Bioenergetic psychotherapists believe that there is a correlation between the mind and the body. The individual is viewed as a psychosomatic unity. What affects the body affects the mind; and what affects the mind affects the body. The psychological defenses one uses to handle pain and the stress of life as they grow up; rationalizations, denials, and suppressions, are also anchored in the body. They appear in the body as unique muscular patterns that inhibit self-expression. These patterns can be identified and understood by a bioenergetic psychotherapist who knows how to look at the structure, movement and breathing patterns in a person's body.

Bioenergetic psychotherapists, unlike other therapists, focus special attention on the muscular patterns in a person's body. They are interested in these patterns and their relationship to movement, breath, posture and emotional expression. Every physical expression of the body has meaning; the quality of a handshake, the posture, the look in the eyes, the tone of the voice, the way of moving, the amount of energy, etc. If these expressions are fixed and habitual, they tell a story of past experience.

The bioenergetic psychotherapist attempts to read these muscular patterns and introduces the client to physical expressions or exercises to help them experience in present time these patterns of constriction in their body. The psychotherapist explores with the client what it would feel like to begin to release these patterns and recover some of the feelings they have repressed during childhood and continue to repress in their adult life. The bioenergetic psychotherapist also helps their client come to understand how and why their patterns of constriction developed; how these very defenses that are hindering their life today, allowed them to survive in an early environment that was not supportive of their being.

As these repressed emotions emerge, the client often begins to realize that these patterns inhibit their capacity for spontaneity and creativity in self-expression. They begin to understand that as these defenses became chronic, so have the muscular patterns in their body. These somatic defenses affect their emotional well-being by decreasing energy level and restricting the capacity for genuine self-expression in relationships; they are not free enough in their body to feel joy, happiness, love, sadness, fear, sensuality and anger. As the client progresses in bioenergetic psychotherapy, old, ineffective patterns of blocking connection, pleasure, spontaneity and joy slowly dissolve. Through the release of body work and the experience of a safe, healthy, supportive connection with a therapist, the bioenergetic client relates to his/her self and others in new, more satisfying ways.

Through identifying patterns of blocked self-expression in the body, the bioenergetic psychotherapist develops a clearer understanding of the various personality types and their corresponding psychological problems. Understanding a person's specific patterns of blocked self-expression suggests the basic defensive structure of the individual which developed as a result of their personal psychological history. In the context of bioenergetic theory, discovering patterns of blocked self-expression and their corresponding connection to personality type, allows the emergence of a potential framework for the course of therapy.

The bioenergetic psychotherapist utilizes body work methods and exercises to help a person become aware of tensions and release them through appropriate movement. Verbal exploration of emotional conflicts and their relationship to an individual's personal history is also an integral part of bioenergetic psychotherapy.

Dr. Alexander Lowen, founder of Bioenergetic Analysis writes that we have each participated along with our parents, heredity, nature and the environment in forming a way of being in the world. The tangible record of this evolving, dynamic process is our body, which is composed of living cells, muscles and organs that pulsate in expanding and contracting ways.

Our personality is an embodiment of the interplay between the pulsatory forces of life and the conflicts, demands, restrictions, stimulation and excitation that arise out of the relationships that we have thus far encountered. The interplay among these forces influences us in the creation of our personality. In simple language, our personality reflects the way in which we attempt to avoid distress and establish a sense of well-being and control in the world by creating a working balance between possessing and expressing ourselves in relating to others. The complexity and originality of this creative life triumph is more fully disclosed when we understand the developmental history of thoughts and actions in regard to self and others and how this history is revealed in the form and motility of our bodies.

Our total person, mind and body, is functionally one in its expression of our struggle in being an autonomous, loving person. When the personality balance we have established becomes sufficiently disturbed or it no longer gives us former benefits, we begin to feel anxious, compulsive, depressed or generally dissatisfied. We enter therapy looking for a way to change. We slowly begin to understand our old way of being as containing costly compromises that have resulted in a life which now feels limited, constricted or unfulfilled.

People enter psychotherapy looking for a way to change. In Bioenergetic psychotherapy, as we talk about our life problems that bring us into therapy, we begin to recognize that our current condition is directly related to our inability to respond to new situations in our life. Our physical form and corresponding personality pattern is not physically and emotionally flexible enough to move with and integrate the excitation produced in some new situation. We are therefore unable to respond appropriately or in a fulfilling manner to our life's demands. While we must respect the creative solutions that we found to childhood conflicts and emotions around terror, abandonment, manipulation, and rejection, our stereotypical ways of being must be analyzed and understood as survival patterns. The modification of these patterns requires an intense, long term relationship with a skilled therapist, where the underlying anxieties associated with change can be carefully confronted and new, more appropriate means of relating to these anxieties can be achieved. This change is effected through both an active understanding of how the body is an expression of the personality and through a healing, empathic therapeutic relationship.

Bioenergetic Analysis is a technique for

I. Understanding the personality in terms of the body;

II. Improving all functions of the personality by mobilizing the energy bound by muscular tensions; and

III. Increasing an individual's capacity to experience pleasure by resolving the characterological attitudes that have become structured in the body and that, therefore, interfere with its rhythmic and unitary movements.

All distortions and denials of reality are compensated by special body attitudes. For example, the neurotic individual who is afraid of his feelings of fear, covers them by an exaggerated expression of courage which is manifested in a fixed postural attitude. His shoulders are squared off, his chest is inflated and his belly is sucked in. The patient is not aware that his attitude is a defense against fear until he finds that he cannot drop his shoulders, relax his chest or let his belly out. When the muscular tensions are released, the fear and its historical cause often rise to consciousness.

Every physical expression of the body has meaning; the quality of a handshake, the posture, the look in the eyes, the tone of the voice, the way of moving, etc. If these expressions are fixed and habitual, they tell a story of past experience. The interpretation of fixed, physical attitudes and the work upon chronic muscular tensions which underlie them add a new dimension of reality to the therapeutic experience.

In working with the body, two principles are paramount:

1. Any limitation of motility is both a result and a cause of emotional difficulties. It arises as a result of an unresolved historical conflict, but the persistence of the tension creates present-day emotional difficulties that clash with the demands of adult reality. Every physical constriction interferes with and prevents a unitary response to a situation.

2. Any restriction of natural respiration is both the result and cause of anxiety. Anxiety in childhood situations disturbs natural respiration. If the anxiety-producing situation persists and is prolonged, the disturbance of respiration becomes structured in thoracic and abdominal tension. The inability to breathe freely under emotional stress is the physiological basis for the experience of anxiety in such stressful situations.

Unity and coordination of physical responses depend upon the integration of the respiratory movements and the aggressive movements of the body. To the degree that respiration and motility are freed from the restrictions of chronic tensions, the physical function of the client will improve. To that degree, his contact with reality on the physical level will expand and deepen. But this will happen only if there is a commitment to and corresponding improvement in his grasp of reality on the psychic and interpersonal levels. One should not be misled, however, by seeming improvements in a client's functioning on the psychic level and interpersonal levels which are not accompanied by an analogous improvement in the physical functioning.

Through special movements and body positions, the client in bioenergetic psychotherapy gains a deeper awareness of and contact with his body. From this awareness and contact, he begins to understand the relation between his present physical state and the experiences of his infancy and childhood which created it. He learns that his denial of the body is a rejection of his need for love in order to avoid hurt and disappointment. He can interpret his rigidities as a defense against overwhelming rage. He can sense that his immobility stems from a deep-seated fear of aggression. Given the opportunity to express his rage by pounding or kicking the couch, and given the chance to voice his negativity, he discovers that he will not be abandoned or destroyed for expressing his feeling. Through the acceptance of his body and its feelings, the individual broadens his contact with all other aspects of reality.

Since the body is the base of all reality functions, any increase in a person's contact with his body will produce a significant improvement in his self image (body image), in his interpersonal relationships, in the quality of his thinking and feeling, and in his enjoyment of life.