Enesa Mahić on body psychotherapy and the integrative approach
How does the body store our emotional experiences, and how can psychotherapy help release them? Enesa Mahić, psychologist and body psychotherapy educator, has been exploring this connection for over two decades through her work with clients and the training of future therapists.
As a co-founder of the Center for Integrative Development – ICBP (CIR – ICBP), she is dedicated to the advancement of body-oriented psychotherapy in Croatia and the wider region. CIR ICBP is an accredited training institute that offers a five-year education in integrative body psychotherapy, as well as a two-year personal development program in Zagreb, Rijeka, Belgrade, and Budapest.
Our editor, Indira Juratek, spoke with Enesa, who shared how her love for psychotherapy began, why the body plays an important role in the therapeutic process, and how movement, dance, and awareness can lead to deeper transformation.
How did your love for psychotherapeutic work emerge? When did it start, and where has it brought you so far?
In my early twenties, I was deeply involved in various forms of contemporary and conscious dance. During longer or more intense dance sessions, I began to experience physical and emotional reactions that I’ve never encountered before and couldn’t explain. My search for answers led me to body psychotherapy, a therapeutic modality that explores the interaction between body and psyche. Completely fascinated by everything I was experiencing and learning, I enrolled in a training in France and later, together with Laszlo Pinter, organized the first body psychotherapy training in Croatia, where we both worked as assistants.
Where did that path take me?
To a life where, for more than 20 years now, I’ve been continuously doing work that I absolutely love — work that is equally exciting, creative, and deeply meaningful. It’s a profession that doesn’t allow stagnation: if I want to work well with clients, I have a responsibility to keep learning and improving, and also to work on my own personal issues. Entering someone else’s inner world is a privilege, and it is the therapist’s duty to work through anything that might hinder their ability to accompany and guide clients with impartiality and compassion.
An unexpected but wonderful benefit of this work is that, for years now, both personally and professionally, I’ve mostly been surrounded by people who have experienced psychotherapy — people who approach themselves and the world more maturely and responsibly, with open minds, sincerity, and respect. I’m endlessly grateful for this “bubble” of wonderful colleagues, collaborators, and friends.
You and Laszlo Pinter are the pioneers of body psychotherapy in Croatia, and together you founded the CIR ICBP Institute based on twenty years of collaboration, practice, research, and teaching. Thousands of people have gone through the programs of the Center for Integrative Development. What does the Institute offer today?
We offer a two-year personal development program, a five-year training in body psychotherapy, a summer retreat, as well as a series of lectures and open one-day workshops.
In the personal development program, over two years, we go through the foundational concepts of body psychotherapy both theoretically and experientially from the position of a client – everything we learn, we simultaneously explore through personal experience. In the third year, trainees shift their perspective and begin to learn how to use what they have learned and experienced on their own skin as tools to support others therapeutically, gradually expanding and deepening this knowledge.
While short lectures and workshops are an opportunity to get to know body psychotherapy, the summer retreat on the island of Lošinj is a treat for both us and the participants 🙂 Each team member offers a three-hour workshop aligned with the shared theme of the retreat, all set in a beautiful environment just a few steps from the sea. As a team, we also spend time together – we attend each other’s workshops, cook together, sunbathe, rest, and plan new projects… We still have many projects in the works, and it’s always a joy to see how much love and passion the whole team feels for this work.
Everyone has heard of psychotherapy, but body psychotherapy is still unfamiliar to many. Can you explain to our readers what body psychotherapy actually is?
My impression is that even psychotherapy itself is still relatively unfamiliar in our part of the world – most people have heard of the term, but many have a distorted idea of what psychotherapy actually is. Some of the most common misconceptions are that only people with serious mental health problems go to therapy, or that the therapist’s job is to listen and tell you what to do.
Just like it’s better to visit a doctor when symptoms are still mild or tidy up your home before it turns into total chaos, it’s also better to go to therapy before a problem grows to the point where it disrupts everyday functioning. A psychotherapist doesn’t tell you what to do – they help you see your situation from a different perspective, support you in feeling what’s hard to feel, and with that broader understanding and new experience, help you find your own solution.
Body psychotherapy involves including the body in the therapeutic process. The body has been part of absolutely every experience we’ve ever had – even those we no longer consciously remember. So why has the connection between body and emotions only relatively recently become recognized in psychotherapy? We need to remember that psychotherapy began with psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The Victorian era was not exactly body-friendly. There’s a joke that in those times even piano legs were covered with fabric because they looked too suggestive, and showing an ankle in public was considered scandalous. So from the very roots of psychotherapy, the body couldn’t take the place it deserved, and it took decades before it started being acknowledged as a key factor in therapeutic work.
We actually all know the connection between body and emotions – the “butterflies” in the stomach when we’re in love or nervous, clenching our jaw or fists when we’re angry, tight shoulders or back after a stressful day, the exhale of relief when we meet someone who loves us, the heaviness in our chest when we lose someone…
In body psychotherapy, you will always be encouraged to stay present with bodily sensations; sometimes you’ll be invited to physically express the emotions you’re talking about, and sometimes we’ll use touch or movement to help the body and emotions settle and stabilize.
When we talk about the body, we’re talking about the nervous system and a whole array of almost invisible, involuntary reactions that give the therapist information about the person they’re working with. Through awareness of bodily responses and different interventions, we help the nervous system – that is, the body – to handle stress better, to feel more alive, safer, more relaxed. This long-term shift also changes how we see life: think about how the world and others look to you when you’re stressed, and how they look when you’re joyful and calm.
What are the advantages of body psychotherapy compared to other (psycho)therapeutic approaches?
It’s not a good idea to compare different psychotherapy approaches because a method that proves useful for one person may not work at all for another. As someone who remains deeply in love with body psychotherapy, it will always be my first choice — but I’ve also had great results with Gestalt or psychodrama, for example. What’s important is that we “click” with the therapist and that the therapy offers the right balance of growth and support within our zone of safety and comfort.
Working with the body in psychotherapy allows us to access unconscious material more easily, which means we can reach experiences we don’t consciously remember or those that occurred in early childhood before we had words to describe what we were experiencing. When it comes to psychosomatic illnesses (symptoms that arise from psychological influences on the body) or trauma work, including the body in the therapeutic process is also a logical choice.
And I’ll say it again — there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the human psyche.
As a therapist, I believe that we should engage in personal development and self-work even when we’re doing well — to build resources for difficult times and challenges, and also to process certain inner experiences more easily when we have the capacity to do so. But how do you explain to someone with a relatively healthy body why it’s still important to work with the body in this way?
I agree with you — the best time for psychotherapy is before a major life crisis happens. But it’s human nature to seek immediate gratification. Simply put, the part of the brain that seeks instant satisfaction is older and more familiar to us than the part capable of planning and delaying pleasure.
When life is relatively comfortable and safe, most of us won’t feel the need to change anything, and the promise of a better future won’t be enough to move us from the comfort of the present. And that’s OK.
Sometimes it’s precisely a crisis that pushes us out of stagnation and into taking steps we’ve been postponing. In Chinese writing, the character for crisis is made up of two words: danger and turning point. Many of us need a crisis in order to grow; sometimes we need a sore body to learn how to value and care for our health. That’s why I don’t think anyone should be persuaded into psychotherapy — body psychotherapy or any other kind — everyone has their own rhythm and motivation.
As a biologist — both through formal education and through observing animal behavior in the wild — I’ve often wondered how it’s possible that animals, who are exposed to life-threatening danger almost daily, live in a kind of zen without signs of trauma. I know Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, also observed that mammals living freely in nature cope with stress differently from humans. In the Energy Medicine training I attended, we were taught that this is because animals can “reset” themselves, unlike humans, who lose that mechanism very early in life and enter the so-called fight-flight-freeze mode. How can Somatic Experiencing specifically help with these patterns?
If we look at the history of humankind, it’s easy to conclude that we’re currently living better than most of our ancestors: we don’t die as often from violence or easily treatable diseases, our children receive better care, we enjoy more personal freedom, comfort, and safety… Our body — specifically, our nervous system — has evolved by surviving countless difficult experiences, and it knows how to cope with stress.
At the same time, this is a period in which we use our bodies less than ever before. Most people don’t live in tune with natural rhythms: we don’t wake up when we’re rested, but when we have to; we don’t eat only when we’re hungry, but use food for comfort because it’s more accessible than ever; we don’t move our bodies in the way nature designed us to — instead, we sit for hours in closed spaces under artificial light, bombarded with stimuli and offered very little space for decompression or emptiness.
Even the animals you mentioned, when kept in captivity, lose their zen and begin to behave neurotically, anxiously, or with signs of depression. Many of us are also trapped in seemingly “normal” lives, unaware that “normal” means common — but not necessarily healthy.
Fight/Flight/Freeze signals aren’t a flaw that appears when we don’t know how to regulate ourselves – they are an evolutionary gift: they carry the capacity of our nervous system to respond appropriately to the situation we’re in. If you step onto a pedestrian crossing and a car speeds toward you, an internal signal to run can save your life in a split second. People who have experienced a wild animal attack or a serious accident often report a lack of any sensation of pain in the moment it happened – the body takes care of anesthetizing us when needed.
The problem arises when the body doesn’t get the chance to release that charge once the danger has passed. If the input is far greater than the output, those signals can get confused. We freeze when it would be appropriate to run, or we flee when the situation isn’t dangerous. Maybe I just need to respond to a simple email, but my body reacts as if I’m preparing for a face-to-face battle with a predator. I want to tidy up my apartment, but for days I’ve been paralyzed by the seemingly overwhelming nature of the task. I go on vacation and can’t just relax – instead, I fill it with a thousand activities because stillness and rest make me feel uneasy.
Somatic Experiencing teaches us how to connect with the body’s barely noticeable reactions, how we can recognize and map them, and thereby slowly begin to consciously work with them. Specifically – how to consciously bring an overstimulated body into a state where it can regulate itself from the inside. When we’re not in fight, flight, or freeze, we are more connected to our environment (rather than to the source of potential danger), and experiencing the world through the body, through the senses, brings more relaxation and a sense of safety.
Try this simple exercise: close your eyes for a moment and feel how your body is. Then do three things:
- Completely relax and soften your belly,
- Let your shoulders fall down, a little bit further away from your ears,
- Release your tongue from the roof of your mouth and simply breathe naturally for a few moments.
Notice if anything has changed. For most people, this tiny intervention brings instant relaxation – some might even yawn. Try this again next time you feel tense or stressed.
You also work with expressive art therapy and you’re the first person I know who does. How does this form of therapy work, and who is it intended for?
I primarily use art therapy as a complement to body psychotherapy. Sometimes, it’s the quickest way to externalize an internal conflict, to give it form and observe it from the outside.
Clients are usually invited to represent their dilemma symbolically through visual art. Then we encourage them to interact with different parts of their creation – to assign them words, movement, sound… Through this interaction and expression, as well as connecting it to the real-life situation, both the art and the client go through transformation.
No artistic talent is required to create art – it can be used by both children and adults. It’s an excellent tool especially for clients who struggle to express themselves verbally.
You also lead dance workshops. How do those work? Why and how do people dance in your workshops?
Dance is my first love. In the dance workshops I’ve led for over 20 years, I use a combination of body psychotherapy and a method of conscious movement called 5Rhythms. In this form of dance, we’re not focused on learning steps or choreography – it’s more about remembering the free movement we’re all capable of.
Since the body isn’t separate from our psyche, the more freely and consciously we move, the more accessible and clearer our inner world becomes: all that which isn’t visible but still affects our lives. In shorter sessions we primarily focus on connecting with our own body, while longer workshops open space for deeper themes like childhood and relationships with parents, our sexuality, fear of death, and working with specific emotions like anger, fear, or compassion…
Dance, for me, is the most beautiful reminder of the body’s power. In a world saturated with information, dance is a space where we rely first and foremost on the body’s wisdom and memory – where cognition is temporarily replaced with instinct, where we don’t seek a linear A-B-C path toward a predefined goal, but instead allow the path to unfold beneath our feet, surprising us with what we find. And we find so much: new sensations and ways of inhabiting our body, new ways of connecting with others, meeting and expressing emotions we rarely access in daily life, new insights, understandings, and inspirations…
And in a materialistic world like ours, there’s something healing in the fact that dance doesn’t leave behind any material trace – it’s not a picture you can hang on the wall or post on social media, there’s no music to replay, no text to read and put on a shelf. It arises, takes hold of us, and disappears – and what remains is nothing but the personal experience, really impossible to fully convey to others.
Depending on your intention, this dance can be exercise, psychotherapy, and meditation – all in one.
Do you believe healing is ever possible through just one therapeutic modality, or are the best results achieved through a holistic approach involving the body, mind, emotions, spirit…?
First, we should see how do we define healing, since the term is often used in the context of spirituality or personal development. Healing as recovery of what’s been wounded? Or healing as a magical return to “factory settings,” as if the wound never happened?
When people start psychotherapy, their initial motivation is usually to alleviate or eliminate certain symptoms. In the context of therapy, our goal is recovery – the reduction or disappearance of symptoms and a return to functionality. In body psychotherapy, this path involves working on all necessary levels. If we talk about physical healing – say, of a broken arm – it’s not necessary to work with emotions, beliefs, or the spirit for the bone to heal. But psychological healing requires a more complex approach.
When we’re hurt, we wait for the wound to close, for what was broken to become whole again. The part of us that was injured can become strong and healthy again, but it won’t be magically healed as if the break never occurred.
As the well-known psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom said:
“Sooner or later, we must give up the hope for a better past.”
And in that vulnerability and fragility of being human, there is so much beauty.
The goal of psychotherapy is to come to know, accept, and integrate all that has happened to us, and then – including all of that – continue to live on a new, more fulfilling level. And to get there, we usually need to address all levels of our being: body, emotions, mind, will, and spirit.
If someone is hesitant to start therapy and unsure which modality to choose, what would you recommend? Where to begin, and how to know which approach yields the best results?
You can start by researching the foundational principles of the therapeutic modalities that interest you and choose the one that makes the most sense to you right now. Then narrow your search to a few therapists within that approach who you feel you might resonate with. If you have a recommendation, even better.
Remember – you are the most important part of therapy. What’s specific to psychotherapy is that your own motivation and engagement are key to its success. If you’re coming just because a family member wants you to, or out of sheer curiosity, the results likely won’t be as significant as when you come with a clear intention and readiness to make changes in your life.
Sometimes people choose a more “challenging” approach or therapist thinking they’ll progress faster that way. And while that can sometimes work, the foundation of effective psychotherapy is trust and a sense of safety. On such a foundation, even transference and dissatisfaction can be processed and integrated in a healthy way.
It’s impossible to say which approach gives the best results, because the human psyche isn’t a measurable object that always reacts the same in the same conditions. The same sentence from a therapist can bring one person relief and security, and another person wariness or suspicion.
So choose therapists with whom you feel safe and supported, educate yourself on what is and isn’t acceptable in therapy (so you can spot boundary violations), and don’t be afraid to communicate openly and honestly with your therapist – even about your dissatisfaction with the process. A good therapist will know how to work with that.
When you’re not doing therapy work, where can we find you? What are the things in life that spark glimmers in you – that feeling of joy and childlike wonder?
These days I do more education and supervision than therapy. But when I’m not in those roles:
Nature. Whether it’s staying in my little stone house by the sea, walking through forests or jungles, or tending to plants in the garden or in my living room – being in nature is my happy place. Coming back to it after some time and seeing that everything still takes care of itself, that there’s a bigger rhythm moving us without our effort – it gives me a sense of belonging. There’s so much beauty present when we’re in nature.
Dance. Every dance studio feels like coming home. I love letting the body speak, letting dance completely take over, with no need to explain it to anyone…
Travel. Arriving at a new place, seeing what’s considered “normal” elsewhere, getting inspired by it, trying everything that culture offers, recognizing similarities among people who look and speak differently – realizing we are part of the same species… Feeling that I can remember any place I’ve visited, that its smells, sounds, and flavours have stayed inside me.
Friends. A few special people I’ll always make time for, even during the busiest periods, because I know that time with them will always inspire me, nourish me, make me laugh…
Meditation. The moment I sit on my cushion, an invisible switch clicks, and my body and mind sigh with relief.
Life itself feels like a glimmer when I live it that way. My chubby white cat, poetry, twinkling lights on a gray winter day, a bouquet of pink flowers I regularly gift myself, a new song I stumble upon… The past three or four years have been very hard, but now I have the experience that even in the hardest processes – like my mother’s illness and death – there are moments of almost unbearable beauty and love. Once I’m tuned into presence and awareness, those flashes become more visible and precious.
We’re at the beginning of a new year. What kind of world do you hope to see in 2025?
Nonviolent. Conscious. Kind.
But considering that in the past 5,000 years there probably hasn’t been a time when some part of the world wasn’t at war, I remind myself that the only place over which I have any real influence is my own life. I can keep striving to cultivate those qualities in my own existence and be grateful when I notice I’m not alone in that effort.
And finally, what does “being well” mean to you?
To be like a flower growing in a crack in the asphalt – happy to have its own spot in the sun and determined to bloom there.
As Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in his poem Gift:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth envying.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
