What is it about?
During the time of COVID-19, many therapists tried to help with the trauma and suffering caused by lockdowns and loss of life. Dance movement therapy is a nonverbal, symbolic way of helping people use creativity, rhythm and attunement to cope with trauma and loss, and can be an effective means for personal and community transformation. During COVID-19, two dance therapists and mental health professions from the United States and China created Zoom Tool Kits that were used on a hotline in China and internationally to express grief and recover resilience. Here we explain those efforts to use dance movement therapy for trauma recovery.
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Why is it important?
The arrival of the coronavirus, with lightning speed, upended our worlds. We face death, chaos and instability. We cannot flee; we freeze. Our bodies feel the shock and register emotions of “unspeakable terror” (Van der Kolk, 2015). While talk therapies help re-orient and provide an avenue for expression, many people facing trauma cannot express it verbally. We need a form of therapy that can awaken the life force, stabilize and re-balance participants. We need a form of therapy that helps awaken emotions in the body, express them through movement and symbol, integrating cognitive naming with experience. We need a form of therapy that can help people connect through rhythm and attunement, and move into higher forms of resilience, creativity, and transformation. We believe that dance movement therapy can do this (American Dance Therapy Association [ADTA], 2009). Dance movement therapy can cross cultures, connecting through rhythm and archetypal forms such as circle dances (Serlin, 1993; Bella & Serlin, 2013). During this pandemic, we have found that an existential/humanistic approach can help people deal with issues of death, loneliness, identity, and meaning (Schneider & May, 1995). Together, an existential/humanistic approach with the rhythmic attunement of dance movement therapy can address traumatic issues that live in the body.
Perspectives
The existential/humanistic approach we use is from our Whole Person Dance Psychotherapy Training Program where students learn The Art of Embodiment. During this training, students learn about the language of movement (von Laban, 2003), about their own movement style, and about expressing and working through emotions in the body. The training comes from the tradition of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) (Serlin, 2010), while the students are also being trained in the Yalom Group Psychotherapy (Yalom, 1980) model and have basic counseling skills. The integration of the two is called Kin Aesthetic Imagining (KI) (Serlin, 1996), an integration of existential and humanistic psychology (Schneider & May, 1995) perspective with DMT methods (ADTA, 2009). Ilene Serlin was asked to supervise a group of psychologists from Beijing on their hotline consultations. Their focus had been on case presentations; suddenly the group faced a new challenge, they were asked to supervise a group of counselors who were serving on the hotline. The supervisors told Serlin that they were also facing their own exhaustion, caregiver burnout, and their own domestic and work challenges. The psychologists reported that callers on the hotline were full of anxiety. Families were taking their panic and fear out on each other, and domestic violence was spiking. One said that at her university each caller had only a one-half hour to talk, and there was no continuity between calls. This situation, therefore, called for a short-term crisis model; the first step being to stabilize and hold out hope for the caller. What Could Help in Such a Short Amount of Time? We created a 15-minute videotape for the supervisors that the hotline callers could see on their phones. First, the video helped the psychologists with their own compassion fatigue and fears. Second, it helped callers begin to feel the strength and support to begin to let their bodies and emotions come alive again. Discerning, naming, and expressing their emotions helped them move through places where they were stuck as they reached out into space and toward each other.
Ilene Serlin
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This page is a summary of: Dance Movement Therapy in the Time of COVID-19, Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, August 2022, Compuscript, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.15212/caet/2022/8/6.
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