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The Alexander Technique and Psychological Growth

© Adam Bailey

The Alexander Technique provides a number of psychological benefits. First, it's helpful to anyone who leads a stressful life. Through it, we learn to face the inevitable stresses of life without adding to the stress and tension in our body. Eventually, we can even lead our life while subtracting from those internal levels of stress!

The Alexander Technique can also provide a deeper benefit. For some people, their unconscious minds and their bodies may be the containers for feelings, memories and experiences that they're unaware of. They may have "forgotten" about these emotions because of the demands of growing up in modern society - or because the original experiences were painful or the environment didn't support their full expression of their feelings. This material is then stored in their bodies in the form of muscle tension, and may result in chronic pain, among other symptoms. Thus, these people, when they begin Alexander lessons, may experience deep emotions and memories from the past. For them, the Alexander Technique provides a safe, grounded means of dealing with this material as it emerges.

In order to illustrate the role of the Alexander Technique in psychological growth, I would like to describe my work with one particular client. Before I do that, however, let me offer a kind of disclaimer. While the Alexander Technique is a powerful tool for uncovering psychological material, most teachers do not offer counseling as a part of their work. Rather, when necessary, they refer a student to a counselor or psychotherapist. By contrast, I do include a counseling component in my work when it's appropriate. I'm comfortable doing that because, in addition to being trained as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I have a master's degree in Counseling Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and have done training in a variety of related disciplines. In addition, I taught psychology at the high school and college levels for nine years.

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The person I'll describe is a person in his 30's who runs an organic farm. I'll call him Seth. When he came to me for lessons, he was married and his wife had a long-term drug dependency. At the same time, he had had a history of chronic and at times severe back pain. He felt that this back pain had two causes: first, the tremendous physical and psychological demands of his work, and second, the stress of his relationship with his wife.

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