It All Boils Down to One Surprising Thing
First, a Quick History Lesson
Dr. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s inner circle of psychoanalysts, developed the world’s first body-based psychotherapy in the late 1920s and 30s.
He described “armor segments,” or bands of bodily tension, which he believed were physical manifestations of psychological problems.
The primary body-based protocol of his method, which he called Character Analysis, was reestablishing vitality through breathing exercises to release armor segments.
Fast forward a couple of decades to Alexander Lowen, a lawyer turned MD who emulated and expanded on Reich’s ideas. Lowen encouraged his patients to get up off the couch and engage more of their bodies in a wider variety of exercises than Reich had done with his breathing exercises. Lowen branded his version of therapy as Bioenergetic Analysis.
Here’s the Thing
Just like every other therapist of their time, the work of both Reich and Lowen was viewed in relation to psychoanalysis—which was, of course, the default therapeutic mode at the time.
A typical psychoanalyst does not assume a position of authority in relation to their patient. But both Reich and Lowen did.
Both men had people do “body things” to achieve their desired outcomes as therapists.
For Reich, that outcome was “orgastic potency.” For Lowen, it was cathartic self-expression.
It’s no secret that Reich reached a point where he felt the talking part of therapy was a waste of time, and wanted people to just do the breathing work. Lowen, for his part, was notorious for using some dramatic methods to get people shouting or crying.
Unsurprisingly, these guys were both understood to be the “character type” that tends toward this authoritative style…which is a story for another time.
But anyway, that’s how Bioenergetics started to diverge from traditional psychotherapy.
To this day, some practitioners understand Bioenergetics to be a coaching approach, not a form of therapy. They diagnose a character style by “reading a body,” then direct the client to targeted bioenergetic exercises, much in the same way as Lowen and Reich.
Basically, they authoritatively instruct the client in when and how to do Bioenergetic Exercises, as dictated by their “reading” of the patient’s “character type.”
It’s a teacher-student relationship—and symptom management is usually the goal.
On the Other Hand
There are also practitioners who see Bioenergetics as a relationship-oriented depth psychotherapy.
They see Bioenergetics as therapy: the old “talking cure” where the goal is to “make the unconscious conscious”—where consciously focusing on embodied experiences facilitates that process, but symptom management isn’t central.
For these practitioners, any and all body-based interventions–including Bioenergetic Exercises—are available for use.
But these interventions are not primarily for symptom management, nor are they employed to avoid awkward silences or fill time.
These practitioners understand Lowen’s character types and will sometimes use them diagnostically—but never like zodiac signs that pigeonhole someone, or narrowly focus the coaching.
The gold standard for these practitioners is to:
- Stay out of the way of the patient’s self-knowledge process by never stepping into an authority that doesn’t exist.
- And by always aligning on the side of the “analytic frame,” (a set of rules and best practices developed over psychoanalysis’ 120-year history to create healthy boundaries around the therapy process).
Psychotherapy needs all of this to be successful.
In All Fairness…
Many therapists’ shift toward something more like coaching is due in part to the fact that insurance companies are more likely to pay for “instruction-manual therapies” like CBT and EMDR.
Between that whole mess and the Lowen-Reich model of therapist-as-authoritative-teacher, the idea that “therapy is just a set of protocols for symptom relief ” is running rampant.
This fundamental misperception has caused a lot of Bioenergetics-trained therapists to coach people in Bioenergetics Exercises, as if that alone is equivalent to therapy.
But here’s the biggest problem with this “Therapy is just coaching!” idea:
- It empowers people without the right training (like lawyers and weightlifters and breath coaches) To believe that after a few sessions they, too, have what it takes to be a mental health guru.
And now they’re out there teaching people about character types like they’re deterministic astrological signs, and leading Bioenergetic Exercise workshops like that’s therapy.
Take it from a certified bioenergetic therapist:
Take it from a certified bioenergetic therapist:
Just because they relieved some symptoms by practicing Bioenergetic Exercises does not make them a therapist. And it does not make them qualified to help you with your mental health.
So, buyer beware.
