Anne Isaacs

All my life I have been concerned with what makes people the way they are both individually and as members of society. My brother is a polio survivor, and all four of my family members had life threatening illnesses or experiences when I was seven years old.  Life seemed fragile. I felt overwhelmed and frustrated.  By the time I was in junior high school, I was often in the principal’s office with the “hoods”, although they were not my tribe. I was a solo juvenile delinquent, in a middle class, white New Jersey suburb.  I knew no one like me.  It was suggested I should leave the public school.

Fortunately, I went to a Quaker boarding school, and found a place to channel my rage and passion: the civil rights movement.  In college I pursued sociology and anthropology, in graduate school social work.  I was the first person hired to develop a new mental health program in a rural county of Arizona. As part of my continuing education, I chose to go to Esalen, and discovered working with the body.

My first training was in Radix, an emotional release model, and became familiar with several other body modalities.  I started to land in my body. Yet it was only when I was introduced to Bodynamic Somatic Developmental Psychology that something deeper in me became clear.  Underneath all that anger was my fear, fear of abandonment, fear of depending on anyone, fear of letting go.  I understood that more rigid defense patterns were protecting the undeveloped parts of me.  I marveled at the precision of how by using the specific muscles corresponding to my developmental themes and issues, new resources were experienced, and issues were resolved.

I became a Bodynamic Analyst and Trainer, and have been teaching and developing the work with my husband Joel since 1995.  Bodynamics focuses verbal psychotherapy and heals developmental disruptions by using the body to evoke the historical context of an issue being worked on, by affirming the therapeutic relationship, and by building needed resources and a related sense of competency.  A person’s psychological, somatic and cognitive development, their abilities, their rigidities, and what they lack, are  mirrored in our body and movements.  Resources as well as defense patterns can be stuck  in either hypo-responsive or hyper-responsive body-psychological-social patterns. The empirical research underlying Bodynamics allows us to use specific muscles to build or free the resources needed to resolve the issues each person presents.

I have deepened my understanding attachment states of mind by training with Mary Main and Eric Hesse, attended many Attachment conferences in Los Angeles, spent a year training with Ron Frederick and Diana Fosha in AEDP, and have integrated all of this into the Bodynamic trainings.

In addition, I am also influenced by Bairo Tulku, and the body based Buddhist work of Julie Henderson and Tony Richardson. Yet I find the core of my work is the compassion I feel for the way we survive by defenses held unconsciously in our body, and how moved I am to see people change these old patterns so effectively using the appropriate muscles.

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