Live online · For experienced trauma therapists
The Somatic
Movement Vocabulary
Immersion
Four weeks inside the five developmental movements beneath the patterns your clients keep repeating.
Yield. Push. Reach. Grasp. Pull.
For experienced trauma therapists who want to understand why a client can see the pattern clearly and still be unable to move differently inside their relationships, choices and life.
Thursdays in September
12–1 PM ET
Come live or watch the recording
Enrollment open now
The problem
Your client understands the pattern. Understanding has not given her another option.
You can find the attachment wound. You can meet the protective part. You can name the belief, build the resource and help her make meaning of what happened. You are not missing the pattern. What you want to understand is why she can see it clearly and still have nothing else available when it matters.
She knows exactly why she overgives. She still cannot let anyone support her.
She has rehearsed the boundary and believes she is allowed to have it. The moment someone is disappointed, the Push will not hold.
She wants closeness. Her Reach is already preparing for rejection before anyone has had a chance to answer.
Something real happens in session. She feels it, she understands it. She cannot Pull it in deeply enough for it to stay.
You may be seeing the pattern without yet seeing the movement organizing it.
Why movement matters
Trauma does not only leave a story. It leaves an organization.
Most of us were trained to work skillfully with a client’s story, beliefs, emotions and recognizable patterns. Beneath those patterns is a layer of clinical information many of us were given far less language for.
movement.
The body, for a host of reasons, has been left out of the “talking cure.”
Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton and Clare Pain, Trauma and the Body
Experience → Meaning → Nervous-system organization → Movement → Pattern → Identity → Life
Something happens. A client makes meaning of it. Her nervous system organizes around what happened and what it meant, and that organization begins shaping how she moves toward support, protection, desire, boundaries and connection. Over time, the movements that stay available, and the ones that do not, shape the choices she can actually make.
What that looks like in a life
These are not only five movements we can observe in a session. They can become the architecture of a life.
A client who cannot Yield may not simply have difficulty receiving support. She may become the person who holds everything together, and build relationships, a career, a family and an identity around being the one who does not need anything.
A client who cannot Push may not simply struggle with boundaries. She may become agreeable, accommodating, easy, and build a life around avoiding the cost of someone else’s disappointment.
A client whose Reach went repeatedly unanswered may not simply struggle with attachment. Eventually she may stop reaching. Stop asking. Stop risking. She may call herself independent, when part of what we are seeing is a brilliant organization around a movement that once became too costly.
A client who cannot Grasp may move toward what she wants and then struggle to take hold of it once it is actually there.
A client who cannot Pull may receive love, reassurance, success, even a powerful therapeutic experience, without being able to take it in deeply enough to be changed by it.
These are not simply ideas clients hold about themselves. They may be embodied organizations built around the movements their systems learned were safe, dangerous or impossible. Which is why what looks like a strength from the outside is sometimes an extraordinarily intelligent adaptation.
Seeing the movement underneath the pattern gives you another level of clinical visibility. Alongside what is the pattern, where did it come from and what intervention should I use, there is one more question available:
What can this person actually do from inside her body right now?
Can she receive support without immediately becoming the caretaker?
Can she hold an edge while someone she loves is disappointed?
Can she want something without abandoning herself if the answer might be no?
Can she take hold of something good when it becomes available?
Can she receive an experience deeply enough for it to change what happens next?
These are answerable questions. They are also the questions that tell you why an intervention that makes perfect sense on paper is not working yet.
And notice that none of them ask whether a client has more Yield or more Push. They ask about range.
The goal is flexibility.
Not for a client to become a “Yield person” or a “Push person,” but to have enough range to reach for whichever movement the moment actually requires. When a movement becomes genuinely available, she has an option she did not have before.
And the choices a person can reach for are the ones that eventually become a life.
Inside the immersion
Over four weeks, we will enter all five movements: developmentally, experientially and clinically.
The satisfaction cycle, in the order a body learned it.
Together these five make the satisfaction cycle, the sequence a body moves through to get a need met. We take one movement at a time, in the order the cycle runs, so that by the fourth week you are not holding five separate ideas. You are holding one cycle, and the places it stalls.
We are not learning five movements. We are learning to think with them clinically.
The healthy function of each movement, and how missing, underused, overused, substituted and compensated movement appears in the room.
Yield from collapse or compliance. Push from rigidity. Reach from panic. Grasp from gripping. Because asking a client to practice a movement is very different from helping her system develop the capacity for it.
How the movements depend on one another, and what may need to develop first. Sometimes the intervention you want to use is not wrong. It is simply asking for a capacity the client does not have yet.
How movement becomes pattern, pattern becomes identity, and identity shapes the relationships and choices a client believes are available to her.
Therapist language, precise questions and titrated somatic experiments, brought back into case conceptualization and the treatment arc.
The five movements are the Basic Neurocellular Patterns described by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. The satisfaction cycle is Susan Aposhyan’s formulation. Ruella Frank developed them into Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy and adds a sixth, releasing. We stay with the five, and we work them clinically.
What changes
What you take back into the room.
Your case conceptualization gains a question
Alongside what intervention should I use, you start asking what may need to develop before the intervention can hold. It is a question you will keep getting better at answering long after these four weeks.
You have language and experiments to work with
Therapist language, precise questions and titrated experiments you can begin using, and practice at the hardest discernment in this work: telling genuine new capacity from a client performing an exercise.
Movement work has somewhere to live
Inside the treatment arc rather than beside it as an isolated somatic exercise.
You will not leave knowing everything there is to know about the satisfaction cycle. Four classes is four hours. You will leave seeing more, asking better questions, and holding more clinically grounded choices about what to do next.
For the capacity underneath the choice.
And it does not stay in the therapy room
The therapist has a movement vocabulary too.
Study Yield and you will meet your own relationship to being held. Study Push and you will notice the edges you hold and the ones you give away. Reach shows up in what you want, what you ask for and what you stop yourself from wanting. Grasp shows up in whether you can take hold of what becomes available. Pull shows up in what you can actually receive and let change you.
There is not a professional nervous system and a personal one.
This is why the immersion is experiential rather than only conceptual. Not so the four weeks become personal development, but because the more intimately you know a movement, the more precisely you can see it in someone else.
I have done a lot of trainings, but I had never found a home where everything connected. What resonated with me was becoming a seer, trusting my clinical intuition while having a framework that brings it all together. I finally felt like I had found a place where all the pieces made sense.Geraldine Rabl, Trauma Psychotherapist, EMDR, Austria
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
I came looking for more depth in my somatic and parts work. What I found was something much deeper than another technique. As my own embodiment expanded, the way I held space for clients changed, and my clients began responding differently because I was responding differently.Gul Khan, Therapist
This training leveled up how I do assessments and treatment planning. Big time.Rachel Berzack, MSW
This really helped me understand case conceptualization in a much clearer way. Learning from you is making me more confident guiding my clients into deeper somatic and trauma work.Radhalisa Zarzuela, LMHC · EMDR Therapist
If you attended The Hidden Movements That Change Therapy
You have the map. This is the terrain.
The masterclass gave you the vocabulary and the map of the five movements. This is not a longer version of that class. Here we slow each movement down and enter its developmental origin, its clinical spectrum, the identities that form around it, and the discernment involved in facilitating it responsibly.
The masterclass introduced the vocabulary. The immersion is where we learn to think with it.
This is for you if:
You are experienced, trained somewhere in EMDR, IFS, somatic work, attachment therapy or your own integration of them.
Your clients understand their patterns and still cannot live differently.
You want sharper case conceptualization, not another rigid protocol.
You want to understand what needs to develop before the intervention you are considering can hold.
You want somatic experiments situated inside pacing, consent, sequencing and a real treatment plan.
You are willing to meet these movements in your own body, not only study them.
I’m Esther Goldstein.
I’m an integrative trauma therapist, EMDR consultant, educator and the author of EMDR for Anxiety. For more than 15 years I have helped experienced therapists integrate EMDR, IFS, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, attachment work and AEDP into a cohesive clinical map.
I came to Movement Vocabulary because I kept sitting with clients whose insight had reached its limit. Their bodies were telling me something their stories could not account for. Once I could see the movement underneath the pattern, I had another way to understand where the work was stuck.
That is the lens I want to build with you here.
Enrollment
Join the Somatic Movement Vocabulary Immersion
- Guided experiential practice with all five movements
- Clinical examples and live case application
- Room to bring your own clients and treatment planning
- Every class recorded and uploaded
- A companion guide to the five movements, yours to keep
Enrollment is open now. We begin Thursday, September 3. Once the live round is finished, the recordings go on sale at $599.
See you inside,
Esther