The meeting room is quiet enough to hear the rustle of people’s sweatered arms brushing against their torsos. But there is no lack of communication in the silence. Participants in a workshop at the recent American Dance Therapy Association’s 34th annual conference are performing an exercise of Follow the Leader. Everyone is clearly listening.
Each person presents a unique move that the others then mimic. One woman takes a precise ballet step. The next woman gracefully floats her arms outward in a rising flow. The final woman simply rolls her head from side to side.
This exercise is common in dance and movement classes for toddlers. It teaches a child to observe and develop her own body awareness. The experience is entirely appropriate for this day’s workshop, which explores dance/movement therapy’s role in chronic pain treatment.
“A lot of our work (as dance/movement therapists) is to convince patients with chronic pain to be playful,” says Susan Imus, co-leader of the workshop and acting chairwoman of the dance/movement therapy department at the graduate school of Columbia College in Chicago, one of only four nationally accredited programs. “We want people to surrender old ways of being and find new ways to shape themselves.”
There are common misconceptions about dance therapists. One is they teach aerobic exercise classes. Another is they minister to dancers who are injured. Neither is true. Common patients or clients include children with developmental problems, teens with eating disorders and adults with conditions ranging from migraines to arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease.
“One important point is that the body’s neural passageways for emotions are the same ones used for motor skills,” says Linda Gorham, co-leader of the workshop and a medical social worker at Olson Pain and Stress Management Associates in Wheeling.
For starters, dance/movement therapists are striving to increase a person’s supply of both serotonin (a brain chemical that fights off depression among other tasks) and endorphins (hormones that offset pain signals in the brain). They are basically looking for ways to detach troublesome brain-body connections and rehook them in a more healthful pattern.
Imus offered a case study from her days as co-founder and clinical manager of the Harvard Community Health Plan’s Pain Program from 1988 to 1994. A 45-year-old man, named William, came to the pain clinic with chronic back pain. It had debilitated him to the point of losing his job and moving out from his wife and two children.
On the day of his first appointment, William hinted he was about ready to take his own life rather than tolerate any more pain–or take the medications prescribed by doctors.
So during the first session Imus settled for getting William to acknowledge he was sick but not dying. “He accomplished what we call “less catastrophizing,’ ” says Imus.
The next step was asking William to keep track of his pain. He wrote down what the pain was saying to him on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
That allowed Imus to encourage William to try some of the program’s elective classes, beginning with “dynamic relaxation,” which was essentially dance/movement therapy (“we didn’t use the word “therapy’ in the title because patients with chronic pain too often hear from doctors that “the pain is in your head’ “).
By the fourth week, William agreed to take the self-hypnosis class.
“That transformed him the most,” says Imus. “The self-hypnosis techniques gave William a sense of power and control. He was less dependent on health practitioners and (no small matter) able to get more sleep.”
“I’m happy to say he stopped taking the pain medications. He actually started a grassroots program working with at-risk youth. He put his life and family back together.”
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To contact Bob Condor or find an archive of his columns, visit chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is bcondor@tribune.com
