Figure 33.1 The Mobility Gradient (Caldwell, 2017, p. 57)
Filling out the movement continuum in clinical practice
Christine Caldwell
To em-body, the prefix em connoting ‘to cause to be in or make’, could be seen as a growing into the body, or coming into oneself. To embody implies a conscious attention to and identification with one’s physical self, but it can also include the ability to non-judgmentally reflect on one’s body, to coordinate functions such as thinking with feeling, sensing, and moving, and to listen to and appreciate the signals generated by the body as relevant, usable, and meaningful. From this perspective, consciously working with such processes as breathing, sensing, feeling, and most importantly moving, can be seen as the royal road to an embodied life.
Living bodies are defined partly by their ability to move under their own power, whether that movement is cellular, systemic, or locomotor (Hanna, 1987; Sheets-Johnstone, 1999). Because of this, the field of biology has long studied movement, starting with single celled organisms and ending with primates, in a phylogenetic progression. Movement is also studied ontogenetically, from zygotes and the prenatal time, to a fully-grown adult (Fentress, 1986). Biology tends to classify both phylogenetic and ontogenetic movement along a mobility gradient, from autonomic to volitional (Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder, 1998). In wildlife biology, for instance, the mobility gradient is used to map the intricacies of animal interactions, seen as non-verbal communications, and these animal ‘dances’ are notated and organized to an extremely sophisticated level (Golani, 1992; Fentress, 1986).
Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT), because of its locomotor roots, carefully attends to a client’s body when they produce observable movement, leaving autonomic and metabolic motions to biology and medicine, much like the rest of modern Western culture. It also tends to focus more on volitional movement, likely because of its artistic roots in dance. All dance therapists, for instance, need to extensively study one or more elaborate movement observation and analysis systems, such as those associated with Laban, Kestenberg, and Bartenieff (Payne, 1992).
This tendency to attend to only part of the movement continuum may be quite sensible, as it has long been known that there is a strong correlation between volitional movement and emotion, motivation, thought, trauma, and self-regulation, all the stuff of psychotherapy (Damasio, 1999; Fosha, 2000; Ogden and Fisher, 2015). The field of body psychotherapy (BP), on the other hand, attends to gross motor movement on a less sophisticated level, but has a history of including autonomic muscle movements such as reflexes, as well as cellular, organ, and fluid movement, linking them with psychological and emotional states (Aposhyan, 1999; Heller, 2012, 2016; Keleman, 1985; Tantia, 2015). For instance, BP tends to value the intricacies of conscious breathing, and by noting how both autonomic and volitional breathing affects cells, tissues, organs, and systems as well as emotional and psychological states, BP bridges the small to the large motions of the body into a psychosomatic whole (Caldwell and Victoria, 2011). Clinical neuroscience also weighs in on the micro level, seeing the movement of enzymes, hormones, and neurotransmitters as the flow of both conscious and unconscious processing, linking them to physical and psychological health and illness (Cozolino, 2010; Pert, 1997; Porges, 2011).
This chapter will create an argument and a plan for unifying the smaller, subtler, and more unconscious movements of the body with the intricacies of its large, locomotor actions, as a way to understand embodiment and to bridge the theory and practice of both DMT and BP. Based in biology, the architecture of this bridge will involve a reworking of biology’s mobility gradient in order to apply it to embodiment. Because larger, more conscious and observable movements have been integrated into both fields, this chapter will focus more on the micromovements that can be observed all along the Mobility Gradient (MG) (Caldwell, 2017). Micromovements are defined as small, brief, barely observable movements that can occur throughout the body. They often show up during moments of transition, stress, relational contact, or emotion. They are largely untracked and below conscious awareness but can with attention be consciously felt. Micromovements can also be seen as movement signals; communication attempts that have for a variety of reasons been relegated to a barely visible form.
To begin, the author proposes a Mobility Gradient that can be applied to both theoretically and practically any form of psychotherapy that sees movement as significant. This can comprise the client’s motions, the therapist’s movements, and the largely implicit dance of movement between client and therapist. While related to biology’s mobility gradient, it borrows from various neuroscience, DMT, and BP traditions in order to create clinical coherency. For instance, in the field of BP, Totton (2005) has noted that body psychotherapists are trained to track, attune to, and make use of autonomic nervous system states both in themselves and their clients. Many body-centered psychotherapists, especially those that work with trauma, are alert to client histories where their body wanted to move to act on emotions or instincts, but for reasons of safety and survival they inhibited the motion (Fogel, 2009; Levine, 1997; Ogden and Fisher, 2015). This immobilization response can become habitual, with micromovements becoming the only hint at what action responses are being suppressed. Thoughts and emotions are also involved. Aposhyan (1999) asserts ‘any thought also results in at least minute muscular responses, evidencing the body’s compulsion to somehow do the thought’ (p. 22). Keleman (1985) has devoted much of his attention to the movement of fluids, cells, tissues, and organs in the body, and how these movements literally create the shape, overall motility, and identity of a person. It is because these many fields already acknowledge and include micromovements in their clinical theory that we can feel more confident that our discipline is speaking to some important therapeutic utility. The next section will briefly describe the MG, and subsequent sections will examine therapeutic applications of micromovements along the gradient (see Figure 33.1).
From left to right, this reworked Mobility Gradient begins with Immobility, which has been shown to be crucial to our understanding of trauma responses (Levine, 1997; Ogden and Fisher, 2015; Porges, 2011). While there is still controversy about the details of the Immobility Response, the author asserts that there are two types of immobility. The first is a freeze, involving a simultaneous contraction of agonist and antagonist muscles such that high tension is experienced but no overt movement is produced; this state is typically accompanied by high sympathetic nervous system arousal. The second form of immobility is a faint, a powerful loss of muscle tone such that consciousness is compromised; it involves a dorsal vagal response and excessive parasympathetic nervous system dominance. While the Immobility Response is not necessarily pathological, various trauma professionals has been alert to the clinical significance of what lies underneath a client’s use of very high or low tone to produce as little movement as possible. Also, important to note is that the word immobility is relative. When we include micromovements in our theoretical frame, it becomes obvious that there is no true immobility short of death. Another way to language this is that there are micromovements present even in immobility responses.
Figure 33.1 The Mobility Gradient (Caldwell, 2017, p. 57)
Next along the Mobility Gradient is Reflexes. Inherited and hard-wired, and from simple to complex, reflexes underlie, predate, and support all complex movement, and are associated with maintaining bodily integrity. Psychotherapies that work with reflex movement include those associated with Body-Mind Centering (Aposhyan, 1999; Hartley, 1995), with trauma (Levine, 1997; Ogden and Fisher, 2015), and with developmental movement (Frank, 2001; Marcher and Fich, 2010). In these cases, conscious movement that cooperates with and sequences the instinctual needs of reflexes can be critically important.
The next level of movement involves Motor Plans. Motor Plans are instinctual and motivationally based and comprise a set of basic movement patterns inherited by all species, such as flying in birds and walking in humans. They complement our structural body plan, yet need to be practiced in order to accomplish, perfect, and be built upon. They often involve a combining, coordinating, and alternation of complex reflexes (like flexion followed by extension) so that basic and fairly stereotypical motions such as pushing, reaching, grasping, pulling, and yielding can occur. Body-Mind Centering clinicians see these movements as crucial, associating them with organismic satisfaction, and working with clients to integrate them into more complex processes (Bainbridge Cohen, 1993; Hartley, 1995). In other body-centred psychotherapies, clinicians may not speak about motor plans, but they frequently use them. As anyone who has ever worked with a client who is reaching out or pushing away can attest, these motions have powerful symbolic and psychological meaning, and often are paired with emotional processing.
Building on Motor Plans, the next level of the gradient sequences to Non-Verbal Communication, where developmentally the infant begins to experience a connection between how they move and how their caregivers respond to them, such that they begin to use movement and sound as a communicative signal (literally their first language), and gradually become aware of and sensitive to the signals of others (Frank and LaBarre, 2011). This level of movement can be easily paired to attachment theory as well as to the implicit exchanges in the therapeutic relationship. Mary Main, one of the founders of attachment theory, was fascinated by ‘the organization of the physical movements of an infant’s body with respect to that of the parent’ (Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy, 1985, p. 93). Trevarthen called these movement pas de deux’s ‘protoconversations’ or action dialogues, and noted that the caregiver and secure infant were not only matching their movements, but were sharing inner states (1998). These communicative movements not only involve physical practice and trial and error, they are also contingent upon and crafted in relationship to a child’s caregivers. They are powerfully interwoven with relational imprints, as well as the ‘stance of the self towards experience’ (Wallin, 2007, p. 1), or how we construct meaning from our experience.
When movement becomes communicative and relational as well as functional, it forms the basis of the next level of the Mobility Gradient, that of Attunement. At this level, movement is not only related to the ability to communicate, but to the capacity to feel and form a deep emotional connection to oneself, others, and the world. In non-verbal communication we form a sense that we can understand and be understood by others by shaping our sounds and movements in deliberate ways, ways that often become fairly automatic and even implicit with reinforcement. In attunement, this automaticity can be lessened, and the sophistication of movement increases, often becoming less predictable because it is much more contingent on present moment circumstances. The ability to use one’s bodily movement to deliberately attune and mis-attune involves a sensitive use of time, space, energy and rhythm as the body flows into and out of contact with elements of inner and outer experience. This ability may predict such therapeutic milestones as a culturally relevant locus of control, and a sense of empowerment and embodiment.
A clinical question arising from this location on the MG might ask what happens to movements during mis-attunements. Answering this question requires further study, but developmental psychology provides us with some hints. Allan Schore (1994, 2012) and his colleagues have found that there may be a gendered quality to an infant’s response to caregiver mis-attunement, such that boys use their body to protest, while girls tend to get involved with other objects, such as toys. While gender binaries are suspect, and cultural practices that solidify gender roles have been shown to be implicitly enacted and internalized starting from birth, this finding may nonetheless show that infants have multiple means of dealing somatically with mis-attunements. These researchers have also noted that infant responses to mis-attunement often occur in stages, starting with one strategy as mis-attunement begins, and switching to others when it persists. Later stage strategies often involve a kind of bodily ‘giving up’ on the relationship. Perhaps this involves a giving up on one’s confidence that one’s body signals will be seen and interpreted properly.
It has also been strongly asserted by Schore and others that mis-attunements are normal and that mis-attunements allow the caregiver to model relational repair. The ability to both verbally and non-verbally mend a relational rift may be just as important a skill to learn as the ability to attune, they note. These findings are often applied to the therapist/client relationship, noting that the non-verbal exchanges between them mimic and often directly enact relational repair and skill-building (Fosha, 2000; Schore, 2012). Clinically, this opens up a rich and complex discussion about how a therapist might use their body as a therapeutic tool, by means of movements that both attune and mis-attune to the client deliberately, for therapeutic effect.
The last level on the Mobility Gradient is called Originality. This level of movement occurs when there are minimal constraints on what must occur behaviourly, and when movement sequences are spontaneous and in the moment. This type of behaviour is often seen in artistic moments as well as play activities. The author has in other venues used the word ‘bodyfulness’ for this end of the mobility gradient, noting that bodyfulness can be seen as a step beyond embodiment, into a kind of embodied spirituality:
I would define embodiment as awareness of and attentive participation with the body’s states and actions. Bodyfulness begins when the embodied self is held in a conscious, contemplative environment, coupled with a nonjudgmental engagement with bodily processes, an acceptance and appreciation of one’s bodily nature, and an ethical and aesthetic orientation towards taking right actions so that a lessening of suffering and an increase in human potential may emerge.
(Caldwell, 2014, p. 73)
From the perspective of the Mobility Gradient and the micromovements imbedded within all levels of it, creativity or spirituality are not a crowning achievement, but rather are ingredients in the overall ability to oscillate along the continuum as circumstances and identities dictate. Creativity emerges from immobilities, reflexes, and motor plans just as much as non-verbal communications, attunements, and originalities.
The following characteristics exemplify the Mobility Gradient, and allow us, in the next section, to overlay micromovements onto the gradient as a way to construct clinical strategies:
Psychologists, from Freud and James onwards, have noted micromovements and seen them as relevant, while failing to develop a comprehensive practice that overtly includes them. For purposes of developing a clinical frame, a micromovement is here defined as a barely observable motion, accomplished with effort or the release of effort that constitutes a non-conscious or minimally conscious signal as to a person’s status on the Mobility Gradient. They are individualistic, especially on the right side of the MG, and signal psychological as well as physiological status. Micromovements occur in moments of quiet in the body, as well as embed within large, whole body actions. Micromovements at the periphery of the body may hold less emotional charge than those in the core of the body, but this remains to be researched.
For example, a slight widening of the eyes, or a subtle slump of the spine may signal an immobility response. Immobility micromovements tend to initiate stillness, whether freezing or fainting. A small twitch at the base of the skull or slight curling of the fingers, may point to a reflex. These micromovements are usually flexions or extensions as well as orienting responses that are often observed when memories of sudden threats to bodily integrity arise, such as falling or being hit, etc. Of particular significance is when paired reflexes, such as flexing and extending, are out of balance, so that one dominates over the other and pulls the body into distorted shapes. A barely observable widening of the chest may be a nascent motor plan.
These micromovements look like tiny pushes, reaches, graspings, pulls, etc., that are related to motivational states such as thirst, hunger, or sex, or to organizing locomotion towards or away from something or someone desired or feared. A purse at the mouth, or a lengthening of the index finger may be the leading edge of a non-verbal communication attempt. Non-verbal communication micromovements often involve minute shifts of posture, gesture, eye gaze, head tilt, etc. that are seen around the edges of speech, or in relational contact. A minimal lean forward could signal an attunement action. Attunement micromovements use momentary shifts of timing, rhythm, space, and effort to match or synchronize self to self and/or other. And a tiny whole-body wiggle or a twitch at the corner of the mouth could be a play signal that presages originality. Originality micromovements contain small signals of readiness to play, invitations to play, and/or spontaneous motions that are done solely for the pleasure of doing them.
It is important to stress how small these movements can be. It is very easy to miss them completely in the traffic noise of larger gestural and locomotor movements. In fact, our non-conscious or barely conscious tracking of these micromovements may be how we experience our intuition as therapists. Rather than intuition being seen as some ill-defined sixth sense, we may be able to support what researchers such as Ekman and Rosenberg (1997), Hall (1981), and Montague and Matson (1979) have posited; that our intuition is driven by an attuned, subtle reading of another’s micromovements, especially those in the face, and those related to emotion and arousal. Because many micromovements are strongly related to affect and intention, the conscious inclusion of micromovements may be the royal road to experiential processing in psychotherapy, processing that is based in what the client really feels rather than what they think they should feel or do.
An interesting question is why micromovements are not more visible. One way to think about this question is through the lens of post-modern identity theory, which holds that we are multiple selves and hold multiple identities, all of which express their own narratives (Atkins and Mackensie, 2008). These narratives are embodied and moved as well as being verbally expressed, yet we privilege some of these narratives while we suppress or oppress others (Caldwell, 2016). It is the privileged narratives that live in gross motor actions, where they can be seen by others and reinforced. The marginalized aspects of our identity remain in the shadows, where the movement expressions of these narratives can only peek out in small ways, much like a verbal ‘Freudian slip’. In any system of oppression, it is not safe to express oneself honestly, so these incipient movements stay hidden and un-integrated; when evoked they result in barely discernable actions that can tell a vastly different narrative than the more visible aspects of identity. Micromovements in this sense represent defended against, suppressed, and affect-laden material that can be easily ignored, yet continually reasserts itself, and that any psychotherapy longs to access.
Clinically, micromovements can be seen as movement impulses that need attention and support to develop into movement sequences. They are body whispers that could, with assistance, become full, rich body narratives. In the authors work, called the Moving Cycle, they are focused on and gently centralized, then supported to develop at their own pace, and in their own way. This ability to tell the body’s stories, its remembrances, its sorrows and its pleasures in its own original language system – movement – without having to be translated into verbal language systems that have their own, often distorting interpretations, may be one of the finest ways that body-centred psychotherapies can operate.
Support for this movement sequencing comes from therapist attention and bodily attunement, along with the client’s high quality, focused attention. The author suggests that the therapist avoid getting into the business of interpreting and diagnosing micromovements. For one thing, it can be an abuse of power on our part (Caldwell, 2013). For another, interpretation by the therapist is clinically unnecessary, as the therapeutic power of micromovements lies in their ability to become conscious, held in non-judgmental attention, and supported to tell their story on their own terms. Meaning-making comes afterwards, at the client’s direction, and as a by-product of the lived experience of the session.
Micromovements also develop into body narratives by aligning with their tendency to oscillate. They often organize in waves of effort and the release of effort (work and rest). They also respond well to being held in a balance between moving, breathing, and sensing, what the author calls The Therapeutic Triangle. In this framework, the therapist helps the client to self-regulate by making sure that breathing supports moving. If we move more than we breathe we dis-regulate due to low oxygen levels. If we breathe more than we move, we dis-regulate due to too much oxygen. If we are not tracking our sensations we do not know our current status, and therefore cannot regulate it. It is not an issue of how much we breathe and move and sense/feel, but how these three critical systems work together for self-regulation.
Within a session, the first task is to identify micromovements, gently and without interpretation. The therapist or the client will likely see multiple micromovements and must use clinical judgment as to which ones are more relevant at the moment. Because micromovements often signal marginalized aspects of a client’s identity, they are often defended against, so it is extremely important that the therapist note them to the client in a friendly, open, and curious way. With practice, the client can identify many of his or her own micromovements. If the client assents, both individuals then focus on the small movement, giving it high quality attention, similar to the Focusing practice developed by Eugene Gendlin (Weiser Cornell, 2013) or Kurtz’s Hakomi mindfulness (Weiss, Johanson, and Monda, 2015). This alters consciousness in ways that access the right hemisphere, relax left hemisphere storylines, and focus attention in the present moment.
Next, the therapist helps the client to find associations (rather than explanations) to the movement. Is there an image, a sound, a sensation, an emotion, a memory that comes up when the movement is done deliberately? The association is braided into the embodied experience of moving, so that the client can hold right hemisphere-based memories in their attention while moving. Often this combining of micromovements with their associations will begin to organize a more coherent movement impulse, such as a push, an upper body extension, or a playful grin. The impulse is then nurtured and allowed to carefully sequence and develop on its own, with support rather than direction from the therapist. This allows macromovement to be integrated with the micro in a safe and accepting environment, in the crucible of right hemisphere processing.
It may be useful to consciously repeat the micromovement, to play with its shape and size, transfer it to a less threatening part of the body, let the whole body do the motion, or to intensify the action. In any of these cases, the movement is experimented with so that it can be supported to more fully tell its story. It may be that classic forms of BP called this sequencing a discharge, or it could also be seen in DMT as an enactment (Koch and Fischman, 2011), but from a pragmatic standpoint the movement is encouraged to develop into a full, accurate, and visible expression. It does not involve ‘getting an emotion out’, as that makes the emotion more important than the body story. Emotion is felt, certainly, but the feeling is used to direct and inspire the movement rather than rule over it, a hallmark of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995).
It is important to once again emphasize that the therapist is not making assumptions about the micromovements. On a micro level, movement is NOT predictable, coherent, or obedient to therapeutic interpretation. It is highly symbolic, affect-laden, and right-hemisphere dominant, and needs its own authority to emerge, be supported, and to begin to speak through the moving body. In terms of the movement itself, again, more is not necessarily better. The movement is supported to have its own shape, size, rhythm, and effort patterns, ones that accurately tell the body story rather than develop into a demonstration of what the therapist thinks is healthier. Golani (1992) notes, for instance, that there is a difference in movement repertoire between two individuals when there is a difference of status between them. A high status person has a greater range of movement than a lower status person, and an individual’s mobility decreases in the presence of a higher status individual as well as becoming earlier developmentally. This important assertion may have implications for how therapists understand their role in the relationship, and how they understand how dominance, hierarchy, and privilege can constrain client movement due to the inherent power differential in the therapeutic relationship as well as oppressive social forces. It will be important to research and write about the micromovement exchanges between the therapist and client; to see them as vital to an attuned and secure relationship, as well as a potential source of enacting bias and privilege.
As a movement sequence emerges and organizes and the session comes to a close, the therapist assists the client to appreciate and care for the nascent identity statements embedded in the motions. The end of the session involves a co-creation of ways to integrate the movement sequence, the new identity statements, and the derived client-centered meanings, into daily life. Thus, the client can embody the session.
Micromovements form the tip of an intrapsychic as well as an interpersonal iceberg, and as such can be leveraged for embodiment purposes in any body-centred psychotherapy. Micromovement work is currently specialized towards working with individuals and needs development in order to be applied to group formats. By integrating micromovements into clinical practice, and by appreciating their relationship to the client’s status on the mobility gradient, body-centred healing can be enriched.
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