Contact Improvisation, Relational-Cultural Theory, & My First Clinical Internship
“The more you give the more you ask for.” Stefanie Turner, a contact improvisation dancer and facilitator in Rhode Island, shared this insight while our Contact Improvisation (CI) group circled up around her. We gather on the cushy mats of a sunshine-filled Brazilian Jiu Jitsu studio every Sunday morning to practice different contact fundamentals, and explore emerging questions for this practice. We had just finished a tracking exercise where we followed our partners’ moving heads and spines with our hands and other body parts. We discovered the safety and relief that comes from additional weight sharing, contrary to the assumption that less weight is safer and more polite for our partners. While less weight is certainly more manageable, CI was and continues to be a practice of meeting and delighting in uncertainty wherever we can. With more weight comes more information, helping us map the other person’s intentions and desires alongside our own. More weight also means more risk, necessitating additional involvement of our partner(s).
If I offer more of my weight, how do you respond?
This weight is desirable and manageable for me right now, let’s see where I go when you pour more weight onto me.
OR MAYBE I’m uncertain about this meeting place of weight, where else could your weight rest?
OR MAYBE No, I do not want your weight right now, please redirect!
There is no safety guarantee in CI, whether emotional or physical. The constant negotiation of each other’s bodies requires conscious awareness and intuitive responsive movement. It requires taking responsibility for our desires, our fears, as well as our safety, and trusting, though not assuming, that our partner(s) will do the same. In contact improvisation we must balance risk-taking with the yogic principle of non-attachment, to prevent our movement impulses from becoming overpowering demands. And all of this happens in a split second! Spontaneity is the name of the game, and authentic bodily responsiveness is the practice.
As a young professional working in an adolescent psychiatric hospital setting, I assume responsibility for my desires, fears, and safety, though also partly those of the youth I aim to support. I wonder what authentic bodily responsiveness looks and feels like in a clinical setting, partly because my internalized Western psychological approach promotes what Relational-Cultural Therapists like Judith Jordan might call a “decontextualized self” (2017). Assuming a facilitator role in a clinical setting for the first time felt like putting on a cloak that simultaneously masks and protects me from the “scary others” who I work with. I put “scary others” in quotes because the youth I work with are neither scary nor others— although hopefully that is obvious. The youth I work with are brave, talented, insightful, friendly, and caring, in spite of the stigma and the lack of humanity that brews in psychiatric hospital wards. So what prevents me from showing up authentically? I blame fear and a desire for control. The historic quest for power over individual’s minds has a patriarchal and colonizing history. While I won’t get into that history now, I do want to explore how it impacts my work as a first-year psychology intern, a social role ripe with uncertainty and inexperience.
A few important notes: I do not know the youth I work with intimately— I am there for a few hours a week, exclusively in group art and dance activities. This is my first few months of working in a clinical setting.
This begs the question, why would I, and should I, be an all-knowing expert who trains the youth I work with to act and think in a certain way?!? My understanding of cognitive distortions and group dynamics, and life experience as a former teenager, should not grant me nor any other intern, or therapist-at-large, expert status in this setting. I hope this is obvious, though based on my accumulating experience, the pressure to assume such a status is immense. The question that arises for me, informed by my dance/movement therapy schooling and yogi training: How can we flip the script, so that therapists are experts of our own intuition, and not others?
In contact improvisation terms, the faulty role would require witnessing another’s movement, analyzing their movement verbally, and then re-patterning their movement according to my own internalized standards of what is “right,” and the hospital’s standards of what is “appropriate.” My gut says boo to that proposition, and I hope yours does too. Relational Cultural Theory (RCT) offers an alternative narrative of mutuality, the premise that two or more people may gain from a therapeutic relationship in different ways. Each invitation to connect is an offering that helps the other person learn more about themselves as well as each other. This concept rings true in contact improvisation as well. By modeling healthy embodied, relational invitations, like offering weight in CI or asking a verbal, non-clinical humanistic question in the hospital setting, I can resist the default power dynamic of assuming knowledge about another person or group of people, and practice arriving in the space— not just letting my role do the talking. What are my genuine curiosities about the youth I work with? Who are they as people, as artists, as dreamers? SO much is lost relationally when I replace my curiosity with fear. I will not know what a dance will look like in a CI context, nor my role in a hospital context, until I first show up authentically and make an offering. This might encourage the other person(s) to show up, and meet me how they want to. The dance, the relationship, unfolds from there.
My body senses stability on my partner’s back, flat and held with a bone-stacking position in table top, my pelvis slides over, legs gleefully moving into the air, head falling down on the other side.
I sense my partner’s weight on my back, my body wants less contact, my head lowers, offering an off-ramp. my head gently rolls on their descending leg, I move slower.
I am sliding, falling, gently lowering to the ground. I feel grounded being lower, I want to be lower, I crawl until my belly drops down to the earth, my leg the only point of connection with my partner’s head. Slowness feels good right now.
Through contact improvisation I learn that there are other ways of giving as well as receiving information through my body: What does it mean to respond to an encounter through my spine, for example, rather than my hands, the classic safe limb from which I have developmentally learned to explore the world? How could I gather information through my spine? I re-gain trust of my body with this alternative bodily engagement, and see more possibilities for being in the world with others. The more I give my body attention and permission to be the exploring, intuiting, responsive force in my life, the more I come to rely on this repressed knowledge source in my day-to-day.
RCT relies on a counselor’s authenticity, and attuned, real-time responses that allow the clients they work with to not just understand but feel their impact on others, and the world around them (Jordan, 2017). The responsive process is empowering for the individual who has come to accept and internalize feelings of inadequacy and ineffectual presence that come from marginalization and shame. As a young professional, my inexperience results in feelings of inadequacy that replace my natural curiosity with fear. The feelings of anxiety, depression, and mood-disruptive disorders that I witness in the young people I work with disrupts their intuitive connection-seeking patterns, resulting in dysfunctional relationships and disruptive behaviors that then keep them in a shame spiral. Re-patterning can happen through healthy, growth-oriented therapeutic relationships. The process, as described in contact improv terms, looks like this:
When I speak, when I move, I am received. I am responded to. I am asked for more. I learn to respond more willfully, more curiously, as I develop a sense of worthiness and courage through relationship. I am asked for more, and I am capable of offering more. We roll, tumble, separate, collide, slide, and land huffing and puffing, side-by-side, on the ground. We breathe. We take account of our journey, of our moments of connection and disconnection. Our bodies are united, yet separate. Our minds stimulated, and aware.
The collisions may be personal, interpersonal, cultural, or sociopolitical. There may never be an easy meeting place, only awkward limbs clashing and body rhythms out of sync. The information exchange still happens as questions are asked.
Woah, you move fast! I pull away, letting only my arm slide gently across their back. They tuck their pelvis in and spin and spin and I separate. I try again, they offer an arm, we meet with a mid-pace arm-to-arm dance, they spin, I walk slowly. We are united in our opposition, linked for a moment of time. We move elsewhere, seeking more connection, offering more invitations. Or perhaps we sit aside. We witness others and let the information of that encounter move within us as we reflect. We re-join, with new questions, when we are ready.
Contact improvisation helps me internalize and learn healthy relational attachment and shared power somatically. The movement practice is available to all willing bodies, however it need not be practiced for the lessons to take root. The courage required to partake in contact improvisation is practiced every time we show up authentically in a relationship, presenting our needs, desires, and insights as invitations for engagement. As Jordan describes, we enCOURAGE each other into voice through responsive listening (2017). The defensive, boundary-loving individualistic parts of me that are influenced by my Western cultural upbringing and fear of burnout flare when writing this. That sounds exhausting! Maintaining the illusion of a separate self, one that must be impermeable from the outside world, is even more exhausting. Beyond that, it is unjust. This defensive orientation has a contextual history in my white body in a subconscious desire to protect unearned power and privilege (Menakem, 2017), and in my womanly body that has a history of gender-based violence and harassment. Seeing myself as a separate entity is as isolating as it is false. I am impacted by others, and am impacting others, always.
Jordan critiques this separatist, decontextualized sense of self as serving the interests of a society that privileges separation and ascendance. Western psychology is built on this individualistic principle. Jordan writes, “Freud (1920/1955) once said, “Protection against stimuli is almost more important than reception of stimuli” (p. 27)… What a bias! In this system, it becomes important to build protection against the outside or gain power over that which is without” (2017). I see this dual protective and power-wielding force represented in my intersectional identity and in my role as a therapist-in-training working in a hospital setting, where I assume a position of expertise whilst protecting myself from the young people’s psychological distress.
Interpersonal and systemic trauma thrive in fearful disconnection, yet humans yearn for authentic connection that requires some vulnerability. An RCT approach to therapy explores this “relational paradox” and reduces issues of distrust by “demystifying the counseling process (e.g., informing the client of the counselor’s role and about treatment progression; Banks, 2006), soliciting client input in counseling (e.g., in pacing of treatment, goal planning; Kress & Paylo, 2015), and responding to disconnections appropriately (e.g., avoiding power struggles, honoring strategies of disconnection as a protective function; Banks, 2006; Jordan, 2010)” (Kress et al., 2018). I see the role of a contact improvisation facilitator as similar to the counselor in that beyond laying out ground rules for healthy engagement in this movement context, they participate in the practice alongside the attendees, they solicit consistent input and insight from the participants, and they name and respond to ruptures that occur throughout the practice, whether ideological or somatic. This informed, democratic responsibility is what I aim to embody as a counselor-in-training, and as an adult. Recognizing the existing and invited web of relationships and connections that undoubtably impact me, I thus adopt an RCT view where I engage and encourage others to partake in relationships where people are both affected and affecting (Jordan, 2017). If “isolation disempowers us and immobilizes us,” then I am inspired to move into and model authentic connection that fosters “courage, confidence, and a sense of strength” (Jordan, 2017).
References
Jordan, J.V. (2017), Relational–cultural theory: The power of connection to transform our lives. The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, (56), 228-243. https://doi.org/10.1002/johc.12055
Kress, V. E., Haiyasoso, M., Zoldan, C. A., Headley, J. A., & Trepal, H. (2018). The use of relational-cultural theory in counseling clients who have traumatic stress disorders. Journal of Counseling & Development, 96(1), 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12182
