“Being Moved” as a Therapeutic Factor of Dance Movement Therapy

Sabine C. Koch

INTRODUCTION

“I was moved to tears, when I saw her dance to that song.” We are often moved by artwork, movies, songs, music, dance, drama, or poetry: No matter which sensory channel the stimuli that move us take, art can bring us to experience things deeply, touch us at the core, and make us feel the essence of the human condition. Recent research from the fields of psychology and aesthetics has contributed to the development of a theory of being moved as an emotion (Zickfeld, Seibt, Schubert, & Fiske, 2019; Mcnninghaus ct al., 2015). In DMT, we can support the client to experience this emotion through encouraging awareness to motion and interoception, and we can use it in the healing process. We can encourage the client to follow the resulting action tendency of being moved and turn it into outer movement, into authentic expression that can catalyze inner tensions and distress into constructive actions for emotion regulation, balance, and well-being. Such expression of being moved can also help in creating interactional resonance,¹ bonding, personal and relational development, insight, and closure. Creative arts therapists (CATs) employ both moving and being moved in the service of restoring health. Being moved is an overall concept of DMT and CATs, and it is a necessary part of the healing process.

In this chapter, I want to stress that being moved and moving are part of one circular process (Fuchs & Koch, 2014; Koch, 2017), and consider how the mechanism of being moved is tied into the healing process. We are supposedly engaged in the circular process of moving and being moved at several occasions throughout our day (see Caldwell, 2018). Being moved is presumably one of the most important active factors or clinical mechanisms of dance movement therapy.² While being moved is part of the affective and the aesthetic experience as assumed in CATs (Koch, 2017) and in dance movement therapy (Adler, 2002; LaBarre, 2005; Pallaro, 2000, 2007), it is also an emerging concept in social psychology (cf. Seibt et al., 2017; Zickfeld et al., 2019), as well as aesthetics research (Menninghaus et al., 2015). The chapter introduces recent concepts of the neighbor disciplines of psychology and cognitive sciences and relates them to concepts of being moved in DMT. It further compiles active factors of DMT that have been empirically investigated in this research group in the appendix.

BEING MOVED IN DMT

DMT theory and practice. Within DMT, being moved is understood as a core element of the method of Authentic Movement (AM; Pallaro, 2000, 2007), a practice developed by Mary Whitehouse and Janet Adler (2002). AM consists in a mover, normally working with closed eyes and without music, waiting for a movement impulse to emerge from the body, and then following that impulse with a curious attitude of where it moves and what else emerges in conjunction with it. The mover is accompanied by a witness, who sits and lets herself be moved by the mover (and later on shares and reflects her experiences in a dialogue with themover). The resulting movement (at the interface of moving and being moved) is understood as free association of mostly unconscious material on the body level, which can then be used to map out the symbolic world and to advance the therapeutic processes of the client (Pal-laro, 2000). The witness’s experience is one of being moved in the meaning of the special emotion introduced in this chapter.

In the Chace method (Sandel, Chaiklin, & Lohn, 1993), DMT also works with moving and being moved. Participants are letting themselves be moved by the others, part of the group or the entire group, when entering into mirroring in movement. By using kinesthetic empathy and the ability to synchronize, participants built relationships. These capacities allow us to be moved. A shared group rhythm can facilitate the experience (Sandel et al., 1993), and the therapist holds the individual’s and group’s experience of being moved. While in AM being moved comes from within, in Chace it also comes from without in a situation of a receptive state to impulses from the music and from others.

Frances LaBarre (2005), a psychoanalyst, dancer, and developmental researcher, aimed at connecting scholarly work on dance and nonverbal communication on one hand, and psychoanalytic research on the other hand. She points out how “acting out” is assumed to occur in all patients in psychoanalysis (pathology-orientation), and suggests using this concept to employ enactment methods (from the creative arts therapies with their resource-orientation) to structure and advance the therapeutic process to the maximum benefit of the client. Clients, enacting aspects of their problems, cause attunement and embodied resonance in the therapist (being moved), which can then fruitfully be used in the therapeutic process. During training, therapists learn to attune with the patient and to be aware of their embodied resonance (or embodied countertransference; see Pallaro, 2007).

Fuchs and Koch (2014) detail how emotions are directly related to bodily changes (body feedback effects; Koch 2014) and thus result from the circular process of moving and being moved (Fuchs & Koch, 2014). Caldwell (2018) details how every therapeutic process consists of sensing, breathing, moving, and relating with multiple feedback loops using our ability of embodied resonance within, between, and among us: moving and being moved. Therapy in general can take forward steps when the inner impulse of being moved is carried to an outer expression and followed mindfully. Embarking on this journey, requires attention to the authority of the body and can lead the patient to solutions, coping, action completion, and closure (Caldwell, 2018).

Also, there is yet another very concrete way of being moved relevant to DMT: in addition to the present description of being moved by one’s own active movements and inner impulses, there is the passively being moved, for example, in the context of a sculpture or marionette game, or simply in massage, where one person manipulates the other’s body. This form of being moved has an important relation to being able to yield, to trust, and to give oneself into another’s hands, which can be crucial issues for some clients. This form of being moved is not addressed in this chapter and would in fact require its own chapter.

Experiences From Empirical Projects

In the context of a research project proposal on active factors of arts therapies for palliative care patients, we planned to measure their aesthetic experience before, while, and after CAT sessions. We created a scale of 12 items to measure active factors of creative arts therapies (see Appendix A), one item being "Ifeel moved/touched". Next to the scale, we planned to ask clients regularly for changes on the item: How much beauty do you experience? (from 1, no beauty, to 10, extreme beauty), we envisioned working with a nice-to-touch wooden scale, where they could just push a lever to the level of experienced beauty in case talking was difficult. Correlational analysis of preliminary data from a student sample revealed that experienced beauty was related to being moved (r = .57), and both were confirmed as part of one meaning dimension by a factor analysis of the eight items. At present, both aspects can thus be understood as an operationalization of the aesthetic experience.

In another project, DMT students provided DMT to the most impaired patients in a care home context (many with late-stage dementia) who were no longer able to leave their rooms or their beds and in most cases did not talk or even react. The general goal of the intervention was to provide an aesthetic experience and a pleasurable interaction to promote well-being for these patients. The idea was to protide “receptive DMT”, with some of our DMT students taking turns in dancing for the care home residents (one at a time in their room), and some other DMT students (one at a time) observing the changes in participants’ attention, affect, sparks in their eyes, and moist/teary eyes. These observational measures rely a good deal on our human capacity for intersubjective resonance (subjectivity needs to be debated; “objective measures” versus use of human resonance to assess, for example, the degree of being moved of a palliative care patient; but this is another debate). Here being moved was an outcome, operationalized by the observation of gaze (for attention), affect, and teary eyes. This conceptualizes being moved as a visible expression of the aesthetic experience but still does not account for other form of expression of the same feeling, or for participants who are keeping the experience of being moved inside, without any outward expressive signs thus not being a sufficient condition.

BEING MOVED IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES, PSYCHOLOGY, .AND AESTHETICS RESEARCH

Being moved as an emotion has long been overlooked and was recently rediscovered and empirically investigated with physiological operationalizations such as tears and goosebumps (Menninghaus et al., 2015). It was also investigated across 15 different countries where its components were mapped by the research group of Seibt, Schubert, Zickfeld and Fiske who introduced kama muta (Sanskrit for “moved by love”) as a technical term for the emotion of being moved. They chose the term, since definitions and connotations of the concept varied considerably across different cultures, and in a few cultures the term “being moved” did not exist (Seibt, Schubert, Zickfeld, & Fiske, 2017; Zickfeld ct al., 2018).

In their 2019 review paper on being moved, (Zickfeld et al., 2019) provide an excellent overview of the theory, empirical research, and components of the construct. They suggest that being moved, also often termed being touched, typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding, often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest, and is often described as pleasurable, sometimes as a mixed emotion.

About the linguistic properties of the concept they write:

“Etymologically, moved derives from Latin moved via French émouvoir. Interestingly, the word emotion derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root (as do motive and motiod). One could therefore think, as Claparcdc (1930) did, that being moved might represent a kind of protoemotion. Analyses of linguistic properties within the German language have identified that moved is related to similar lexemes indicating some kind of passive action (Kuehnast, Wagner, Wassiliwizky, Jacobsen, & Menninghaus, 2014; Menninghaus et al., 2015). English lexemes such as moved, touched, and stirred are based on the same metaphors of passive displacement or contact that a number of other languages use to denote more or less the same emotion (e.g., Mandarin gàn dông, literally, ‘to feel movement’; Fiske, Schubert, & Seibt, 2017).”

Historically, the concept of being moved was first described by McDougall (1919), who called it “the tender emotion”, and by Claparede (1930), who termed it être ému. Nico Frijda (2007) refers to a category' of emotions he called being moved. He argues that these “ambiguous” experiences (Frijda, 2001) are aesthetic emotions that “grip the body'.” (Zickfeld et al., 2019).

Zickfeld et al. (2017) claim that the construct contains empathy as one of its subcomponents. Kama Muta (Seibt et al., 2017) further includes an attachment component: “It motivates affective devotion and moral commitment to communal relationships” (Zickfeld et al., 2019, p. 5). In a recent national survey, about 51% of adults from the United States reported being moved by media or something on the internet at least several times a week (Zickfeld et al., 2019). ’