How posture and body language can affect our relationships

In a recent interview, singer Robbie Williams and his wife Ayda talked candidly about mental health and how they have both found therapy essential for dealing with life’s challenges. Robbie remarked how everyone in California – the birthplace of his wife – is born with a therapist already assigned. However, in the UK, there is still a stigma attached to requesting such help. Perhaps it’s that British psyche, the stiff upper lip, which prevents us from asking. I do believe this is changing and all for the better. Here I share my experiences of the coaching I've received following the death of my husband Ian.

Relationships. They can be wonderful, but fraught with challenges. And, I'm not just talking about romantic interactions. Think about the relationships we have with family, neighbours, friends, or work colleagues. It was through Time Line Therapy (an NLP approach) and embodiment coaching (also known as Somatic Coaching or Embodied Leadership) that Dawn Bentley, of Aurora Executive Coaching and Consulting helped me to recognise old patterns of behaviour. 

'Revisiting' past events and the emotions attached to these helped me to release some of the suppressed anger, or sadness, or anxiety I had carried forward. With Dawn's help I identified the key attributes I'm looking for in a personal relationship and examined my repetitive behaviours. Primarily for me, this was being a people pleaser, which means I try to morph into who I think the other person wants me to be, rather than being myself. You know the usual sticking points: the 'I'm not good enough/pretty enough/clever enough', the list goes on!  Working on how I physically presented myself we  addressed my posture and how I actually ‘showed up’ when replaying various scenarios together.  As I've learned through my exposure to TTouch, a gentle training method I use with my animals, there is a very strong link between posture and behaviour. Think about how you hold your body if you’re frightened – you make yourself smaller, round your shoulders, or curl up in a ball. By tweaking your posture, you can address your behaviour and feel more confident.

Learning how to be myself in relationships and reducing that need to people-please has been a huge step forward for me. I was already practising this in a business setting because I work with clients with whom I feel authentic, and therefore I attract clients who want to work with me and appreciate the value I offer. However, on a personal level, I found this more difficult due to past experiences and relationships I've had through childhood and young adulthood. Understanding my boundaries within relationships, and releasing the stored tensions and emotions within my body, has been life‑changing. I learned how to stand my ground, ask for what I want, be clear about my boundaries, slow down - or at least recognise when I speed up and stay calmer when annoyed frustrated - and be myself.

The coaching with Dawn complements the work I did in parallel with Pam Billinge and her beautiful equine coaches at Equest Limited. It is our body language – or rather our energy from within rather than our external body language - which the horses tune in to. This is how horses communicate with each other as well as their human friends. There is no hiding how we really feel when we are around horses because they see through it all. The first session sticks in my mind. After talking to Pam about my background and about the bereavement I had experienced, we went out into the field to meet the two horses who were going to help facilitate this session. 

Pam suggested that I walk into the field to meet the horses, being mindful of their ‘personal space’. Bearing in mind that I am around horses every day, I was quite shocked – and somewhat disappointed – to find that the horses didn’t seem to want to know me at all. Pam observed this for a while before calling me over to explore what was happening. Slowly but surely we found the underlying cause of what was really happening. I was so desperate for them to like me – that need to people please and gain approval arising again - that my body language accompanying this emotion was actually sending the horses away from me.

Together, Pam and I worked on this and as we did so, and as my body language subtly changed in response to the change in my own mind-set, the horses grazed closer and closer to us until one of them sought out my hand with her muzzle for a stroke. I felt elated and accepted!  With Pam's help, I have made significant progress in understanding where my behaviours stem from when it comes to relationships with people and I’ve had many a light bulb moment sat out in that beautiful field in Wiltshire!

Kathryn White is owner and director of Cathean Ltd Medical and  Copy Writing Services. She is a published medical, copy and equestrian writer with a passion for creating compelling text in collaboration with her clients. Her customers include pharmaceutical, healthcare and equestrian businesses across the world.