Approach Pat Ogden · Trauma-Informed Body Psychotherapy · DIP Critical Reading

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

What did the organism want to do — and what form of completion is actually appropriate now?

At a glance

Developed by Pat Ogden, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy integrates body-based work with contemporary trauma theory and attachment theory, focusing on “action tendencies” — the body’s interrupted impulse to act (to flee, to push away, to reach) during an overwhelming experience — and supporting a person to notice and, where useful, complete that impulse safely in the present.

What it’s asking the therapist to do

Track small physical impulses as they arise in session, name them, and invite slow, mindful movement to explore or complete them, always titrated to stay within a manageable range of activation.

You might recognise this

“I’ve been invited to complete a pushing-away movement my arms literally can’t make.” “Imagining the movement, in detail, did something real for me even though my body never moved.” “Saying ‘get away from me’ out loud completed something a physical push never could have.” “My action tendency was always there. It just never had the arm it needed.”

The disability question

“Completing the action” has an obvious physical bias built in — what did the organism want to do, what stopped it, and what form of completion is actually appropriate now are genuinely useful questions, but the completion itself doesn’t require full physical execution of the original impulse. A completion can be imagined, verbalised, or expressed through whatever movement is genuinely available, and still carry real psychological weight. This is an actively developing area of this site’s own framework, not yet as fully worked through as Reich or Boyesen.

A lived scene · fictional teaching example

A client, recounting a frightening medical procedure, notices a strong impulse to push the memory of the hands holding her still away from her. Her arms, affected by a longstanding motor condition, cannot make that pushing movement with any force. The therapist doesn’t try to physically approximate it. Instead, she asks the client to describe, in as much detail as she wants, exactly what pushing them away would feel like, sound like, look like — and to say the words “get off me” out loud, with as much force as she can put into her voice instead of her arms. Something visibly releases in her afterward, the same quality of discharge the physical version is meant to produce. The impulse found its completion through voice, not arms, and lost nothing in the translation.

Where this concept can help

Exploring interrupted protective or connective impulses from past overwhelming experiences, and finding a genuine, available channel — physical, vocal, or imagined — for completing them.

Where interpretation should stop

When a physical impulse genuinely cannot be executed and the exercise is pushed toward the original form anyway, rather than adapted; when the absence of physical completion is read as the trauma remaining unresolved.

Evidence and status

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a well-established clinical tradition integrating body-based and attachment-informed trauma theory. Its controlled evidence base is still small: our searches found one pilot randomised trial (Classen et al., 2020), far less than the evidence for established talk-therapy trauma treatments.

You may also want to explore

Somatic Experiencing · Medical Trauma & Body Ownership · Other Approaches & Evidence

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.