Polyvagal-Informed Restorative Movement Psychotherapy: Roots, Rhythm, and Reciprocity

An invitation for any clinician wanting to adopt body-based therapies into their practice.

This expansive guide is the harvest of Amber Gray’s three decades of experience as a somatic and dance/movement psychotherapist working with survivors of oppression, war, and other severe traumas. From this challenging work, Dr. Gray has sourced innovative pathways to healing, utilizing the emergent wisdom of Polyvagal Theory as a guidepost for somatic and movement-based psychotherapy with survivors of any type of trauma.

Here readers will find a range of body-based practices and processes that any clinician can incorporate into their therapeutic work. Illustrative examples highlight how somatic interventions can be applied in the broader context of a restorative approach to survivor-centered psychotherapy. This deeply humanitarian book weaves many streams of wisdom at the crossroads of science, Spirit, and eco-somatics; what emerges is a path to profound healing that is accessible to any clinician and any client.

29 illustrations

Amber Elizabeth Gray is a trailblazer in the practice of somatic and dance/movement therapy with survivors of interpersonal, collective, and historic trauma in vastly diverse clinical, communal, and cultural contexts. An itinerant global citizen, she resides in Santa Fe, NM.

Stephen W. Porges, PhD, originator of Polyvagal Theory, is a Distinguished University Scientist and founding director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida.

Deb Dana, LCSW, is a clinician, consultant, speaker, and the leading translator of Dr. Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory. She is the bestselling author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Polyvagal Practices, and many others. She lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.