DIP Critical Reconstruction · From: Pulling & Pushing

Reaching, Receiving, Pushing Away

The original exercise family

Bodynamic work in this area uses arm movements — reaching toward, pulling in, pushing away — to explore a person’s relationship to wanting contact, accepting it, and refusing it.

What the theory may be assuming

That a person can voluntarily move an arm through a reaching and pushing motion, and that doing so is what makes the underlying psychological capacity accessible.

Three relational questions

Reaching: can I want something and make that want visible? Reaching may happen through speech, eye gaze, AAC, simply asking, gesturing, directing another person, or technology — not only an extended arm.

Receiving: what happens when something comes toward me? Receiving may involve assistance — someone else’s hands, a device, a support person carrying out the actual physical part of being helped.

Pushing away: can I create enough distance? This may mean saying stop, turning away, asking somebody to leave, using a support person to intervene, or changing the environment rather than moving a limb through it.

The psychological function underneath

Wanting contact. Accepting it when it’s offered. Refusing it when it isn’t wanted. None of that requires an arm. It requires the internal capacity to notice a want or a limit and to act on it in whatever way is genuinely available.

Two lived scenes

A client with very limited arm movement cannot perform the classical reaching gesture at all. But when asked directly what he wants, he answers immediately and clearly: he wants his sister to visit more, and he’s never told her. Reaching, for him, was never about the arm. It was about the asking, and the asking was the part he’d never practised.

A second client, fully able-bodied, reaches with total physical ease and demonstrates the classical exercise perfectly. But when help is actually offered to her — a hand, an object, support — she deflects every time, physically capable of receiving and psychologically unable to. The exercise’s form told the therapist nothing about where her real work lay.

Accessible ways in

A single finger’s movement toward or away from something. A shift in gaze toward or away from a person or object. A verbal “yes, come closer” or “not right now.” An internal, unspoken sense of leaning toward or away, simply noticed and named. A nod or a shake of the head. All of these carry the same psychological content as the original arm movement.

A process: Notice the pull → Name which of the three it is → Find the available channel → Act → Notice what happened

Notice the pull: is there a felt movement toward, or away, or a wish to receive?
Name which of the three it is: reaching, receiving, or pushing away — they call for different things.
Find the available channel: what actually available means, speech, gesture, technology, another person, can carry this?
Act: in that channel, however small.
Notice what happened: psychologically, not just whether the movement looked like the original exercise.

Where interpretation should stop

When physical inability to reach, receive, or push away with the arms is read as a psychological difficulty with wanting, accepting, or refusing; when smooth physical performance of the gesture is assumed to mean the underlying capacity is present.

A question worth carrying

What’s my actual answer right now — toward, or away — and what’s the smallest, most available way I have to express that?

You may also want to explore

Sensing My Space · Embodied No · Bodynamic Psychology

Evidence & sources

Sources checked in October 2026, using targeted searches rather than a systematic review. “We have not located” means our searches did not find it.