For experienced trauma therapists · Live online
The Somatic
Movement Vocabulary
Immersion
An in-depth exploration of Yield, Push, Reach, Grasp and Pull, and how these five 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 understand the pattern completely, and still be unable to move differently when it matters.
Thursdays in September
12–1 PM ET
Come live or watch the recordings
$599 for the recordings later
You are already good at this work.
You can find the attachment wound. You can meet the protective part. You can name the belief, build the resource and understand how the past is organizing the present.
And you want the work to reach further.
You want to understand what is happening when a client has insight, language, awareness, and still cannot do something different inside her relationships, choices and life.
But right now
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 the experience in deeply enough for it to stay.
You are not missing the pattern.
You may be seeing the pattern without yet seeing the movement organizing it.
The reason
Trauma does not only leave a story. It can leave an organization.
We have been trained to work skillfully with what happened, the meaning a client made of it, the beliefs and protective strategies that developed, and the patterns that followed.
But there is another layer of information available to us:
movement.
The movements a person can access, and the ones that became difficult, dangerous or unavailable, begin shaping what she can actually do.
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?
Over time, these are not small questions.
A client who cannot Yield may become the one who holds everything together.
A client who cannot Push may build a life around avoiding the cost of someone else’s disappointment.
A client whose Reach repeatedly went unanswered may stop asking, stop risking and eventually call herself independent.
These movements do not only shape what happens in a session. They can become part of the architecture of a life.
And when you can see the movement underneath the pattern, you gain another level of clinical visibility. The question becomes:
What movement is unavailable here? What interrupted it? What developed in its place? And what may need to develop first before something different can actually hold?
Inside the immersion
Over four weeks, we will:
Yield, Push, Reach, Grasp and Pull, developmentally, experientially and clinically.
The healthy function of each movement, and how missing, underused, overused and compensated movement can appear in the therapy room.
What can look similar from the outside: Yield from collapse, Push from rigidity, Reach from panic and Grasp from gripping.
How the movements depend upon one another, and why the intervention you are considering may not be wrong, but may be asking for a capacity the client does not have yet.
How movement becomes pattern, pattern becomes identity, and identity begins shaping the relationships and choices a client believes are available to her.
Therapist language, clinical questions and titrated somatic experiments that can be brought back into case conceptualization and the larger treatment arc.
Because the therapist has a body too, and the more intimately you know a movement, the more precisely you can recognize it in someone else.
You will leave with
Greater clinical visibility
into what may be sustaining a repeated pattern even when the client already understands it.
Sharper case conceptualization
about what may need to develop before an intervention can actually hold.
More discernment
about when to facilitate a movement and when to build an earlier capacity, and practice at the hardest distinction in this work: genuine new possibility, or performance.
Precise questions, language and somatic experiments
you can integrate into your existing work without turning movement into another isolated technique.
A more nuanced understanding of your clients’ range
not simply whether they need “more Yield” or “more Push,” but what movements are actually available to them in the moments that matter.
A deeper relationship to your own movement vocabulary
and how it shapes the therapist, leader and person you are becoming.
You will not leave knowing everything there is to know about the satisfaction cycle. Four classes is four hours. You will leave seeing more, and with somewhere new to look.
The goal is not to make someone a “Yield person” or a “Push person.”
The goal is flexibility.
- To Yield without disappearing.
- To Push without losing connection.
- To Reach without abandoning yourself.
- To Grasp without gripping.
- To Pull in what you receive deeply enough to let it matter.
Because when a movement becomes genuinely available, a person has an option she did not have before.
And the choices a person can reach for are the ones that eventually become a life.
What this changes
What we are building is psychological flexibility. Range, in the moments that ask for it.
When a client can feel a movement rather than only understand it, buy-in stops being something you have to build with explanation. She notices for herself that she cannot let her weight rest anywhere, and the work becomes hers rather than yours.
You sequence by capacity rather than by protocol. Which movement first, what has to develop before it can hold, and what you are not going to ask for yet. Your treatment plan gains an order it did not have.
Range does not stay inside the therapy hour. It shows up in what a client can ask for, what she can hold when someone is disappointed, who she lets close, and the work she believes she is allowed to want.
And it does not stay in the therapy room
There is not a professional nervous system and a personal one.
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 will show up in what you want, what you ask for and what you stop yourself from wanting. Grasp will show up in whether you can take hold of what becomes available. Pull will show up in what you can actually receive and let change you.
And it shows up outside the room. In how you lead, in what you agree to on a Monday, in how you let yourself be loved, in what you are willing to want out loud.
This is why the immersion is experiential and not only conceptual. Not so that four weeks becomes personal development, but because the way you hold a client is the way you hold everything, and the more intimately you know a movement, the more precisely you can see it in someone else.
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
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 and attachment work into a more cohesive clinical map, so they can see more clearly what is organizing the work and make more precise decisions about what to do next.
Why I built this
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 knew where the work was stuck and what might need to develop next.
I built the immersion because learning the five words was never the hard part. Learning to work with them was, and that is not something a single class can do.
The Somatic Movement Vocabulary Immersion
Join the Somatic Movement Vocabulary Immersion
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