Therapists and Coaches: Learn To Better Support Your Clients with a Holistic Approach
If you're reading this, we already know you’re an amazing practitioner. You love helping people, and you want to support your clients as fully as possible. You want to address the wholeness of their experiences — not just scratch the surface.
Yes, you want to help your clients address their mindsets and belief systems… But you also want to help them process their emotions, feel safe and at home in their bodies, and connect deeply with their spirits.
You understand that the challenges your clients face — with relationships, with money, with their careers — are about so much more than just a belief or mindset. You understand the role of past experiences and trauma, and you want to feel confident supporting your clients as they explore and heal through this deeper territory.
You want to step into this role, but you're not sure how.
To support the wholeness of your clients, you need a holistic approach to your practice — and becoming a holistic practitioner means moving beyond the mind.
Moving Beyond the Mind
When you know how to safely guide your clients into their bodies, as well as how to navigate whatever they may bring into a session, your role as a practitioner becomes exponentially more powerful.
To co-create lifelong shifts with your clients, you need a holistic approach. For coaches and therapists, approaching each person as a whole individual allows you to more effectively support that person through their healing process.
Let's take a look at what a holistic approach to therapy and coaching can mean, and then dive into how these approaches can help you become a more effective practitioner.
A Holistic Approach to Mental Health
According to an article on Healthline.com, “Holistic therapy addresses the mind, body, and spirit to support health and healing.”
This can include things like:
Dance/movement therapy and other somatic therapies
Creative expression
Internal Family Systems therapy or “parts work”
Grounding exercises
Embodied mindfulness
Anything that helps you approach your clients as whole people with bodies and feelings (not just brains with thoughts) can help you cultivate a more holistic approach to your practice.
But most contemporary approaches to therapy and coaching tend to focus solely on the mind. Unfortunately, when we never move beyond our minds or thoughts, we lose out on so much potential healing and growth.
Cognitive Therapy is a New Phenomenon
While cognitive therapies are extremely popular, leaving the body and spirit out of the healing space is a very new strategy. It originated with modern psychology, which was developed less than 200 years ago.
When we look beyond a Western perspective or explore healing modalities throughout time, we find that holistic approaches to health and healing are far more common than mind-centric approaches. Traditional medicine systems like Ayurveda (which originated in India over 5,000 years ago) and traditional Chinese medicine (or TCM, dating back to 200 BCE) have taken a holistic approach to healing for centuries, addressing everything from diet and exercise to mindfulness and spirituality.
What all holistic healing approaches have in common is their dedication to caring for the whole person. By moving beyond the mind, we can help our clients establish a deeper sense of integration and alignment within themselves, bringing together all of their complex parts. According to the Oxford Treatment Center, “the goal of holistic therapy is to help a person gain a greater understanding of themselves and increase self-esteem and self-confidence.”
This is what we aim to do as holistic somatic practitioners.
The Benefits of Becoming a Holistic Practitioner or Coach
By adopting a holistic approach to your practice, you can experience massive shifts in the quality of your practitioner-client relationships and help your clients experience more significant healing and growth.
Here are some of the shifts you might see as a result of adopting a more holistic and embodied approach in your practice:
Move Beyond the Mind
The mind is just one part of our being. If we stop there, we miss out on so much of ourselves. By taking a holistic approach that involves somatics and embodiment, we can move beyond the mind into the physical, emotional, and spiritual realms of our clients’ lives and experiences.
Moving beyond the mind can look like incorporating embodiment practices into your client sessions, helping your clients understand how emotions feel in their bodies, or incorporating creative expression into your practice.
However you choose to accompany your clients beyond their minds and thoughts, this process can help your practice feel more holistic and serve as a better container for holding the fullness of your clients’ experiences.
Go Deeper with Your Clients
Incorporating a holistic approach into your practice allows you to navigate more complex territory with your clients. Instead of simply entering every problem or struggle through the mind, a holistic approach offers many different doorways.
The mind is good at shutting us out. It knows how to section things off and compartmentalize difficult or painful memories. If we only ever rely on the mind to let us in, we get stuck navigating the surface of a problem.
By using an embodied approach, you can offer your clients a wide variety of strategies for exploring and moving through their stuck areas and roadblocks. This allows you to dive deeper, helping your clients make more significant progress as they move toward their healing goals.
Address Trauma and Past Experiences
According to Maureen Salamon of Harvard Health, the mind-body approach of somatic therapy can aid trauma recovery. This is because trauma happens and is stored in the body. To find and heal the root of trauma, we must involve the body in that process.
Many clients feel stuck in their experiences of cognitive therapy because they're trying to address trauma that’s stored in the body by entering through the mind. This approach can lead to years of navigating the same territory over and over, never feeling like you're making significant progress.
The ability to help your clients heal through trauma and difficult past experiences is the most powerful and important reason to adopt a somatic approach. This is how we move from simply listening to and supporting our clients to guiding them into a more liberated and empowered future.
Remove Roadblocks to Healing
By bringing a holistic approach into your practice, you can help your clients break patterns they’ve been stuck in for years. In our work at Healing Embodied, our clients tell us all the time about how they spent years in talk therapy, experiencing very little progress or change. They got burnt out and knew they needed something different. Once they found our programs and started experiencing a more holistic and embodied approach to healing, their growth soared.
“I had a conventional CBT therapist for about five years before I discovered dance/movement therapy through Healing Embodied,” shares Dana Yewbank, one of our Healing Embodied clients and Trust in Love members. “I had actually ‘quit’ therapy a few months before finding HE, because it just wasn’t working for me anymore.”
“Once I started working with Healing Embodied, everything changed. I feel far more confident and at home in myself than I did before. Getting into my body and out of my mind was the magic I needed all along.”
In many practitioner-client relationships, somatic work is the missing piece. It’s the piece that allows you to dig deep and support your client’s whole experience, helping them alchemize their pain and trauma and grow into deeper freedom and trust.
Join Our Accredited Holistic Practitioner Training Program!
At Healing Embodied, we've made it our mission to help clients and practitioners alike discover the power of embodied mental health and integrative healing. Our accredited practitioner training program — the first of its kind — can help you become the most effective practitioner you can be, giving you the skills you need to confidently guide your clients through the process of self-integration.
Led by our Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapists, this year-long program incorporates somatic work, embodiment, creative expression, parts work, inner child work, and shadow work. By diving deep and showing up as our full selves, we learn to help our clients do the same.
Our next cohort begins February 2025! To get all the details and next steps, hop on our waitlist today.