Investigation into the Experience of a Movement-Based Group Therapy Intervention: An Integrated Mind-Body Approach.

摘要

Despite modernization of human societies, the human stress response is essentially unchanged and not always helpful in dealing with modern psychological stressors. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand and describe how people experience: 1) the stress intervention used in this investigation, 2) stress before and after the intervention, and 3) mind-body connection before, during, or after the intervention. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted after the administration of the group stress-intervention. The partcipants were pre-screened, ensuring each experienced a minimum level of objective stressors but did not endorse clinical levels of anxiety or depression. There were several themes found describing the experience of the group including: group experience of unity is a key factor, grounding occurs from an internal experience of relaxation and the shared experience of the group process, slowing the body down helps individuals with self-reflection, mindfulness as a tool-even if self-evaluation of its use was poor-is relaxing and centering, and the whole of the group seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. The main theme found when describing the mind-body connection was that the mind-body connection is always experienced, but rarely in gestalt. The main themes found when describing the experience of stress were that stress is a disconnected experience of either body or mind until an experience of relaxation brings awareness of the entire stress experience to the participant and that transformational coping occurs as awareness of the effects of stress increase in juxtaposition to an experience of relaxation. The essence of their experiences are presented.