Outside the clinic
The body knows things the brain takes years to say.
Ben has been practising interpretive dance since 2017. He does it on Tuesday evenings in a Woolloongabba studio, in socks, with a group of seven other adults who have also decided this is a reasonable use of their time. He finds it genuinely transformative. He has not put it on his LinkedIn. He has considered it. He has not done it.
How it started
It started as a joke. A colleague mentioned a Tuesday-evening movement class in Woolloongabba and said Ben seemed like someone who needed to get out of his head. He went once to prove he didn't. That was seven years ago. He has never once proved he didn't.
Ben is not a dancer in any conventional sense. He has no training, no particular natural grace, and a left shoulder that does something his instructor charitably calls "characterful." His instructor has been calling it that for seven years and has never elaborated further. Ben has chosen not to ask.
The class meets on Tuesday evenings — eight people, a playlist that ranges from ambient drone to early Björk depending on the teacher's mood, and a group agreement that nobody talks about what they did until they're done moving. Ben, who talks for a living, finds this arrangement profound. His family finds his description of it profound in a different way.
"There's a whole body of research on somatic therapy — the idea that trauma, stress, and unprocessed emotion are held in the body as much as in the mind," he says. "I knew the theory. I'd read Bessel van der Kolk. I just didn't know what it felt like until I was standing in a studio in Woolloongabba at eight o'clock on a Tuesday and something shifted that hadn't shifted in a session or a run or a conversation. That was a significant moment." He pauses. "I was also wearing novelty socks with dachshunds on them. This did not diminish the significance."
He has not become evangelical about it. He tells people when it comes up, and it comes up more than you'd expect, because a psychologist who does interpretive dance on Tuesday nights is a fact that tends to surface. His partner thinks it's good for him. His kids think it's hilarious. His Tuesday-evening classmates are, by his account, the most emotionally honest group of people he has ever spent time with, which is saying something given his profession, and also given that one of them once interpreted the entire concept of Mondays using only their elbows.
He once arrived at Tuesday class directly from a four-hour deposition in a custody matter. He describes what followed as "the most useful forty-five minutes of that entire week." He also describes it as "the sweatiest," but considers this separate to the point.
In the room
What Tuesday night taught him about Thursday morning.
Ben does not ask clients to dance. He wants to be extremely clear about this. He has said it twice now because the first time he said it, a client looked alarmed. What he does do — carefully, when it fits, and only with clients who are ready for it — is draw on what he's learned about the body as a place where things get stuck and unstuck. This is different. Please do not bring dance shoes.
The body keeps the score
Van der Kolk's phrase has become shorthand, but the idea is serious: unprocessed experience doesn't just live in memory and cognition. It lives in the shoulders, the gut, the chest. Ben's practice on Tuesday nights has given him a felt sense of this that talking about it never quite could. He brings that understanding into the room — not as movement, but as attention. Specifically, not as movement. He cannot stress this enough.
Noticing where things land
In a small number of sessions — usually where a client has hit a wall with talking, where words keep arriving at the same place without moving anything — Ben will ask where they feel it in their body. The tight chest, the jaw, the hands that won't unclench. This isn't interpretive dance. This is, to be absolutely clear, not interpretive dance. It's the discipline interpretive dance taught him: the body is already communicating. You just have to ask it the question. No socks required.
The breathing, the stillness, the shift
What he's found, consistently, is that asking a man to notice his physical experience — without judgment, without trying to fix it — is one of the faster routes through a stuck moment. Not movement for movement's sake. Just the simple act of checking in with the physical before returning to the verbal. It takes about thirty seconds. It changes the room. It does not involve a playlist. It does not involve Björk. That part stays on Tuesdays.
What he doesn't do
He doesn't ask clients to move around the room. He doesn't interpret their posture or make claims about what their body "means." He doesn't bring his Tuesday-night playlist to a Thursday-morning appointment. He does not demonstrate. He has demonstrated once. It was at a conference in 2019 and he refers to it only as "the incident." The dance practice informs his attention, not his technique — and the distinction matters enormously, both professionally and personally.
The somatic thread in his practice draws on ACT's body-awareness components, Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing framework, and a fair amount of personal experience standing in a Woolloongabba studio wondering what his left shoulder is trying to say. His left shoulder has been saying something for seven years. He is still not entirely sure what. He suspects it is about his father.
Men come in and say "I don't know how to explain it." I used to think that was a problem to solve. Now I think it's information. The body already knows. We just need to stop talking long enough to hear it. And no, I won't show you what I mean by that.
Here for the therapy, not the dance.
The Tuesday-night class is not open to clients. The psychology practice very much is. These are two separate things. They will remain two separate things. There is a boundary and it is firm.