Dance therapy

Dance therapy (also called movement therapy) is the use of choreographed or improvised movement as a way of treating social, emotional, cognitive, and physical problems. Throughout the ages, people of many cultures have used dance to express powerful emotions, tell stories, treat illness, celebrate important events, and maintain communal bonds. Dance therapy employs this power of movement for therapy and uses it for health, and well-being.

Dance as therapy came into existence as a combination of modern dance and psychiatry. It was pioneered by Marian Chase (1896-1970), who studied dance in New York City before establishing her own studio in Washington, DC, in the 1930s. Because Chase’s dance classes provided unique opportunities for self-expression, communication, and group interaction, psychiatrists in Washington began sending patients to her.

By the mid-1940s Chase was giving lectures and demonstrations, and other professional dancers soon followed her lead, using dance to help people with emotional, mental, and physical problems. It was not until 1966, that dance therapy gained professional recognition, when the American Dance Therapy Association was founded. Today the American Dance Therapy Association has nearly 1,200 members in 46 states and 20 countries around the world.

Dance therapists believe that mental and emotional problems are often held in the body in the form of muscle tension. Conversely, they believe that the state of the body can affect attitude and feelings, both positively and negatively.

Dance movements help healing in several ways. Moving as a group brings people out of isolation, creates powerful social and emotional bonds, and generates the good feelings that come from being with others. Moving rhythmically eases muscular rigidity, diminishes anxiety, and increases energy. Moving spontaneously helps people learn to recognize and trust their impulses. Moving creatively helps self-expression and opens up new ways of thinking and doing.

On a physical level, dance therapy provides the benefits of exercise: improved health, coordination, and muscle tone. On an emotional level, it helps people feel more joyful and confident, and allows them to explore such issues as anger, frustration, and loss that may be too difficult to explore verbally. On a mental level, dance therapy seeks to enhance cognitive skills, motivation, and memory.

Your dance therapy experience will depend on your ailment, whether you work with a dance therapist in private practice or in the context of a treatment team, and whether you are the only patient or part of a group. Different dance therapists have different styles. You need absolutely no previous dance training to benefit from dance therapy.

For the first consultation you will meet with the dance therapist in a dance studio. You should wear comfortable clothing for this and all other sessions. First, the therapist will talk with you about your needs and your reasons for wanting treatment. Next, the therapist may ask you to walk around the studio in order to analyze your body shape, posture, and movements: Is your body erect or caved in? Finally, the dance therapist will discuss your treatment goals with you, and the two of you might arrive at an agreement regarding the duration and nature of the therapy. You should review your goals with the therapist periodically to see if you are meeting them.

Phobia

The term phobia, which comes from the Ancient Greek word for fear (fobos), denotes a number of psychological and physiological conditions that can range from serious disabilities to common fears. Phobias are the most common form of anxiety disorder. An American study by the Na­tional Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 5.1 and 21.5 percent of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and gender, the study found that phobias were the most common mental ill­ness among women in all age groups and the second most common ill­ness among men older than 25.

Most psychologists and psychiatrists divide phobias into three cate­gories. Social phobias - fears to do with other people and social rela­tionships such as performance anxiety, fears of eating in public, etc. Spe­cific phobias - fear of a single specific panic trigger, like dogs, flying, running water and so on. Agoraphobia - a generalised fear of leaving your home or your small familiar 'safe' area, and of the inevitable panic attacks that will follow. Agoraphobia is the only phobia regularly treated as a medical condition.

Many specific phobias, such as fears of dogs, heights, spider bites, and so forth, are extensions of fears that everyone has. People with these phobias treat them by avoiding the thing they fear. Many specific pho­bias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics and brain-chemistry combine with life-experi­ences to playa major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.

Phobias vary in severity among individuals, with some phobics sim­ply disliking or avoiding the subject of their fear and suffering mild anxi­ety. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated dis­abling symptoms. It is possible for a sufferer to become phobic about vir­tually anything.

The name of a phobia generally contains a Greek word for what the patient fears plus the suffix-phobia. Creating these terms is something of a word game. Few of these terms are found in medical literature, e.g. cancerophobia is a fear of cancer, necrophobia is a fear of death or dead things or cardiophobia is a fear of heart disease.

Some therapists use virtual reality to desensitize patients to feared thing. Other forms of therapy that may be of benefit to phobics are graduated exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural (CBT). Anti-anxiety medication can also be of assistance in some cases. Most phobics understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are powerless to override their initial panic reaction.

Graduated Exposure and CBT both work towards the goal of sitizing the sufferer, and changing the thought patterns that are contrib­uting to their panic. Gradual desensitization treatment and CBT are ten extremely successful, provided the phobic is willing to endure some discomfort and to make a continuous effort over a long period of time. Practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) claim to have procedure that can be used to alleviate most specific phobias in a single therapeutic session, though this has not yet been verified scientifically.

Insome cases, a fear or hatred is not considered a phobia in the clinical sense because it is believed to be only a symptom of other psycholog­ical problems, or the result of ignorance, or of political or social beliefs. These are phobias in a more general, popular sense of the word:

· Xenophobia, fear or dislike of strangers or the unknown, often used to describe nationalistic political beliefs and movements.

· Homophobia, fear or dislike of homosexual people.

· Islamophobia, fear' or dislike of Muslims or Islamic culture.

Furthermore, the term hydrophobia, or fear of water, is usually not a psychological condition at all, but another term for the disease rabies, referring to a common symptom. Likewise photophobia, is a physical complaint, aversion to light due to an inflamed or painful eye or excessively dilated pupils.

Hypnosis

Hypnosis, as defined by the American Psychological Association Di­vision of Psychological Hypnosis, is "a procedure during which a health professional or researcher suggests that a client, patient, or experimental participant experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior." However, any definition will be vague, as the underlying mechanism is little understood. Some theories view hypnosis as an al­tered state of consciousness, others as a type of focused attention. Psy­chologists have recently researched hypnosis and found a strong corre­lation between the ease of putting someone in a state of 'hypnosis' and their level of suggestibility. Generally, under hypnosis people become more susceptible to suggestion, causing changes in the way they feel, think, and behave, although contrary to popular belief they do still re­main theoretically in control of their actions.

Hypnosis also generally stimulates a feeling of relaxation, and this has helped its development into a therapy - hypnotherapy. One of the treatments in hypnotherapy is regression. Often it is viewed by some psychologists with skepticism. It is claimed that when participants are put through the process of regression, they may invent false memories due to the social expectation placed on them. These memories cannot therefore be reliable.

Hypnosis has further been described as "the suspension of the critical factor" which expands on the idea of "increased suggestibility". A person who claims to be hypnotized sometimes appears to accept statements as true that they would normally reject. For example, statements such as "you have forgotten your name" would not normally be accepted, but under hypnosis people do claim that they do not know their own name. It appears as if the hypnotized participant accepts the authority of the hypnotist over their own experience. When asked afterwards some par­ticipants appear to be genuinely unable to recall the incident, while oth­ers would say that they had known the hypnotist was wrong but at the time it had seemed easier just to go along with his instructions. Some hypnotists would claim that this showed the difference between a deep: and a shallow hypnotic trance while skeptics would question the validity of the demonstration.

Experienced hypnotists claim that they can hypnotize almost anyone with the exception of the very young, the very elderly and people with a very low IQ, particularly those with an inability to concentrate. Intoxicated people would also prove very difficult. They also claim it is a myth that people with strong will power cannot be hypnotized, as they claim these generally make the best participants. Hypnotism depends upon the cooperation of the hypnotist and the participant; when a person with strong will power decides to cooperate with a hypnotist, hypnosis can occur. Alternatively, since hypnosis does depend on cooperation, no, one can really be hypnotized against their will. Being a hypnotist is not a source of power over other people.

Many religious and cultural rituals contain many similarities with techniques used for hypnotic induction and induce similar states in their participants.

Self-hypnosis - hypnosis in which a person hypnotizes themselves without the assistance of another person to serve as the hypnotist - is a staple of hypnotherapy-related self-help programs. It is most often used to help the self-hypnotist stay on a diet, overcome smoking or some other addiction, or to generally boost the hypnotized person's self-es­teem. It is rarely used for the more complex or controversial uses of hyp­notism, which require the hypnotist to monitor the hypnotized person's reactions and responses and respond accordingly. Most people who practise self-hypnosis require a focus for their attention in order to be­come fully hypnotized.

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