Emerged originally from the work of Wilhelm Reich and forms a distinct branch of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Contemporary Body Psychotherapy is concerned with the integration of physiological/somatic, emotional, mental, spiritual and social/relational aspects of the individual. It involves an extensive body of knowledge and explicit theories of mind-body functioning which take the complexity of interactions and reciprocal relationships between psyche and soma into account.

For example taking the state of trauma-it is happening in the body as well as in mental states, it’s the body that triggers the responses of the mind. Most of the traumatic responses involve high physiological arousal, in other words the stress response becomes active when the external stimuli perceived via the senses are subject to brain processing activating the amygdala, which serves the brain as a sensor, which is responsible for the flight/fight and freeze response.

Body Psychotherapy approach share an underlying assumption that we are embodied beings and that there is a functional unity between psychological and bodily aspects of being.