Depth Movement Therapy with Difficult-to-Reach children those on the autism spectrum or with other communication problems

I work individually with children and their families, as well as offering in-service training for service providers.
The aims of the work are to support the child’s recognition that:
  1.    I have a body!
  2.    My movement has meaning that can be recognized.
  3.    I can choose to do things, to start, and to stop actions.
  4.    I can make my movement bigger, smaller, faster, slower.
  5.    I can move alongside someone else.
  6.    I can be creative!
  7.    I can feel safe in my body and in the space.
  8.    I can see and be seen.
  9.    I can receive your presence, as well as my own.
  10.    We can discover a shared language for communicating in movement.
  11.    I can experience being in the flow of time, I can enjoy different rhythms and pauses.
  12.    We can have a dialogue in movement, sounds, song and words.
I work on the premise that movement is inherently meaningful. Through movement communication, children can begin to express their aliveness and their relatedness, their thoughts and feelings. Because each child is unique, I discover how to enter into dialogue by close attention to what I experience in the child’s nonverbal expression. This requires listening with my body and heart as well as my mind and it requires patience not to begin from ‘doing’. I then gently and slowly enter the qualities of the child’s particular world of isolation. I feel the emotional atmosphere, and in response, I may move, make sound, speak and/or sing to attune to the child’s world. The child will recognize that s/he is being ‘received’. From that spark, the channel of communication opens, and new choices and pathways become possible.