1. Key skills: Tracking and body reading

Tracking and body reading are two skills essential to sensorimotor psychotherapy work.

Body reading, very simply, is looking at the structure and the movement of the body that is characteristic for the person.

One of my favorite things still to do with some of my friends and colleagues is to go to a mall and watch bodies – watch how everybody moves so differently.

In sensorimotor psychotherapy, with body reading, we can see the record of the history in a person’s movement and gait – the way they hold their head and shoulders. There are typical gestures that they use. So that is body reading.

Tracking is simply tracking the moment-by-moment changes in the body through the session. In fact, Beatrice Beebe has broken this down with babies – this microsecond tracking of a baby’s response to the mother. She has all that on film, which is just exquisite to see.

We want to train ourselves to do that in therapy because we’re looking at how the body reflects and sustains whatever difficulties the client is having. (p. 5 in your transcript)

2. Not your typical physical therapy

Dr. Ogden shares exercises that can help patients improve their physical and psychological state.

I had a patient who is a very well-known author, and he had a crisis – his parents passed away and he got a divorce all within a year; t was in very, very quick succession.

He had a posture that was kind of pulled in and down, and as he talked about his history and his losses, you could see just a slight exaggeration of that pattern.

We know that that is the presence of the past in the now – it is his history that is re-stimulated by his current events. But much of his old history had to do with very implicit memories that he couldn’t possibly remember because it happened when he was a baby.

He was just going through his days weeping and feeling the loss. As we worked together, the more he talked about it, the more he got into his hunched-over pattern. The hunch and the loss of postural integrity showed that his spine did not support him.

Let’s call this person Bill. He had lost his core, and what is so important about that in terms of the body, is that our spine is the core of our body. If we have a flexible but sturdy and erect spine, it provides the axis around which all movement can happen.

We see this in babies – how they set up so straight – they have that postural integrity that people like Bill lose over time.

We had to work with strengthening the core of his body so that he could have a home that he felt was solid in his own body, rather than just this reflection of despair that is very physical – it’s not just psychological.

So we worked in a couple of ways. First, we worked with what I call pushing actions – if you push from your back, your spine will start to lengthen.

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