For experienced trauma therapists · Live online
The Somatic
Movement Vocabulary
Immersion
A four-week immersion into Yield, Push, Reach, Grasp and Pull, and how these developmental movements shape the patterns your clients repeat, the identities they inhabit and the lives they believe are possible.
For experienced trauma therapists who want to understand why a client can see the pattern clearly and still be unable to move differently when it matters.
Plus a bonus implementation call in October
12–1 PM ET
Come live or watch the recordings
Immediate access on joining
Who this is for
You are already good at this work.
You can find the attachment wound, meet the protective part, name the belief and build the resource.
And you want the work to reach further.
You want to see what is happening when a client has insight, language and awareness, and still cannot do something different.
But right now
In your sessions, there is a client who…
Knows exactly why she overgives, and still cannot let anyone support her.
Has rehearsed the boundary and believes she is allowed to have it, and gives it away the moment someone is disappointed.
Wants closeness, and at the first sign of rejection gives up on the closeness she could actually have.
Is finally offered something good, and hesitates, keeps her options open and somehow does not take hold of it.
Has something real happen in session, feels it and understands it, and three days later carries on as though it never landed.
You are seeing the pattern clearly.
What you may not yet be seeing is what is organizing it.
The reason
Trauma does not only leave a story. It can leave an organization.
You have been trained to work skillfully with trauma, to understand what happened, work with the meaning your client made of it, and meet the beliefs, protective strategies, attachment wounds and nervous-system responses that followed.
But you may not yet have been trained to recognize and work with the developmental movement underneath the pattern.
And that matters.
Because you can understand exactly why a client does what she does and still not know what capacity needs to develop for something different to become possible.
This is where Movement Vocabulary gives us another layer of clinical information.
Movement is how we organize ourselves, physically and psychologically, to meet the world around us: to receive support, to hold an edge, to move toward what we want, to take hold of it and to bring it in.
Within Movement Vocabulary, we work with five foundational developmental movements.
Can she receive support without disappearing, collapsing or 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 recognize and take hold of something good when it becomes available?
Can she receive an experience deeply enough for it to become hers and change what happens next?
What that looks like in a life
These movements can become part of the architecture of a life.
When you can see the movement underneath the pattern, you gain another level of clinical visibility.
What movement is organizing this pattern?
Where does this client have flexibility, and where does she not?
What capacity may need to develop before the intervention you are considering can actually work?
Inside the immersion
Inside the four-week immersion
Explore Yield, Push, Reach, Grasp and Pull developmentally, experientially and clinically, including healthy function, underuse, overuse and compensation.
Learn to distinguish Yield from collapse, Push from rigidity, Reach from panic and Grasp from gripping.
Because two clients can look similar from the outside and need very different things.
See how the movements lean on and build upon one another, and why an intervention may not be wrong, but may be asking for a capacity the client does not have access to yet.
Use clinical questions, therapist language and titrated somatic experiments that connect what you are seeing to the larger treatment arc.
Because the therapist has a body too.
You will explore how your own relationship to these movements shapes what you notice, what you facilitate and what you may ask of a client too quickly.
You will not only listen to me teach the movements.
We will bring them into actual cases, looking at what the client did, what you noticed, where you lost the thread and which clinical directions you are deciding between.
This is where the framework begins to live in your hands.
What changes
You are not only learning five movements. You are developing a different way of seeing, thinking and moving as a therapist.
A masterclass can introduce you to the map.
This four-week immersion gives us time to bring that map into actual cases, test what you think you are seeing and refine how you choose the work.
This is when you can go deeper, and it holds, because what developed was capacity, not compliance.
This is when the client you have been blocked with for two months finally has the breakthrough you could feel was just beneath the surface.
This is when your treatment planning becomes more refined, nuanced and exact.
You are no longer only reaching for something else to try.
You know what you are trying to develop, and why.
And you have language you can use with her, so she understands what she is moving through and what becomes available when she can hold it.
And by Christmas, you are already seeing the shifts from the work you began here.
The client who always gave the boundary away may begin holding it while someone is disappointed.
The client who spent her life caring for everyone else may begin receiving support without disappearing into the other person.
The client who understood everything but changed nothing may begin taking an experience in deeply enough for it to shape what she does next.
Because these are not simply movements inside a therapy session.
They become the architecture of a different kind of life.
When a client can receive support, hold an edge, move toward what she wants, take hold of it and bring it in, she is not only changing a pattern. She is changing the identity she inhabits, and the life she believes is possible.
And she stays for the whole arc of it, because she trusts you, she trusts the frame of the work, and she is beginning to trust herself.
And you become a different therapist, too.
Clearer in what you see.
More precise in what you choose.
And more trusting of how you move inside the work.
And it does not stay inside your sessions. When you are this clear about what you are working with, people notice. Colleagues ask how you saw it. Referrals arrive for the cases nobody else could place. You are invited into the rooms where the harder work happens.
None of that is the point. All of it tends to follow.
The therapist is part of the movement, too.
There is not a professional nervous system
and a personal one.
Study Yield and you will meet your own relationship to being held.
Push will show up in the edges you hold and the ones you give away.
Reach will show up in what you want and what you stop yourself from wanting.
Grasp and Pull will show up in what you can take hold of, receive and actually allow to change you.
The way you relate to a movement shapes what you notice, what you miss and what you may ask a client to do too quickly.
That is why this immersion is experiential, not only conceptual.
The more intimately you know a movement, the more precisely you can recognize 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.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
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
In their own words
One therapist, after the Movement Vocabulary workshop.
About
I’m Esther Goldstein.
I am 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 and attachment work into a more cohesive clinical map.
I built this as a four-week immersion because I did not want to introduce you to five movements and then send you away to figure out how to use them alone.
I want us inside the work long enough to learn the movements, bring them into actual cases and allow the framework to become part of how you see and practice.
The Somatic Movement Vocabulary Immersion
The first training, Yield, has already been completed. You will receive immediate access when you join.
$599
Includes the full immersion, immediate access to Yield and every recording, and the October implementation call.
Join the Somatic Movement Vocabulary Immersion
See you inside,
Esther
P.S. If you have already taken one of my Movement Vocabulary masterclasses, check your email for your private $97 coupon, which brings the immersion to $502.
New to Movement Vocabulary? The Hidden Movements That Change Therapy is the masterclass that introduces the five movements. Watch the replay here.