Dancing Dialogue

This week is Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Awareness Week, and we want to share something tender.

Some experiences settle into us before we have language to describe them. Difficult births. Early medical procedures. Ruptures in early attachment. These imprints do not disappear simply because we had no words for them. They live on in the body.

Adults who have done years of thoughtful talk therapy often describe a sense that something underneath has not yet been reached. That is not a failure of effort. Words cannot easily reach what was stored before words.

Body-based therapies offer a different door in.

A parade across the living room. An invented animal walk. A sudden freeze game. This is dance-play, and it is doing more for your child than you might realize.

Beneath the surface, those silly moments are quietly building emotional vocabulary, nervous system regulation, social skills, and the kind of parent-child connection that words alone rarely reach.

Five minutes of bouncing on the bed turns out to be part of how you raise a thoughtful, regulated human being.

What does dance-play look like in your home?

Before toddlers can name a feeling, they live it through their bodies. A sudden burst of spinning. A leg shaking under the table. Going completely still in a new room. These are not behaviors to manage. They are first drafts of feeling, written in motion.

When caregivers respond with curiosity instead of correction, toddlers learn something quietly powerful: their inner world is welcome here. What they feel is knowable. Someone is paying attention.

What movement does your little one make when big feelings arrive?

The body remembers what words cannot always say.

On Saturday, Dr. Suzi Tortora closed out her week at Codarts with a workshop on how adverse childhood experiences live in the body, and how dance/movement therapy can meet that imprint with safety, attunement, and embodied repair.

The room was full of students, faculty, and visiting clinicians from across Europe and beyond. Dance/movement psychotherapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement, body awareness, and embodied communication to foster healing for individuals, families, and communities. When clinicians learn to read the body as language, the body becomes a place where childhood imprints can finally be witnessed and supported toward integration.

Thank you to Codarts and to every clinician in the room for the depth and care you brought to this work.

Nine cohorts. Fourteen years.

This past week, Dr. Suzi Tortora returned to Rotterdam to teach the second-year students at Codarts, where she has been on the faculty since 2012. This year's cohort brought together students from Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, Norway, and India.

Pictured with Suzi are two extraordinary colleagues. On the left, Nicki Wentholt, the founding director who first invited Suzi to join the program in 2012. On the right, Simone Kleinlooh, the current director continuing that legacy.

What happens in these rooms is the living transmission of dance/movement psychotherapy across generations and borders. To our students, thank you for the depth and curiosity you bring to this work.

What a meaningful four days. From May 18–21, Dr. Suzi Tortora taught the DMT XV Families in Motion Masterclass at Codarts in Rotterdam, with Dr. Renee Ortega joining remotely as a guest teacher.

Therapists from across the globe gathered to deepen their understanding of dance/movement therapy with families. When clinicians learn to read and respond to the body's language, the families they serve everywhere benefit.

Thank you to Codarts, to every participant, and to Dr. Ortega for sharing her wisdom. If you're a clinician curious about embodied, relational therapy, our Ways of Seeing International Training Program is open for enrollment.

Dancing Dialogue is in Rotterdam this weekend.

Dr. Suzi Tortora is at Codarts University of the Arts leading an experiential workshop, The Body Remembers: How Adverse Childhood Experiences Shape Adult Treatment, for dance/movement therapists across Europe.

Her work explores how early adversity organizes the nervous system and lives on in posture, breath, rhythm, and relational dynamics, and how clinicians can support healing through embodied, attachment-informed care.

We're proud to see Ways of Seeing reaching therapists around the world.

For over two decades, dance/movement therapy has been part of the healing journey for children with cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Our founder, Dr. Suzi Tortora, started the dance/movement therapy program in pediatrics at MSK in January 2003. She trained our associate Jennifer Whitley, who has now been part of the team for over 12 years. Together, they work within the Department of Integrative Medicine and Wellness Services.

In 2021, Dr. Tortora co-authored a journal article through the Society of Integrative Oncology that helped establish a formal definition for Pediatric Integrative Oncology: a relationship-centered, evidence-informed approach to caring for the whole child and family system through mind and body practices alongside conventional treatment.

Supporting children and families through medical illness is a specialty we are proud to offer at Dancing Dialogue.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2021.102678