Disgust is often hidden within hypo-patterns – and thus hidden under anger. They both play a role in re-establishing boundaries after trauma – but in very different ways. Disgust establishes boundaries from deep inside – and supports us in being able to get rid of something toxic.

Anger is focused on taking action outgoing. The methods that are functional when working with anger don’t work in relation to disgust. We will introduce a specific bodily methodology that supports regulation of disgust – and we will explore what emerges bodily and emotionally after this regulation.

The workshop includes a short theoretical presentation, practical exercises and exchange in the group. Merete Holm Brantbjerg and Kolbjørn Vårdal are both founders of Relational Trauma Therapy. RTT is specialised in including hypo-states and disgust in trauma-work.

Merete Holm Brantbjerg has worked since 1978 as a body-psychotherapist and since 1985 as a trainer in Denmark and internationally. She is a co-founder of Bodynamic Analysis – and she is the founder since 2003 of Relational Trauma Therapy (RTT) together with Kolbjørn Vårdal. RTT is a psychomotor, neurocentric and systemsoriented approach. She is specialized in including hypo-states in trauma-work.

Kolbjørn Vårdal is a body psychotherapist with a master’s degree in Violence and Traumatic Stress. Since 2001, he has worked in Oslo as a teacher, supervisor, and psychotherapist. Since 2003, he has co-developed Relational Trauma Therapy together with Merete Holm Brantbjerg. He is specialized in using neurologically informed practices in body-oriented trauma therapy.

Some feel resistance, fear, or overwhelm; others feel curiosity or possibility. This experiential workshop offers a grounded, embodied, and relational exploration of therapists’ somatic responses to AI—without requiring any technical knowledge.

Through guided movement, somatic parts work and relational constellation exercises, participants will explore how AI shows up in their bodies, boundaries, values, and professional identities. Rather than focusing on technology itself, the session positions AI as a new “other” that evokes projections, archetypal patterns, and deep relational questions.

Together, participants will co-create a collective ethical map to illuminate what feels essential to protect, question, or imagine as AI enters the therapeutic landscape. The workshop closes with a ritual grounding to honour the irreplaceable qualities of human presence, attunement, and embodied connection.

Learning Methods: Experiential Learning, Guided movement, Somatic reflection, Integration.

Learning Outcomes: By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Track and articulate their somatic responses to the idea of AI in therapeutic settings.
• Identify inner parts (protective, resistant, curious, dismissive) that are activated by AI.
• Participate in a relational constellation to sense how AI occupies space within the therapeutic field.
• Contribute to a collectively generated ethical map of values, risks, boundaries, and possibilities.
• Clarify what aspects of human presence, embodiment, and attunement feel essential and non-negotiable in therapy.

Dr Geraldine Sheedy Barber (MIACP, C.Psychol. PsSI) is a Senior Lecturer at Munster Technological University (Cork) and practitioner in relational and somatic psychotherapy. Her doctoral research explored what happens between bodies in psychotherapy and her current research explores how relational somatic therapists perceive and relate to artificial intelligence.

Her work brings together body-based practice and emerging technology in ways that invite grounded dialogue, ethical reflection, and deepening awareness of what it means to remain fully human. She combines her teaching and research with a small private practice and provides clinical supervision and consultation. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, with a focus on best practice in psychotherapy training and innovative approaches to teaching and learning in the field.

As body psychotherapists, we are trained to observe, assess, interpret, and intervene. We work intentionally and skillfully with the body. Yet at the edge between knowing and not-knowing, doing and allowing, another possibility appears: What happens if we deliberately step aside?

Instead of using the body as an object of diagnosis or intervention, we experiment with directly asking the living body what it needs and wants. Rather than treating it as a container for emotions or narratives, we approach it as an autonomous subject — a dynamic field from which healing and development may arise.

Through guided mindful sensing and spontaneous movement, participants will explore how transformation might unfold when we suspend direction and trust the body’s inherent regulatory and developmental intelligence. We will investigate how listening — rather than shaping — can move us through the polarity between control and surrender.

The workshop offers a clear, ethically grounded framework that ensures safety and professional containment while allowing authentic embodied emergence. It is delivered within the method PME (Physio-Mentale Entwicklung), which provides the structural and conceptual foundation for this embodied approach.

Dieter Rehberg is Director of the Somatic Training Academy, a training institute accredited by the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP). He is a Master of Somatic Movement Therapy and Education (ISMETA) and holds an MA in Somatic Studies from Middlesex University (London), as well as a BA in Dance and Performance from European Dance Development Center (EDDC).

He is a licensed Psychological Counselor (LSB), a Massage Therapist, and a Body Psychotherapist. In addition to his clinical and educational work, he develops and teaches the method PME (Physio-Mentale Entwicklung) within professional training programs.

At the edge of experience—where intensity rises and regulation destabilizes—these polarities fracture. The organism loses its capacity to oscillate. One pole dominates while the other collapses: the body inflates or implodes, accelerates or freezes, fragments or clings. Here, the question is no longer simply regulation, but how to remain present when experience threatens to exceed the system’s capacity to hold it.

This workshop explores body psychotherapy within this edge space. It introduces an integrative framework for understanding how polarity becomes embodied through the interplay of breath, fascia, and autonomic regulation. Drawing on the Energetic Breath Cycle™, Fascia Texture Typology™, and Neurofascial Encoding™, it offers a precise language for tracking how experience is organized and re-patterned in living tissue.

Bridging Reichian pulsation, polyvagal theory, fascia research, and developmental somatics, the workshop reframes therapeutic work as restoring oscillation—supporting the organism’s capacity to move between poles without losing coherence. The approach is experiential and direct. Participants will explore the threshold where polarity destabilizes—and transformation becomes possible.

Through guided movement, breath modulation, micro-touch, and paired relational exercises, participants will:

• Track how polarities such as reaching ↔ withdrawing, charging ↔ yielding, and inflating ↔ collapsing emerge in real time
• Sense how these dynamics appear in fascial textures and breath patterns
• Recognize when the system approaches its edge of tolerance or disorganization
• Practice interventions that support the return of fluid oscillation

Dirk Marivoet, MSc, PT, PMT, ECP, CCEP, is a body-oriented psychotherapist and founder of Core Strokes® and the Neurofascial Transformation Process™. His work explores how experience becomes embodied through breath, fascia, and relational organization—especially at thresholds where regulation destabilizes and new patterns emerge. Integrating Reichian, post-Reichian, Bodymind Integration traditions, and fascia research, he developed the Energetic Breath Cycle™ and Fascia Texture Typology™.

We will focus our inquiry on the balancing between attachment and separation – individuation viewed not as polarities but as psychobiological needs leading towards authenticity and the integrity of self.

Our healing journey in ” cosmos” from the ” music of the spheres” as far as the ” bridge” of our heartfulness will be accompanied by stillness and movement, somatic meditation, music, symbols , postures of the soul and by relational neuroscience.

Xanthippi Svolopoulou: Body psychotherapist of Biosynthesis, international Bodynamic practitioner, NARM psychotherapist (healing developmental and complex trauma), 5 rhythms of Gabriel Roth, archetypes with Ditte Marker, Re-orienting birth with Lisbeth Marker. Presented workshops in Berlin 2018 (“Blossoming synapses”) and in Sofia 2023 (“Our blooming heart as our common identity”). MA of Greek Literature, History, Language (Paris 3).

Clinical experience consistently demonstrates that gender stereotypes profoundly shape interpersonal relating, often rooted in implicit early learnings embedded in the Basic Experiences of the Self (BES; Rispoli, 2004, 2026). These foundational psycho-body experiences, when fully lived, engage all levels of the organism—somatic, emotional, and relational.

Rigid gender stereotypes, particularly masculine ones, hinder positive access to certain BES, such as “Feeling oneself” and “Tenderness,” leading to diminished emotional availability and relational dissatisfaction.

This experiential workshop, grounded in Neo-Functionalism / Functional Psychotherapy, will present a specific sequence of body-oriented techniques commonly used in clinical practice to reactivate and integrate the capacity to Feel oneself, Perceive others, and experience Tenderness.

Participants will engage in guided techniques designed to foster psycho-body awareness, challenge rigid polarities, and promote more fluid, integrated ways of relating.

Marco Iacono, psychologist, psychotherapist, trainer of the European School of Functional Psychotherapy (SEF) and manager of courses in Trieste (Italy), vice-president of the Italian Association for Body Psychotherapy (AIPC), past-president of the Italian Society of Functional Psychotherapy (SIF), adjunct professor at the University of Udine and EABP full member.

It gives a small insight into how this bodywork is successfully applied in a psychiatric day clinic. Experience the miracle of getting moving through breath and feeling tensions flow away.

Split-off parts are reintegrated into the nervous system and allow us to navigate better on all levels of our lives. (What do I need? Where do I want to go? What is good for me? Where are my limits? Where can I widen my boundaries? How can I use my resources? What kind of potential do I have?)

The HKIT® approach has been working and researching for many years on how split-off parts can be reintegrated into the reality of people’s lives through the dance with the free impulse of movement, breath, voice and manipulative-free therapy. Through the new integration, mental illnesses can be reduced, cured and a better quality of life can be experienced. The invisible, unperceived becomes visible and tangible and thus it can be processed and healed.

Caroline Benhöfer-Buhr, born 1963, lives and works in Lower Saxony in Germany. She has been working as a dance therapist HKIT® in clinics and independent practices for 25 years.

Kathi Ellerbrock, born 1967, lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. She has been working as a dance therapist for 15 years, in a self-employed practice. She works with the method “Healing Forces in DanceHKIT” ® for women and young girls in dance pedagogy and dance therapy. Dance performer, for 10 years, in the group “Dancecollaboration”. Teaching therapist HKIT® Professional Association, German Society for Dance Therapists and Dance Teachers HKIT®

They believed that engaging in this dialogue could significantly enrich body-oriented psychotherapy by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the elusive concept of the “self” from a Self Psychology perspective. This dialogue might also help clarify therapeutic strategies for addressing the growing phenomenon of narcissistic personality styles, a trend that has replaced traditional psychoneuroses in contemporary times.

At the same time, a special issue of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry journal (2022) focused on “The Turn Toward Embodiment,” emphasizing the importance of embodiment in psychoanalysis. This focus on embodiment reveals a void in clinical theory and practice within self-psychology and relational psychoanalysis, where verbal expression has been favored over non-verbal, somatic experience.

Ernst and Stan, with a long-standing interest in fostering this dialogue, plan to host a conversation between both communities. In this workshop, they want to present Self Psychology to an audience of Body/Somatic Psychotherapists.

In a bid to foster dialogue between Self Psychologists and Body Psychotherapists, Ernst and Stan aim to shed light on the significance of merging somatic experience and therapy with self-psychology and psychoanalysis. This amalgamation, which is frequently overlooked in body psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment, can bridge the gap between these two therapeutic approaches.

Ernst Meyer is a Registered Clinical Psychotherapist and has been in private practice in Sydney/Australia since 2013. He is a board member of the “Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia” (PACFA), Convenor of PACFA’s “College of Psychotherapy”, holds a Masters Degree in Psychotherapy and Counselling, and is a full member of the “European Association for Body Psychotherapy” (EABP). Being a former police officer, he specialises in supporting former and serving first responders.

Stan Dudley, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist who has been in private practice for 42 years in Cincinnati, Ohio. He provides individual treatment for adults and adolescents and couples and family therapy. Dr. Dudley has been a supervisor and taught courses in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and self-psychology. He has been a consulting psychologist completing assessments on children and adolescents for the Hamilton County Department of Children’s Services and the Juvenile Detention Center.

At a somatic level, Instroke work increases energetic density, strengthening the client’s energetic core, which in itself can initiate a profound healing process.

This approach inspired me to develop my own interpretation of Will Davis’s work. Within relational Body Psychotherapy, Instroke-based techniques can provide valuable resources for supporting early traumatized clients more effectively.

In this experiential workshop, we will explore how Instroke work and relational therapy can complement one another, offering participants practical ways to integrate inward energetic processes with attuned, relational, and somatic practice.

Olaf Trapp: 66 years old German, Certified Bioenergetic Therapist (IIBA), based in Zagreb/Croatia, former president of the European Federation for Bioenergetic Analysis (EFBA-P), 40 year’s experience in bodywork, first as a massage therapist and teacher for Acupressure. He led body psychotherapeutic workshops in USA, Chile, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Greece. He is working in private practice with an emphasis on early developmental trauma, structural disorders and psychosomatics.