Dyspraxia and Disorientation: Navigating Embodied Safety

There is a particular quality of disorientation that is very familiar to me. It comes with an internal scramble: where am I in this? For much of my life, I have understood that scramble as a social or emotional response. Only more recently have I begun to trace it further back to something embodied and foundational.

Proprioceptive uncertainty might be seen as a version of the shifting relational field, experienced from the inside. I am beginning to see that growing up with dyspraxia (making me unsure of my position in space, of where my physical boundaries were) shaped not only my body, but my psychological sense of self. The gestalt concept of the contact boundary is the place where self meets world, where we take in what nourishes and push away what does not. I now see that this boundary has been uncertain for me at a bodily level. External feedback therefore became my primary orientation, shaping my creative adjustments. I learned to locate myself not through internal and embodied assurance but through the reactions I provoked in others.

I am still understanding what this has meant for my relationships. When the other is how you know where you are, their uncertainty becomes yours; their withdrawal, a loss of bearings. Reorientating myself has therefore not been a simple therapeutic task but rather a more fundamental one: learning to trust a felt sense of self that historically has not reliably been available to me.

I found support for this from different sources. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes that “real safety is the willingness not to run away from yourself”. What has helped me most has certainly involved meeting myself, and meeting my body in particular. Embodiment practices felt like a scary place to go, but gradually, over a few years, I built confidence and had more capacity to not run away from this uncomfortable, awkward aspect of myself. And in more recent times, I have even found myself running towards this embodied aspect through different practices that bring me much joy and previously-unknown embodied freedom alongside the continued discomfort. In fact, I’ll be on a dance and movement retreat during the UKAGP conference, so this is my offering from afar to this year’s rich theme.

These embodied practices have something in common: they are not about achieving safety by managing the external field. They are about finding an orientation inside myself. My therapist uses a somatic term – the midline, and I have come to understand this as a moment of organismic presence and satisfaction in the gestalt sense, a felt experience of congruence, of “rightness”, that arises when I am fully in contact with myself. From my midline, the shifting field becomes more navigable.

In the recent British Gestalt Journal seminar day, Peri Mackintosh taught an embodied practice that has its roots in Zen Buddhism, which aims to support us as therapists when we lose this midline, helping us find our way back again. It pointed towards something I recognised in my personal explorations: that the capacity to meet the other without defensiveness is not the absence of emotion but an orientation that holds emotion without being overtaken by it. That is what finding my midline has truly offered me: a ground from which genuine contact (with self, with other, with the shifting relational field) becomes possible. Finding one’s internal safety is, I would suggest, what makes genuine contact possible. To meet the other fully, we need somewhere to meet them from.

It seems that what dyspraxia made unavoidable for me (this confrontation with an unreliable ground), the shifting relational field asks of us all. None of us are ever fully stable within this field. The field moves between rupture and repair, between knowing and not-knowing. We are experiencing it acutely in this moment of history as the collective ground shifts beneath us in ways that exceed any individual’s capacity to metabolise alone.

What I have been learning, slowly and somatically, is this: navigating safety is not about finding stillness. It is about coming into contact with something internal that can move with the field. For me, that has meant learning to inhabit a body I once sought to keep at a distance. Perhaps for each of us, that midline is closer than we might believe…

I’m wishing you all a nourishing and enriching conference.

Helen (Tal) Moss is a gestalt psychotherapist in private practice in York. Their work is informed by their own experience as a neurodivergent person, and they have a particular interest in working with clients around neurodivergence, spirituality, gender and sexuality.

Website: www.gestalttherapy.love