ABSTRACT
This chapter presents DMP as a framework for restoring and healing trauma and exemplifies her arguments with a case study, emphasizing the resource-based approach of DMP to support traumatized clients in restoring meaning and their place of belonging in the world. The author has worked with survivors of relational (war, torture, ritual abuse, domestic violence, genocide, terrorism) for over 20 years, and has developed a components-based and developmentally-informed DMT framework for working with trauma. Restorative Movement Psychotherapy is the clinical counterpart to this framework and is a trauma informed approach to DMT. This chapter integrates theories and bodies of work that contribute to this framework (developmental psychology, body-mind centering, Laban Movement Analysis, polyvagal theory), emphasizing DMT as the core of this approach. Case presentations of clinical DMT with adult and child survivors of relational trauma will provide practical examples of the power of DMT in the post-trauma restorative process. The need for titration of DMT, as both a somatic and expressive arts therapy, will be described, with practical and adaptable examples of this work in both clinical and international humanitarian (i.e. field work) contexts. The DMT for trauma framework components include embodied self-care as an ethical practice; primary and secondary portals to embodiment; moving through the developmental progression as restorative process; restoring core rhythmicity; and a DMT phasic approach to complex trauma.
