Somatic Research Methods

Research is a crucial element in advancing our collective knowledge of somatic psychology, but body and movement psychotherapists often struggle to engage in meaningful relationships with the psychology research literature and the
community of scholars who typically produce it. This paper elaborates the common ground between research and somatic psychotherapy by linking the values, attitudes and skills of somatic psychotherapists with specific research
methodologies. It traces the similarities between doing therapy and doing research, with a focus on the role of the therapist/researcher, and outlines a research method that somatic psychotherapists might consider as a basic
framework when undertaking their own formal research.

*Please only cite after publication. This is a pre-published draft.

The field of Somatics has existed for more than eighty years without the complement of substantial research to accompany it. As it began to evolve into mental health treatment, the experiential orientation of somatic psychotherapy attracted those more interested in the art of the practice than the practice of scientific research that could support treatment outcomes. This has created a weakness in the field and has arrested the development of somatic psychotherapy as an evidence-based treatment for emotional health. This article will offer an overview of the extant literature on embodied research and make a case for the need for somatically-informed embodied research. It will describe general ways in which somatic psychotherapy and dance/movement therapy clinical practice can be repurposed to create somatically-informed research methods. Finally, it will project how embodied research methods may be useful to studying complex issues in social phenomena as well as the intricacies of treatment resistant medical and emotional illness.