TRAINING
Friday-Sunday
July 10-12, 2026
9-4:00pm
In this module, participants will immerse themselves in the foundational Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) principle that movement is both the primary expression of the self and a primary pathway to healing. From a DMT lens, trauma is understood as an experience that disrupts the innate, integrated flow between sensation, feeling, thought, and action. This disruption becomes embedded in the body as a constricted movement repertoire, limiting an individual’s expressive range, relational capacity, and sense of bodily autonomy.
Participants will learn to see the body as the living archive of personal history. Trauma may manifest in movement as dissociation (absence/disconnection from movement), stereotypical patterns (fixed, repetitive movements), or disorganization in effort and spatial dynamics. The core of DMT trauma work is not about re-enacting the traumatic event, but about re-establishing a safe and trusting relationship with one’s own moving body.
Through the therapeutic movement relationship, the DMT therapist uses kinesthetic empathy, mirroring, and attunement to support the client in accessing, expanding, and ultimately transforming their internal movement landscape. This process helps to rebuild a coherent somatic narrative, restore choice and agency in movement, and cultivate new, resilient patterns that foster regulation, expression, and empowerment.
“Wendy is deeply invested in this work, her expertise in the material is so well presented in her pedagogoy. The quality of the content is superb, we need more practitioners learning this work.” — Inertia D. Performance Artist and MFT
Somatic Skills
Kinesthetic Empathy & Attunement
Nonverbal Tracking & Assessment
Facilitating the Movement Continuum
Witnessing and Validating Embodied Metaphor
Co-Regulation through Rhythmic Synchrony
Expanding the Movement Repertoire
Supporting Embodied Empowerment & Agency
Learning Objectives
1. Articulate how trauma impacts the individual’s movement repertoire and therapeutic movement relationship, using core DMT frameworks to describe the manifestations of constriction, dissociation, and dysregulation.
2. Employ kinesthetic empathy and nonverbal tracking skills to assess a client’s movement profile, identifying both trauma-based movement patterns and inherent somatic resources that can serve as foundations for resilience.
3. Facilitate DDMT interventions that utilize rhythmic co-regulation, and the respectful expansion of effort/shape/space to help clients safely access, express, and integrate fragmented somatic experiences within the therapeutic container.
4. Design a client-centered, trauma-informed DMT session sequence that moves from establishing somatic safety and resources, through the exploration and transformation of embodied metaphors, toward the consolidation of new, adaptive movement narratives that support empowerment and integration.
