Diane Boyden Pesso and Albert Pesso, founded Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP®) in 1961 – a serendipitous outcome arising from the pressure of personal crises, in combination with their background as dancers, teachers and choreographers. From the beginning, they never took things for granted for both were deeply invested in understanding how things came about.
They soon recognized the profound significance of what they had established, and worked continuously to systematize the process. They were deeply invested in making it duplicable and understandable so others could learn it. Now PBSP® is taught in nine countries in training programs overseen, supported, and furthered by the international, non profit organization, the Psychomotor Institute, Inc.
It is a method that allows the physical, motoric, yet symbolic, expression of feelings that are deeply stored in the body from impressive past events. Those emotional and somatic imprints are treated as clues leading back to those specific events — also as triggers which can release the stored energy in the form of emotional behavior, acted in the present, but more pertinent to that history.
PBSP® "structures" employ the use of ideal figures who provide the client with tactile, motoric, visual and auditory input that can be used as material to construct, in the mind’s eye and in the mind’s body, an experience, parallel — but in healing contrast — to the original traumatic event. Although the activity occurs in the room, the final and most meaningful locus of reconstruction takes place in the inner theater of the mind. With the therapist’s help, this present day therapeutic experience is carefully linked to childhood memories and states. Thus, those virtual events — recorded as literal historic events – result in the client enjoying believable and strongly felt anticipations of a new and more satisfying future.
There in the mind, a "new" history is being crafted and accurately located in the appropriate centers.
In an atmosphere of safety, care and respect, (the hallmark of PBSP® therapy) the PBSP® therapist closely and carefully tracks the meaning of verbal, nonverbal, and emotional information that comes to the client’s attention as it rises to the surface of their minds and bodies.
A role-played "truth stating" figure externalizes and illustrates the clients’ spoken thoughts and beliefs by stating the old "truths" the client lives by. If the client says, "I have to take care of myself because there is no one in the world who will do that for me," that figure is instructed to announce that truth, "You have to take care of yourself because there is no one in the world who will do that for you.".
A role-played witnessing figure validates the clients’ emotional expressions, naming each emotion (and the context of the emotion) in a compassionate, accepting manner: ("I see how bitter you feel as you hear that statement.")
Such clear, internal and external views of consciousness spur the client’s associations and induce the recollection of past, life-shaping, events that have a similar configuration and emotional effect. Memories evoked by these procedures are powerful and experienced almost as if they were happening in the present. The client is thus in the dual position of "reliving" a vivid memory while at the same time observing him/her self from a therapeutic perspective.
When the client recalls the painful memory of the rejection and disappearance of his/her father while a child, the client can ask a group member to role-play the "rejecting and disappearing aspect" of his/her father.
Although absorbed with this externally represented memory, the client is nonetheless able to use his/her new-found awareness of emotions, body sensations, and impulses as the motive force to express what is coming up from moment to moment. "Accommodation," the role-playing procedure that provides the wished-for interaction that matches each action, not only allows full expression of each emotion but provides maximum relief and satisfaction. Clients can thus air and safely integrate feelings that have been long buried and deeply repressed.
However, emotional expression alone is not enough for long lasting change. New learning requires new experience. What has happened, as well as what has not happened shapes our character and personality during our formative years. We cannot undo the past, but clients in a PBSP® structure experience what it might have been like to have had a non-rejecting, non-disappearing father. While clients are in the ‘as if real’ situation, vividly remembering past events, interactions with symbolic "ideal parents" provide their remembered child states with experiences that would have had a positive influence on their attitudes towards themselves and the world.
These new experiences give clients a positive lens through which to see and experience the world. They can now choose not to be ruled by habitual, emotional overreactions — displaced anger, anxiety, depression, and chaotic states. Thus clients can function more productively in present day, reality settings.
PBSP® is considered a psychoanalytic process, a behavior modification process, a re-parenting process, a gestalt process, a body therapy process, a family therapy process (without the family), and more. It contains so much that is fundamental to all forms of psychotherapy that it relates easily to all major techniques used to treat emotional and mental problems. Therapists use PBSP®, in groups and on a one to one basis, with a wide variety of populations. It is successfully used in psychiatric settings, drug and alcohol treatment centers, pain clinics, and obesity treatment programs. It is effective with victims of abuse, incest victims, and adolescents in trouble with their emotions, the law and drugs. It has significant value in application to marriage and family problems and is now being used to alleviate executive stress and to deal with other organizational problems.
