for first when a client is stuck, and why working the wrong one costs you months.
What You Leave With
Not a concept. A working instrument.
The five patterns, mapped to what you actually see
Each with its clinical signature: what an incomplete yield looks like in posture, in breath, in the pace of a session. So that you can finally name what you have been watching for fifteen years.
The diagnostic sequence
When a client is stuck, you will know which pattern to examine first, and why. The order is the tool. So that you stop treating downstream and start treating the movement that never completed.
Your own pattern, located
A guided sequence through all five. Most clinicians find theirs in the first twenty minutes. So that the way you do life stops shaping the way you do this work.
The Movement Vocabulary reference card
One page. Five patterns, their clinical presentations, and the question to ask when each is missing. So that it sits beside you in session instead of in a folder.
Replay access
The recording, yours to keep. The second watch is usually where it lands.
If you already know this is the lens you have been missing, you do not have to wait for the end of the page.
Grab your seatOne More Reason We Miss These
Your clients can only go as deep
as your body can stay present.
You cannot recognize a movement your own body cannot make. The body that walks into the room shapes the therapy that becomes possible in it. If pushing has never felt safe in yours, you will struggle to help a client find an embodied no. If yielding was never available to you, you will reach for action before they have learned to settle.
We cannot perceive in another what we have no reference for in ourselves.
This is why the masterclass begins with you.
Your body is the instrument you perceive theirs through.
The Therapist You Become
What changes is not only what you know.
It is how you work.
You stop wondering what you are missing.
Sessions get quieter. You trust silence, because you can see what is happening inside it.
Complex cases stop feeling random and start feeling legible.
Consultation gets clearer. You stop chasing insight and start following development.
You stop trying harder, and start seeing more.
And the confidence changes at the root. It stops depending on having the perfect intervention ready. It starts coming from something steadier, from knowing what you are actually looking at.
The Room
This is not an introduction
to somatic work.
For you if
- You have been practicing five, ten, twenty years.
- You are trained in EMDR, somatic modalities, IFS, or all three.
- You have felt the ceiling of what your current language can reach.
- You want nuance, not another protocol.
Not for you if
- You are looking for the basics of nervous system regulation.
- You want a technique you can apply on Monday without moving it through your own body first.
- You would rather collect a framework than be changed by one.
Why Esther
I am a trauma specialist, EMDR consultant, and the author of EMDR for Anxiety. I founded a group practice of nine clinicians and a training platform for therapists who have outgrown the trainings available to them.
I did not come to Movement Vocabulary through a certificate. I came to it the way you will: sitting across from a client I could not reach, out of protocol, watching what her body was doing while she spoke. The pattern had been there the whole time. I simply had no word for it.
I have taught this to clinicians with two decades of experience. They come up at the break and say the same sentence, nearly word for word. I have been watching this my entire career and I did not know it had a name.
This masterclass is what I wish someone had put in my hands fifteen years ago.
What This Is Actually About
Someone is on your schedule right now who cannot yield. On July 23 you will either have a name for what she is doing, or you will chart it one more time as resistance.
We spend our lives trying to change behavior. But behavior is the visible expression of movements that were organized long before any of us had words. If we never help people develop new movements, we should not be surprised when they keep making the only choices their nervous systems know how to make.
Every new movement creates a new capacity. Every new capacity creates a new choice. Every new choice makes a different life possible.
Development is movement. Identity is movement. Healing is movement. The way we do life is the way we do this work.
We do not become different
by thinking differently.
We become different by developing
new ways of moving through the world.
I do not believe the future of trauma therapy belongs to the therapist with the most interventions.
I believe it belongs to the therapist who can perceive what others cannot. Because what we can perceive is what determines the treatment we build, the questions we ask, and the possibilities we are able to offer.
The work becomes less about forcing change,
and more about following what is already trying to unfold.
More From Clinicians Who Were In The Room
What really landed for me is the distinction between what clients say they want and what they actually need. They come in asking for symptom relief, but underneath it, they are longing for connection. This showed me how to create that somatic connection in real time, not just talk about it.
Kristi Knight, LMHC, CHC
I learned to differentiate shock from developmental trauma, and to understand the importance of titration in treatment. It has helped me guide clients more effectively.
Kaitlyn Schwab, LMFT
The sentences she gave us for taking a client beyond the story were gold. I have so many more tools now for how I plan and lead my sessions.
Delphine Birckel
This training leveled up how I do assessments and treatment planning. Big time.
Rachel Berzack, MSW
One client who stops stalling pays for this many times over. Ninety minutes, $97, and a lens you keep for the rest of your practice.
The Hidden Movements That Change Therapy
Thursday, July 23 / 12:00–1:30 PM EST / $97
Save my seatLive on Zoom. Replay included.
Reference card sent within 24 hours.