Relational body psychotherapy offers a unique contribution to working with disorganised attachment through using embodiment and the relationship as anchors and platforms for growth and healing. When working with highly dissociated clients, who have needed to split from their bodies in order to survive and are unable to consider their body as a safe haven for their psyche, the task of body psychotherapy is of a different quality. For some people with a disorganised attachment pattern, neither the body nor the relationship is experienced as safe.

In this paper I explore the tension between the experience of “feeling at home” and homelessness, between embodiment and disembodiment; of finding a middle way to meet the other where body and connection are standing on thin ice. I will share my own personal experience as a person who becomes dissociated, where embodiment and attachment are extremely challenged and also my clinical experience as a relational body psychotherapist.