ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the therapeutic modality of Embodied-Relational Therapy (ERT), and how it works with relationship and with embodiment. Relational therapy is a shared attempt to work through mutual feelings of distress and pain, as well as love and enjoyment. And all of its psychological complexity develops on a platform of embodied experience. The idea of working with embodied relationship in ways beyond verbal discussion takes many therapists—not only psychoanalysts—into the territory of retraumatisation and dissociation. The most common response to this is to rule the idea off-limits. In ERT psycotherapists are fully open to and accepting of touch, as one of the channels in which amplifying can take place, but also as a basic human need and sometimes a crucial form of comfort. They are also of course aware that touch can sometimes feel retraumatising for clients with certain kinds of experience.
