About this recording
For more than forty years, Pat Ogden has been reshaping how clinicians understand trauma and the role of the body in therapeutic change. As the creator of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy method, she has shown that movement, posture and physiological states often carry the imprint of early relational experiences and survival responses that never fully enter language. Her work gives therapists a clearer way of understanding the implicit patterns that sit beneath symptoms, especially in patients whose histories are fragmented or held in the nervous system.
In this Legacy Interview, Pat is joined by Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and developmental psychologist Ed Tronick. Their dialogue brings together somatic psychotherapy, developmental science and psychoanalytic thinking in a way clinicians seldom have the opportunity to witness.
Together with interviewer Jane O’Rourke, they explore the clinical realities of working with the body in psychotherapy: how to track somatic cues, how to respond when the nervous system becomes the primary communicator and how the therapist’s own embodied presence shapes the work.
The interview includes a clinical video from Pat’s practice, which she pauses and discusses as it plays, giving insight into her therapeutic decisions as they unfold.
For clinicians wanting to deepen their understanding to work with body states, this is an opportunity to learn from the field’s most influential figures.
Why this conversation matters
Across therapeutic disciplines, clinicians are seeing more patients whose trauma presents not as coherent narrative but as patterns in the nervous system: collapse, hyperarousal, freezing, disconnection, somatic tension, movement impulses and shifts in posture. Therapists trained primarily in talking therapies often feel unsure how to interpret or work with these expressions.
At a time when many are seeking body-focused trauma training or CPD that complements traditional psychotherapy, Pat Ogden’s work offers a grounded and clinically accessible way of bringing the body into the room safely and thoughtfully. This recording is not formal training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Instead it highlights principles any therapist can integrate into their thinking, formulation and moment-to-moment decision-making.
Bessel van der Kolk’s work has been pivotal in reframing trauma in children and adults as a disruption of brain-body regulation rather than simply a narrative memory, giving a scientific foundation to why clinicians must attend to somatic and autonomic patterns in the consulting room.
Ed Tronick’s contribution deepens this perspective. His research shows how wellbeing depends on cycles of mismatch and repair. When these processes fail early, the body often becomes the repository. Understanding these dynamics is essential for contemporary trauma work.
What you’ll learn
By watching you will gain insight into:
- How movement, posture and gesture express implicit procedural memories
- How to recognise somatic narratives that diverge from verbal accounts
- Ways of integrating body-based awareness into traditional psychotherapy
- How the therapist’s embodied state supports co-regulation and emotional steadiness
- Working with micro-movements, orienting responses and shifts in arousal
- Understanding trauma through the nervous system rather than narrative alone
- How implicit memory shapes clinical presentations across the lifespan
- Why some survival energies appear frightening and how to conceptualise them safely
- How Ed Tronick’s models of dyadic regulation, mismatch and repair enrich somatic and relational work
- What Pat has learned from her own body, her clients and decades of clinical observation
You will come away with clearer ways of noticing embodied trauma responses, understanding what they may be signalling and integrating this awareness into therapeutic action.
More about this Legacy Interview
Pat Ogden’s contribution to psychotherapy emerged from clinical curiosity, patient observation and a striking attunement to the implicit layers of experience. Long before Sensorimotor Psychotherapy had a name, she was paying attention to the ways the body communicates what speech often cannot. Early experiences of physical freedom, loss and a heightened awareness of her own bodily responses later shaped the way she listens to somatic cues in the consulting room. She has described learning to recognise patterns in the body before those patterns surface in language, a perspective that went on to shape her entire clinical approach.
This Legacy Interview traces how those formative experiences developed into a method that now informs trauma treatment internationally. Pat discusses how she tracks somatic shifts during sessions, how she recognises cues that precede narrative awareness and how she works with voluntary and involuntary movement when addressing trauma and attachment patterns. Her reflections place the body at the centre of meaning-making and therapeutic change rather than as an adjunct to talking therapy.
Pat uses clinical video material to talk through what she notices moment by moment, how she responds to emerging impulses and how she integrates subtle bodily information into the wider therapeutic frame. This Legacy Interview offers a rare chance to see her work in action and how theory becomes technique.
Pat is joined by close collaborators, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and developmental psychologist Ed Tronick. Their dialogue brought together somatic psychotherapy, developmental science and psychoanalytic thinking in a way clinicians seldom have the opportunity to witness.
Psychotherapist and broadcaster Jane O’Rourke guides a conversation that weaves together personal history, clinical insight and applied technique. The aim is to help therapists think more precisely about the information held in posture, movement and autonomic shifts, and how this knowledge can support clinical judgement across modalities. Pat was practising body based approaches long before the field took shape formally, and her work has been central in bringing the body back into the heart of psychotherapy.
Special Guests
Bessel van der Kolk, MD
Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and President of the Trauma Research Foundation.
Since the 1970s Bessel has focused on post-traumatic stress in children and adults and how overwhelming experiences shape the body, brain and relationships. He founded the Trauma Center in Boston and has been central in advancing clinical and scientific approaches to traumatic stress. Pat has been an important influence on bringing the body into Bessel’s thinking. He is widely known for his book The Body Keeps the Score.
Ed Tronick, PhD
Developmental and Clinical Psychologist. University Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Boston.
Creator of the Still Face Experiment and the Mutual Regulation Model, Ed has transformed understanding of how infants and caregivers co-create meaning. His research spans infant development, maternal depression, cultural caregiving and psychotherapy, illustrating how early rupture and repair shape the nervous system and the capacity for connection. His work bridges developmental science and psychoanalytic thinking, influencing generations of clinicians working with trauma, attachment and dysregulation.
About Pat Ogden
Founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. Pioneer of body-based approaches to trauma and internationally recognised clinician, author and trainer.
Pat Ogden, PhD, has spent more than four decades developing a clinical approach that integrates somatic awareness with attachment theory, neuroscience and the psychology of action. Her work shows how trauma and early relational experience are carried in movement, posture and autonomic patterns, often long before these experiences reach language. She is known for her ability to track subtle somatic cues and translate them into therapeutic meaning, and for demonstrating moment-by-moment decision-making in trauma treatment. Pat’s books and teaching have shaped contemporary somatic psychotherapy and influenced clinical practice worldwide.
Who this recording is for
- Therapists wanting to deepen their understanding of the body’s role in trauma and attachment
- Clinicians seeking practical ways to integrate somatic awareness into talking therapies
- Practitioners curious about what decades of somatic and developmental research reveal about effective trauma work
- Supervisors supporting therapists who are learning to track implicit cues, arousal shifts and embodied communication
- International mental health professionals looking for accessible insight into Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and embodied clinical practice
Interviewer
Jon is in conversation with Jane O’Rourke.
Jane O’Rourke, founder of MINDinMIND and a former award-winning BBC journalist now practising as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, draws upon her combined expertise to create rich and thoughtful conversations with leading mental health clinicians. Her interviews weave together the personal and professional threads of her guests’ journeys, capturing the experiences that have shaped their clinical work and thinking.