| Attachment, the Body, and Psychotherapy |
Supervision groups looking at attachment and body presentation
As therapists, we constantly strive to understand better what is happening in the consulting room as we aim to help out patient or client more about and function better in their relational and work lives. By using the insights of Attachment Theory and their awareness of the body, we therapists can facilitate a more embodied and enlivening therapeutic relationship, leading to livelier, happier patients.
Recent research in Attachment Theory and neuropsychology substantiate our common-sense understanding of the importance of on-going somatic experience in healthy development. Through our lives, attachment is a bodily experience, both in terms of actual contact and touch, and also in terms of how we talk about ourselves. Attachment Theory may explain for example the degree to which we seek and give comfort, how we see and interact with others, and how we let people interact with us, but does not say much about somatic experience. In terms of the body, different psychotherapeutic techniques either proscribe contact and often ignore awareness of both the patient’s and the therapist’s body, or prescribe active interventions which do not necessarily suit either person in the therapeutic encounter.
All psychotherapists - psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and humanistic – are welcome to use there groups to explore the inter-play of object relations and attachment theories with body psychotherapy and verbal therapeutic approaches to see how our patients/clients relate to us and to the significant people in their lives through their attachment patterns and bodily presentations.
Led by John Andrew Miller
Registered as both a psychoanalytic and an integrative psychotherapist with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, I bring twenty-four years experience of supervising psychotherapists and other helping professionals. As well as having a thriving private practice, I have undertaken teaching Comparative Psychotherapies and body psychotherapy, academic validations, and consultancy in continuous professional development for several training programmes. I am a member of the International Attachment Network [UK], the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, the International Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, and the British Association of Analytical Body Psychotherapists.
JOHN ANDREW MILLER is a member of IAN and also a member of the monthly Supervision Group run from Fairbridge Road
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