Scary?!
There’s a big lie floating around out there in social-media therapyland: namely, that bioenergetic therapy is “scary.” I’m here to set the record straight.
If you know anything about bioenergetic therapy firsthand, this myth might sound absurd. So when I see this type of comment out there on the interwebs, I know it was posted by somebody who doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
So how did bioenergetics, or BE for short, get this less-than-stellar reputation?
*Record Scratch*
Let’s rewind to the 1970s, when the form of somatic therapy called bioenergetics got really popular. To be precise, it’s “bioenergetic analysis” which is often referred to as “bioenergetic therapy.” And we’ll leave it at the shortened “bioenergetics” since that’s what everyone calls it—which creates a bit of a mix up, as you’ll see below. Anyway, back in the day, one major thing BE helped people with was: acknowledging and expressing anger they’d been forced to stifle their whole lives.
Cue: a lot of screaming and pounding by people suddenly freed from the shackles of family and societal prohibitions. Finally, they were able to express themselves free from judgment.
Unfortunately, Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetics, was a little too keen on this unfettered anger. He considered aggressive expression to be a “hump” that everybody needed to “get over.” Lowen’s unbridled enthusiasm for expressions of anger came back to bite him in the ass in the form of the people who publicly badmouth bioenergetics to this very day.
One of these people happens to have developed and marketed his own form of somatic therapy—a method that’s enjoying a moment of massive popularity.
Here’s the Thing.
What if aggressive, overwhelming people were scary recurring characters in your childhood?
What if no one was there to help you calm down and make sense of their behavior?
What if you never had a chance to learn that being loud and aggressive is perfectly okay—as long as you don’t hurt yourself, someone else, or damage any property?
If all—or, honestly, any—of these hypotheticals are true for you, you’re unlikely to have arrived in adulthood with the ability to tolerate loud, aggressive sounds and movements.
In fact, even being around aggression—or being prodded to express yourself aggressively—might actually throw you right back into the protective dissociative state that you entered as a child.
And if dissociation is your go-to tactic for dealing with an arousal state in your body—even when the scary aggressors are nowhere to be seen in your current adult life?
Well then, being pushed to tolerate noisy human chaos and express yourself aggressively is never going to improve your mental health—let alone prevent you from retreating into dissociation.
Bioenergetics’ reputation as “scary” is based on decades-old headlines about how the founder ran his training seminars…
NOT on how a typical therapy session was conducted with patients at that time.
DEFINITELY NOT on how bioenergetic practitioners work with clients today.
No well-trained, modern-day bioenergetic therapist would ever push a patient to a point where they dissociated.
No well-trained bioenergetic therapist would ever even work with someone’s body before they thoroughly assess how much bodily energetic arousal that person is ready to tolerate.
Indeed, the first thing a bioenergetic therapist does with a new client: Teach them to recognize and calm uncomfortable energetic arousal.
So there’s nothing fundamentally scary about bioenergetics, even though it doesn’t shy away from—and might even encourage expressing big, loud feelings through sound and movement.
Flexibility of Response Is Key
If big expressions of sound and movement frighten you into a dissociated state, your therapist would do right to work towards helping you tolerate and express them without dissociating. Why? Because there are times and places in your life where it’s absolutely important to be able to do so.
In fact, there are bioenergetics exercise classes deliberately designed to help you build awareness of bodily sensations and practice emotional expressions that might have been explicitly or implicitly prohibited in your past.
For those who don’t want or don’t think they need therapy, these classes are a godsend. In bioenergetic exercise classes, you can build skills in self-awareness and self-expression without having to dig too deep into your personal history.
I don’t want to name names, but there’s a guy on the internet who’s spent several years promoting bioenergetic exercise to what you might call the “bro” crowd. [update: he seems to be back at it.]
What he demonstrated might have come across as frightening to some, but he was serving people who’d been shackled by family and society into not expressing themselves. What’s wrong with that, you might ask?
Well, that guy isn’t a licensed therapist. He’s a professional bodybuilder. After encountering bioenergetic therapy himself, he reintroduced the world to—and revitalized bioenergetics through—his own version of bioenergetic exercise.
Let me reiterate: That was not bioenergetic therapy. It was one man’s excited interpretation and OTT (that’s, over the top, for us old people) expression of bioenergetic EXERCISE. Not therapy. Bioenergetic EXERCISE! It’s apples and oranges, people.
Bioenergetic therapy is soft. It’s hard. It’s quiet. It’s loud. It’s chaotic. It’s well-ordered.
Most importantly, bioenergetic therapy is built on the research-backed foundation of psychoanalysis, which hinges on a strong relationship between therapist and client.
So, no. Bioenergetic therapy is not “scary.” It’s dynamic. It’s lively. It’s comprehensive.
And if you want to change your life, it might be right for you.
