Movement as Medicine: How Dance Therapy Helps Chicagoland Process Stress with Erica Hornthal

Aaron Masliansky (00:01)
Welcome to the Chicagoland Guide and I'm your host, Aaron Masliansky Today I am here with Erica Hornthal Erica is ⁓ the therapist who moves you and we're going to talk about that. ⁓ Erica is based in the North Shore in Highland Park and ⁓ there's a lot to get to and I think what she's doing is so unique and so great and ⁓ we're going to get all to it. So Erica, thank you so much for joining me today.

Erica Hornthal (00:27)
Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Aaron Masliansky (00:29)
Pleasure, pleasure. ⁓ So you are a licensed professional counselor and you do stuff with dance and body movement. Tell us about that. How did you get to discover this path?

Erica Hornthal (00:46)
actually it's very Chicago heavy, ⁓ because I ended up going for my master's degree in dance movement therapy and counseling in, ⁓ in the city of Chicago at Columbia college, Chicago. They actually were one of the few programs in the country to have dance movement therapy. So it's been a pretty direct route. grew up dancing and when it came time to look for what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to help people.

⁓ but I was actually able to find a way to marry, helping people, psychologically speaking, behavioral speaking with my love for dance and movement. ⁓ and just through my education, through my background and internship, inevitably that's kind of, that's actually exactly what led me to opening my own practice. And then.

settling in the North Shore, which has been a really wonderful place for me and my clients and the work that I do.

Aaron Masliansky (01:48)
And you know, lot of people, when they think therapy, they think talk therapy, sitting on the couch, laying on the couch and talking through it. ⁓ I mean, does any of that happen with your therapy or is it all through movement?

Erica Hornthal (02:01)
Yeah, so the way that I like to break it down for people is that movement is in everything that we do. So it's very challenging because we do get hung up on the word dance. And understandably so, there's a lot of misconceptions and a lot of stereotypes and assumptions that we make around dance, myself included, because had you asked me what dance movement therapy was 25 years ago, I probably would have had a very different answer than how I practice.

but I think it's really important that people understand and remember that movement is in everything. sitting on a sofa could be all of the movement that we are capable of today in this moment. It could also be moving to a different part of the office. It could be laying down when we're feeling really overwhelmed. It could be allowing ourselves to walk.

or pace as we're retelling a story. And then for some of my clients, it actually is getting up and moving to music or creating their own music or dancing to express what words cannot uncover because body language and nonverbal communication makes up so more of our overall expression than just our words do. So to someone walking by my office,

if you were able to peek in, which, you know, confidentiality doesn't allow us, but if you were able to be a fly on that wall, you would mostly see my clients sitting across from me on a chair or a sofa. It's my lens that I bring in as a movement therapist that allows for a different therapeutic relationship. And it's just the openness and the willingness to allow people to move in a way that expresses what they're feeling in that moment. So if it's

collapse and we just need to lay on the floor and just breathe because sometimes that's hard enough. Or again, sometimes we need to actually move, shake, dance, wiggle in ways that we feel almost like too suppressed to do in our day-to-day lives.

Aaron Masliansky (03:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, and years ago I had the Music Institute of Chicago on the show and I know they talk about all those different, they use those different types of methods that people don't necessarily think about, but it is a great option to be able to have different ⁓ methods to get through your anxiety. ⁓ You know, and I feel that for myself even, ⁓

Erica Hornthal (04:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Masliansky (04:28)
you sometimes you need to have talk therapy, but the movement or exercise like can break through some of the things that you are dealing with. And, ⁓ you know, one of the things that you you've done is, ⁓ you've created a book called body talk, which has these different types of movements and patterns and things that you can do. And I think that it's so, ⁓ insightful. mean, you've written multiple books. I mean, do you get a lot of people, ⁓

Erica Hornthal (04:36)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Masliansky (04:58)
Talking to you about this, mean, what has the success been from this?

Erica Hornthal (05:03)
Yeah, it was interesting because Body Talk, which is the most recent ⁓ book that I put out, kind of came from the, I put out a card deck before that, which kind of came as a result from the book that I published before that. So it's almost like what I've created has been from the feedback I received prior. So the feedback I was receiving right before I...

got the idea and started working on body talk was that people still needed the how. Okay, how do I do this though? Show me how to do these things. And dance movement therapy, it is so much less about us, the therapist showing someone how to do something. It's not as prescriptive as people might think in terms of like an exercise or a somatic practice. It's much more about uncovering what you need.

listening to your own inner guide body, know, sensations, reflexes, et cetera. And so the feedback after body talk has really been, thank you. Thank you for putting this out there because I knew that I needed to listen to my body. I knew that I was fighting my body. I was in my head too much overthinking.

Aaron Masliansky (06:14)
Mm-hmm.

Erica Hornthal (06:25)
but I still didn't understand what that meant in terms of movement. So it was really important for me to put out a resource that really allowed people to move from the beginning. I take people through this developmental aspect of movement, which I did not create. I got to learn from people that created a model, kind of elaborated on models that were, you know,

written back in the 60s and 70s, even earlier than that. And it really just shows that how we experience life, how we end up thinking about things, all comes from our movement patterns. So allowing people to tap back into sensation, understand how to regulate or feel regulated in their body, stabilize, mobilize, this is what allows us to eventually trust, to build attachments.

secure attachments, allows us to emote, know, express our emotions, communicate more effectively. ⁓ So the feedback overall has been really positive because one, it was coming directly from my readers saying, hey, I need this resource. I created the resource and they were like, thank you, this is exactly what I needed because I wasn't, I was doubting myself. I wasn't sure how I needed to move.

And the guide that tells me daily what I should be working on or how I could move differently to think differently has been life changing. So, so far so good. Knock on wood that the feedback's been wonderful.

Aaron Masliansky (07:55)
That's fantastic. know,

know, though with stress, I mean, we all deal with it. But why, why are we so stressed? Like what, like, is this just something that anecdotally has been a human condition forever? Or is this like the American condition of the 21st century?

Erica Hornthal (08:18)
Yeah, I think that's a really important question. You know, I have this question, I have this conversation pretty regularly. And I think I go back to, you know, let's say millions of years ago, right, when we were moving to survive, right? We were moving to get away from a threat. We were moving to search for food. We were not so much in this high thinking cognitive brain that we have evolved into.

which is not a bad thing, but I almost feel like we've out evolved our natural instincts to move. And when we're not moving, we are not allowing our body to move emotions through it. So we're sitting at our desks day in and day out for hours at a time. Now we have portable computers in our hands, in our pockets where we're scrolling constantly.

So not only has movement been limited, but the size of our movement is so much smaller. And so while people could say, we've got so many more responsibilities and there's so much more going on in the world, global warming, warfare, et cetera. Yeah, that is a reality. But also we have completely changed our relationship to movement.

And so now we convince ourselves that we have to get it back in at the end of the day and go to the gym for a couple of hours. And if we're not motivated to do that, then movement isn't for us. We just really need to be looking at ways to help emotions, the anxiety in particular, move through us. Because if it doesn't, it will build up. And then, yeah, we will have this epidemic of over anxious, overworked, overproductive ⁓ individuals that

can't rest. We don't know how to relax anymore, you know, unless it's like a remote beach. And then the minute we come back from the remote beach or retreat, we're overwhelmed again. You know, so it's like, you have to learn to be the rest and recuperation so that you bring that with you wherever you go. Because it's just where we've gotten so far from it. I think it is, we're all capable of it. We just don't know how to do it anymore. We've totally forgotten.

Aaron Masliansky (10:12)
No.

It's true.

Yeah, we don't know how to,

we don't know how to relax. mean, that's why people turn to, you know, drugs and alcohol so much because it's just a way to kind of shut off. And it's like when you have a computer in your pocket that you need to be attentive to all the time, it can, it can make you extremely anxious. And then you have other things going on. mean, right now we're recording this on November 3rd, 2025 and ⁓

Erica Hornthal (10:38)
Mm-mm.

Yeah.

you

Aaron Masliansky (11:01)
There's a lot of ice activity going on, ⁓ immigration throughout the North shore. This past, I live in, ⁓ Kevin's in Skokie Evan scenario, and there are a lot of things happening on Friday, Halloween. It was crazy. My daughter's at school and they're watching it from their windows in the lunch room. I mean, that really can, can wreck you and you know, being in Highland park and what you dealt with on the 4th of July. ⁓

Erica Hornthal (11:12)
⁓ Mm-hmm.

Aaron Masliansky (11:29)
years ago. mean, that's just stressful. you know, it shows up. It shows up in the community and then into your body and it could show up that way and it could become chronic and stored physically. And so how does that movement then get that out and deal with that in a way that is constructive and able to move forward?

Erica Hornthal (11:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I go back to ⁓ this, for me, kind of this basic premise that, and we forget about this a lot, that movement is actually what creates our cognition. And then cognition creates more movement, right? It's the cycle. But for a lot of us, we get to this point where cognition and thought and executive functioning is so dominant that movement becomes the afterthought, right? How do I move based off of how I feel?

Not how am I moving, which created how I'm feeling right now. So I think it's really important for us to remember that, reclaim that movement isn't the afterthought, it's kind of the precedent. And so when we understand that or we think about that, it's a little easier to understand that how I'm moving contributes to how I feel. And if there's any part or time where

Aaron Masliansky (12:29)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (12:53)
I'm not feeling my best. I can't really understand how I feel, but I want to feel differently, that we always have the option to move differently. It's this mind-body connection, right? It's not just our head. It's not just in our mind. It's our brain. And our brain's connections are wired through the way we move, from the very first breath we take, from the movement that we do in utero even, right? This kind of sensing, breathing, flowing, if you will.

I think the last time a lot of us felt free were when we weren't conscious of our movement. We weren't conscious of our thoughts. We have so many thoughts that we're not conscious of, but the easiest, so to speak, way to change our thoughts is to simply change the way we move, which is not so simple for a lot of us. It sounds really hard, but change is constant, movement is change. So you can always have a little bit more

power over how you feel simply by the way you move. ⁓ And, you know, it's biological. It's nothing that you actually have to buy into. Everything you are thinking came from something you felt at some point, some movement that you had. ⁓ So many of us take for granted that we can sit on our own, we can walk, we can stand on our own two feet. Every movement we have has some type of psychological consequence, ramification, if you will.

⁓ So clients that come to me and say, you know, have a hard time trusting or I don't trust myself. I don't trust my partner. I have a hard time finding someone. I have trouble with attachment. Like, okay, let's go back to our developmental movement patterns. How did we learn to stand up? How did we learn to stand on our own two feet? How did we separate from the people around us? We can always rewire how we feel about those things simply by the way that we're moving.

so hopefully that helps people listening understand that there's a, there's a connection there, you know, that how our thoughts are wired is directly related to how our bodies are wired. ⁓ and so you don't really have to understand what's going on to engage in the process, right? Like sometimes we need to know the why. ⁓ I love this example. I heard it from Gabor Matei, but I'm sure it originated elsewhere too. ⁓ you know, if a snake bites you.

Aaron Masliansky (15:00)
Absolutely.

Erica Hornthal (15:16)
Is you asking the snake why you did it and understanding where it came from going to make the bite any better? No, you need to treat the wound, right? The snake probably will never tell you why other than it was feeling threatened, you know? ⁓ We don't have to understand the why of everything to start engaging in the how, you know, how we can make our situation better.

Aaron Masliansky (15:24)
Right.

So when somebody comes to meet with you, is it one on one? Is it group?

Erica Hornthal (15:46)
Kind of all of the above. So just recently I did a couple ⁓ therapeutic movement groups at local nursing homes. I was actually, I was in Evanston. I was also in Highland Park. ⁓ My private work with clients tends to be more one-on-one, but it's really any way that you would encounter psychotherapy, right? Talk therapy, group, family, couples, ⁓ obviously individual. So it really depends on the need of

the client, right, or the concern that they're coming in with. ⁓ And then it's dependent on the therapist. Some therapists are much more adept at group therapy. I personally love working with individuals. So that's my strong suit. Every now and then I will work with a diad or a family come in. ⁓ But I think that speaks to the expertise and the comfort of each individual therapist, right? We kind of...

find our niche and go with that. But movement-wise, you can do it all. You can have a group movement experience. You can have an individual movement experience. It is going to change ⁓ your relationship to movement, which inevitably changes your relationship to the people in the room. Because movement has this capacity to increase empathy, ⁓ to help us understand where someone's coming from, or quite literally move in their shoes. So

Whatever your needs are, you can inevitably find a creative arts therapist or dance therapist specifically that's going to meet that need.

Aaron Masliansky (17:21)
When somebody comes in, I imagine that it must be a little bit uncomfortable to start moving if it's a one-on-one and doing these movements with somebody. How do you get them to overcome that?

Erica Hornthal (17:37)
It's not as hard as you'd think. I mean, I think that too, especially for example, I will have clients come in and say, well, you were paneled with my insurance company. So they don't even know that I'm a dance movement therapist. They see my name. They don't see Chicago dance therapy. So I kind of run that down with them. You know, I'm like, are you familiar with dance therapy? Did you know that that's the modality that I'm pretty heavy on?

Aaron Masliansky (17:55)
Mm-hmm.

Erica Hornthal (18:04)
no, but I'm interested or I'm not really a mover. So I think we're just going to talk. That's fine. You know, whatever. I can meet you where you are. So I think it starts off with this cliche, right? Of like meeting the person where they are. And most of my clients are in their thoughts. We're in these overthinking, very high anxiety patterns. I see myself in that a lot too. it's creating a bit of curiosity. know, can you...

Can you connect for a moment? How does the way you're thinking right now connect to the way you're moving? So I can ask someone, how do know you're anxious? Well, I think really fast. OK, but if you couldn't think or talk, how would your body display your anxiety? So we start to look at it from this top down model. I'm thinking about how it looks, so I'm meeting them in that cognitive side.

And then once we have this moment of my heart's racing, my shoulders are really tight, my belly's tense, I can't even feel my feet, it's the gateway, right? Where I'm like, okay, we have a body, right? We have this area outside of the mind. Would you like to do something with it? Would you like to move it in a way that might help manage your anxiety?

Aaron Masliansky (19:24)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (19:28)
And the answer is usually yes, because maybe they've tried everything else or they're trying to avoid trying other things, ⁓ to kind of try every holistic approach possible. So there isn't too much resistance. There may be resistance to certain types of movement, which is okay. If I said, hey, well, let's get up and start dancing, I would feel uncomfortable myself because I'm picking up on their discomfort too. So it's not...

Aaron Masliansky (19:54)
Yeah.

Erica Hornthal (19:58)
It's not me expecting or the goal isn't to start doing the cha-cha slide in my office. If you never get there, that's okay. That's not the goal. The goal is to express ourselves more fully. And so if that's learning to emote with my face more, if it's learning to use my hands more, if it's just learning to shift my posture when I start to feel really overwhelmed, I think that's really important. Those can be the goals. ⁓ If I can offer an example, I was working with a physician.

and he was experiencing a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety in the workplace. He was having a lot of changes in his home life as well. So it was totally understandable why he was feeling this way. And I asked him, what's a movement that you do a lot of during the day? know, cause he sits, but then he goes to his clients or patients and he said, well, I'm constantly washing my hands. Okay, that's good to know. I'm glad to hear that.

Aaron Masliansky (20:41)
Sure.

Erica Hornthal (20:54)
So I said, what does it look like when you wash your hands? And so he imagines, puts his hand under the faucet, and he's scrubbing really, really hard frantically. Scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub. So then I asked him, how do you think that scrubbing, that really hard intensity, fast pace, perpetuates or stops your anxiety? And he was like, oh, it totally feeds into it. That is the rhythm of my anxiety.

So one of the interventions we talked about was next time you wash your hands, it's the duration, not the intensity, right? Wash your hands for 20 seconds, but can you slow it down? Can you massage the soap into your hands, get into the crevices of your fingers, and then slowly rinse your hands off? And he was like, yeah, I think I could. It was really hard for him to do because it was an ingrained habit. But that intensity and that

Aaron Masliansky (21:22)
⁓ yeah.

Yeah.

Erica Hornthal (21:49)
that pacing is often the autopilot that is driving our anxiety and we don't even realize it. So it was one intervention that really changed things for him. He was mindful of it. If he was feeling anxious, it slowed him down enough in the moment to then go to the next patient with fresh eyes.

Aaron Masliansky (22:08)
Yeah, I think that movement sometimes when you're like by changing that movement pattern, I noticed it myself sometimes where it's like, okay, just breath, move differently and you can, you can move on better. I mean, and you work with people of all ages.

Erica Hornthal (22:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, so far my youngest was three. I don't particularly work with young kids anymore, but early in my career, my youngest client was three and I love to work with older adults. I don't do that as much anymore, but my oldest client was 107. Yeah, so was pretty big range.

Aaron Masliansky (22:42)
Wow. What do you do with a hundred and how like, how is it different between

say a three year old and a hundred and seven year old? Like what, what are you doing differently with each of them? Or is it similar?

Erica Hornthal (22:55)
Yeah. So ironically, it's not all that different. I'll tell you for a couple reasons. And not to say like, 107 year olds act like kids. No, that's not what I mean, right? I'm not trying to infantilize anybody, right? Some people would, but I think the point is that a three-year-old doesn't have a lot of inhibition. And at 107, there's not a lot of inhibition there either, right? Whether or not you have a dementia or not, it's like,

Aaron Masliansky (23:06)
No, no. ⁓

Erica Hornthal (23:21)
You get to a certain age and you just want to do what you want to do, say what you want to say. ⁓ You know, live your life because we don't know how much longer we have. Right. I mean, I think at one hundred and seven, it's fair to say that any of us could say that at any time, but certainly at one hundred and seven. So the difference cognitively oftentimes and physically is the lived experience. Right. A three year old typically is at the beginning of their life. One hundred and seven is typically at the end of their life.

So the experience that the body has had, vastly different, but the patterns and the origins are kind of the same. And the older we get, we tend to revert back to some of those early movement patterns, especially for individuals with some form of dementia. ⁓ The connections in the brain start to dissolve.

And we see younger movement patterns, which oftentimes can bring up younger thought patterns too. So it wasn't all that different. The difference really for me is the mobility. The woman that I was working with who was 107 did not have a lot of mobility. That's not true for all 107 year olds, but we haven't met that many of them. She was chair bound. There were days where she was bed bound. For me, it's the capacity and it's the potential.

Aaron Masliansky (24:40)
No.

Erica Hornthal (24:48)
Movement is what allows us to tap into our cognitive potential. So if there was any way that I could move with her, whether that was rhythmically, putting on a favorite song, holding her hand, walking with her, sitting with her in the lunchroom, because she was living in a nursing home at the time, those are all movement. Those are all ways that we move. And oftentimes, there were days she wasn't getting that at all. So was connecting with someone.

moving in a different way allowed her to have a conversation. We would start speaking. She might voice her concern about something. She could even set a boundary. You know, we could move in a way that she would say, no, not today, or yes, I'd like to do that. ⁓ So even though there is a huge age difference, it really isn't all that different when we look at movement. We're just looking at the movement present.

And while a three-year-old might have a lot of energy that maybe a 107-year-old doesn't have, ⁓ the capacity, the potential to move isn't all that different. And we're just looking at what's possible in each moment. So I have so much fun working with older adults, even though a lot of people would say, well, how much can you do? They're not moving, but they are. They are moving. They're moving in their own way, in whatever way they can in that moment.

Aaron Masliansky (26:00)
Right.

you

Right.

And then on the younger scale, when you look at children, I mean, how, and kids have a lot of energy, they could have anxiety, whatever it may be. How can parents encourage their kids through different movement patterns that can, if they're working with you, ⁓ could kind of reinforce that and help them through?

Erica Hornthal (26:18)
Mm-hmm.

sure.

I think one of the big things is not placing your own judgments of movement on your child. So as an example, and this happens in school, it happens, I mean, it everywhere. If we see a child moving too much or being too animated, too emotional, too whatever, insert the word, we want to quiet them.

stop, sit, don't, not right now. And while I understand certain movements aren't acceptable in all situations, we're not necessarily looking to meet the child in what they need. We're just looking at kind of repressing what they're doing that doesn't match what we think is appropriate in the moment. So if you have a kid that's being pretty loud, excited, running around, and you're not in an environment to do that,

Are we adjacent to an environment that will allow that? Can we say, you know what, think little Joey needs to run around for a moment. We'll be right back. And if we're having a dinner with family, can we go outside, jump up and down for a little bit, shake out our wiggles, and then come back to the table? Looking at movement as an intervention, not a problem. Not a problem to be solved. You can't solve a moving problem with stagnation.

Aaron Masliansky (27:57)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (28:06)
You can't solve a movement problem with immobility, right? And yeah, if it's a child in particular that's having an emotional outburst, ⁓ less movement isn't gonna help that either, you know? So I recognize people listening might be like, but it's not always the time and place. I understand that, but I'm just opening up the possibility, right? Are we looking at the potential? ⁓ yeah, like I tell my clients, know, if you're feeling really anxious, you're on a...

first date or you're in a meeting, can you excuse yourself to use the restroom? Who doesn't need to use the bathroom, right? Who's gonna say, no, you can't go to the bathroom right now. We can do a few little regulating tools or exercises in the bathroom, splash our face with water, shake our hands, take some breaths. There's a lot of things that we can do to meet our body to ease whatever tension or discomfort we're feeling. Let's start teaching our kids to do that young, you know, instead of.

Aaron Masliansky (29:02)
Yes.

Erica Hornthal (29:02)
shaming them for it. Is there a way that we can meet them in that? Maybe even do it with them. You might feel better.

Aaron Masliansky (29:08)
Right. And I think that if you look at the old school way of doing it, may be take them outside and give them you know, a spanking. And that's how people would deal with these types of things. And that, I don't know. I don't agree with that line of parenting, but that is the way that people would think about it.

Erica Hornthal (29:16)
Right, right.

I mean, it's repressing it

either way, right? Like now you're punishing the child for wanting, for needing to move, right? Versus, you know, supporting it. And you can still, you can still educate that there's a time and a place, right? Is it appropriate to start running around the office during, you know, your interview, you know, in your twenties? No, I get that, right? So we're not, we're not, right, right.

Aaron Masliansky (29:31)
Right.

You're not going to get the job.

Erica Hornthal (29:53)
We're not telling the child run around whenever you want. We're actually creating a safe opportunity and space for them to do it. As parents noticing, wow, Tommy needs something. This movement is my assessment, right? Like as a therapist, I'm constantly looking at movement as assessment, observation, and intervention. So can I as a parent look at my child's movement and think, what is this telling me?

Aaron Masliansky (30:09)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (30:21)
We know as parents what our kids, we don't know necessarily better than they do, but we know maybe better than someone else who isn't around them what our child, what their typical movement looks like. You know, you can tell maybe when your child's upset or when they're anxious, when they're really excited or indifferent to something. So start to become more of an expert on your child's nonverbal communication so you know when there's been a shift.

And then as they get older, ideally they can identify it. They might even be able to tell you, I'm feeling really uncomfortable or can we take a moment outside so I can take a breath? Like my daughter's done that. She's like, I need to get some fresh air. Can you take a walk with me? Yeah, sure. Is it possible every moment right away? No, but we build tolerance and then we can address it later on too.

Aaron Masliansky (30:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

absolutely. And I think that's also an important cue to look at, ⁓ either for, ⁓ when you're looking at a peer or maybe your, your partner and seeing that, you know, sometimes in the marriage, things can get heated and people need to be able to take a cue from one another and say, okay, and maybe take a walk, go outside, change the movement pattern. And that can start to shift the mindset.

Erica Hornthal (31:35)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely, yeah, because, know, especially partners, people we've been living with for a long time, our spouses, we know the buttons. We know all the buttons that we can push to get under that person's skin. I think the tool is to not push the button, right? It's like, I know, I know what I could say right now to make you angry or to, quote, win this argument, right? But the harder thing is to actually put a pause on the conversation and say, like,

Aaron Masliansky (31:50)
you

Right.

Erica Hornthal (32:07)
I don't want to do that. I don't want to harm you anymore. I don't want to hurt myself anymore. Can we put a pause on the conversation, go take a walk around the block, or maybe we need some space. I need to go to my corner, you go to your corner. And when we've calmed down, not just of mind, but of body, we can come back and have a more reasonable conversation. One of the interesting tools, I've done this a few times with couples, because again, I don't do a...

a lot of work with couples, but is to have a nonverbal conversation. So play out a typical fight without any words and just do it through your movement. It's really eye-opening because we start to see the other person's communication, but then we also start to recognize our own. We're like, I'm really invading this person's space or wow, I just got five times smaller. Wow, I really shrink when I'm in.

conflict with my spouse. I don't want to do that anymore, you know? ⁓ It's amazing because there's so much communication right there, but we focus on the words and winning the argument and getting the upper hand. So it's such a powerful tool. We can use it in all of our relationships, obviously, especially the one with ourselves.

Aaron Masliansky (33:08)
Yeah.

yeah, nonverbal is the key thing. That's where I feel like most of the communication comes from. It is. Even in my line of work with negotiations, it's picking up on those types of things and you learn so much more than just by speaking. ⁓ You pick up on the cues and that's key.

Erica Hornthal (33:34)
Yeah, it's like 80%. Yeah, it's so much.

Yeah, because

movement is what allows us to feel safe, right? So safe is a really hard word to use, I find. So I use like secure and stable. Someone's going to be much more open to a negotiation if they feel secure and stable. How do we do that? Through our body. We can't always control our environment, but we can control some aspects of stability and security internally.

Aaron Masliansky (33:54)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (34:13)
Yeah, if you're trying to broker a deal and someone's looking really frantic and anxious and they're jittery, it's gonna be a lot harder to come to an agreement, right? Versus helping a client feel more secure and stable, maybe asking, know, is there something that can get you? You know, taking a moment to ask like, how are you feeling about this right now? Do you need to take a break? Like that builds trust and then that in turn becomes safety.

Aaron Masliansky (34:24)
Sure.

Erica Hornthal (34:42)
and people feel safe and they want to return. They want to come back, ⁓ hey, you got to go to this guy. He was fantastic, right? He's the guy you should always go to. you know, sometimes to people it sounds manipulative. It's not meant to be a manipulation. It's actually our body is wanting to create security and safety in our environment.

Aaron Masliansky (34:51)
Great.

Yeah, it's listening. It's true listening.

Erica Hornthal (35:05)
Yes, active

listening, yes, embodied listening. We don't know how to do that anymore,

Aaron Masliansky (35:10)
I know ⁓

embodied listening. is a great phrase to use.

Erica Hornthal (35:15)
Yeah, like AI

can't embody, like it can hear us, right? But chat, can't, chat GPT can't listen with its body and empathize with what I'm feeling right now.

Aaron Masliansky (35:28)
No, it

could sure pretend it does. It's pretty good at it.

Erica Hornthal (35:31)
Right. If I tell

it and I type something in, it will tell me what it thinks I need or resources available. But yeah, that embodied listening piece is such a challenge because it's not being modeled.

Aaron Masliansky (35:45)
Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't thinking to ask you this, but as you mentioned, ⁓ AI, like, what do you think of that? Like people using chat, GPT or some of these other, ⁓ AI apps to talk through their, their issues. Because, ⁓ I mean, I feel like if you've used it, probably like many people have tried it now and like you, you can talk through your issues or it's not the same as movement, but I mean, do you think it's, ⁓

Erica Hornthal (36:06)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Masliansky (36:12)
beneficial and you know, it's like on one hand you can go to social media and you can see all these things and either get positive or negative reinforcement, but then there's the AI where you can talk through your things just with that software.

Erica Hornthal (36:27)
You know, I think like most things there's good and bad, or there's pros and cons, I guess I should say. I think if we're trying to make mental health interventions more accessible to people, then this might be one of the only ways that someone gets help or reaches out when they're feeling a certain way for a lot of different reasons, whether it's financial, whether they don't feel.

comfortable talking to someone about it and they're more comfortable talking to their devices or an AI. I think what concerns me is that again, we're leaning more into this cognitive, executive functioning, higher ⁓ developmental areas of the brain that while they're helpful, they override

our limbic system, they override our reptilian brain, like the parts of our brain that don't operate on logic and reasoning. So AI, I feel is going to be completely logic and reasoning based. I'm not sure how you, and I'm not a tech person, so someone listening might be like, no, no, no. ⁓

Aaron Masliansky (37:46)
.

Erica Hornthal (37:47)
Maybe if you're with something that's reading your face while you're talking, it can infer empathy, right? Or it can write in nonverbal communication. At this point, if I'm going to go to like chat GPT and just type it, it's not seeing anything. So I worry that we're going to go further and further down this path of disembodied therapy, disembodied mental health, because we're prioritizing cognition and logic and reasoning.

Aaron Masliansky (38:27)
Thanks.

Erica Hornthal (38:46)
My feet are starting to fall asleep. It's just, it's not healthy for us. So I don't want to knock AI completely. And this is a totally different conversation, but, you know, now we're getting to the point where, like therapists are starting to use AI and, you know, for things other than just note taking. So I think we just have to really reevaluate, like there's a human aspect to it. It's all about the relationship. Do you want a relationship with a computer? Do you want a relationship with a real person?

Aaron Masliansky (38:50)
Right.

Erica Hornthal (39:15)
And if you don't want a relationship with a real person, that might be one of the reasons you need to go to therapy. ⁓

Aaron Masliansky (39:20)
You're right.

Great way to put it for sure. ⁓

Erica Hornthal (39:24)
Yeah, no shade to anybody

out there, but just think about that.

Aaron Masliansky (39:31)
Yeah, no, it's a

really good point. Yeah. One of the things I learned about with Steve Jobs from Apple was that he would have some of his best ideas and meetings when he would go for a walk with people and they'd walk around the campus at Apple or whatever. And that does, I mean, I find that when I go and take a walk, like, or take a shower, some of those best ideas come out because like you're, changing your senses. Like you're, ⁓ either with the shower, cause you're not.

Erica Hornthal (39:42)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Masliansky (40:01)
on a device and you could just think and you're feeling the warmth. Or if you're outside, you're, seeing things it's fresh air, it's sunlight, it's movement. So I think that that, like you said, like it's important for all those things to happen. Like it's not just the cerebral, it's everything else connected.

Erica Hornthal (40:04)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, because we think through movement. We think through experience, through experiential learning, ⁓ which is a big reason that our learning, our education system is changing so much. Because it's like now we're trying to get back to the social emotional piece, because we kind of outsourced it for a while. Behaviors really increased in the classroom, and now we're like, we should really pay attention to that social emotional piece.

Aaron Masliansky (40:47)
That's kind of important.

Erica Hornthal (40:47)
maybe we should build

in a little bit more play. Maybe we should let kids be kids and worry about test scores later. So it's a challenge. There's no right or wrong, I guess. My intention and hope for at least Chicagoland is to just utilize all the tools that you have. Your body is such a huge resource. And if you're struggling in any way,

You don't have to buy anything. You don't have to take anything. Like it's right there. You know, it's like the greatest free resource that we have, you know, meanwhile, while we're struggling to pay for things and struggling to get, you know, things covered by insurance, like have you exhausted your own resources? I don't think so. Most of us have not, you know, and we don't even know that it's there. So yeah, it's, I don't know. All the modern day challenges are definitely impacting.

mental health more and more. But I think for me, it's like simplifying, know, going back to like, everything we have is kind of where psychology started. It was a very mind, body, spirit oriented thing. And I think people got afraid of it. It got a little too existential sometimes for people and they needed to qualify it, you know, and quantify it. And we're kind of heading back in that direction where we're like, wait a minute, there's more to it than just thinking.

Aaron Masliansky (41:59)
Sure.

Erica Hornthal (42:10)
You know, I think I have to feel my way in to think my way out. It's a paradigm shift for a lot of people, but it's really getting back to the origins of the whole science of psychology.

Aaron Masliansky (42:21)
That makes sense to me. ⁓

Erica Hornthal (42:23)
I mean, how else do you manage

what's going on in the world? I don't know. There's no words for half of what's going on. So you just have to create. You have to create. have to use your art, your music, your drama, your poetry. You have to emote. There's just too much going on in the world for us to talk about. There's just no words anymore.

Aaron Masliansky (42:45)
Right. That's a point. If somebody is trying to figure out, how do I get into body movement therapy? Like where do they look? I mean, you mentioned something about insurance. mean, so is it covered by insurance? How does that all work?

Erica Hornthal (43:00)
Yeah, so it depends where you're located. ⁓ Because I reside in Illinois, as a dance movement therapist even, I'm bound by the ⁓ guidelines, let's say the rules of psychotherapy. So to be licensed as a psychotherapist in this state, I needed to sit for my examination. That license allows me to panel with insurance companies.

So I'm personally not paneling as a dance movement therapist. I'm paneling as a counselor, as an LCPC. ⁓ Some other dance therapists may be LCSWs, which is a social worker. There may be psychiatrists, psychologists. So it's the licensure that actually allows you to bill insurance. Not everybody wants to use insurance or wants to take insurance. So you may even be able to do an out of network situation.

where maybe you're paying upfront, but then your insurance company will reimburse you a little bit. ⁓ Specifically, if you're looking for a certain modality, let's say, ⁓ keep in mind, you don't have to have any experience. So I don't want people thinking, I love music, therefore music therapy will be my thing. None of my clients at this point come to me because they think of themselves as movers or dancers. It's actually quite the opposite. So I would almost say like, think of the things that scare you.

that you're hesitant toward or you resist, that might be a modality that you wanna lean into. But you don't necessarily have to see a dance movement therapist. There are lots of therapists out there that are more semantically based now. It tends to go hand in hand with trauma. Not a bad thing, but again, not everybody identifies as having trauma or sees themselves as having experienced a trauma. So you can start with a general search.

Aaron Masliansky (44:42)
Mm-hmm.

Erica Hornthal (44:49)
you know, ⁓ body centered therapists in my area. know, psychology today has lots of somatic therapists. If you're more interested in creative arts therapies, I would start there. So creative arts therapy and then your region, creative arts therapy and your city. Specifically, if you're looking for dance therapy, dance therapy, city, music therapy, city. ⁓ It seems like there wouldn't be a lot, but I guarantee you there are. There are like

300, I don't know if they're all practicing right now, but there's something like 300 dance movement therapists in Chicago alone. Yeah, so again, it's not just the modality, it's the therapist. So while I would love for people to call me, I might not be the right fit for everybody. And that's the therapy side of it, right? It's about the relationship. So if you're interested or you're intrigued, pick out those keywords, know, body oriented, somatic, movement, and

Aaron Masliansky (45:26)
Wow.

Sure.

Erica Hornthal (45:49)
With the movement piece especially, just recognize that movement therapist alone is not a trademarked entity. So under that, you could get a physical therapist, you could get an occupational therapist, you might get a psychotherapist, you could get someone that is not a mental health practitioner or licensed individual at all. ⁓ They use movement and therapy helps us feel better. So it's more of a ⁓ descriptor.

So just educate yourself, right? When you find someone or you think, hey, I'd like to work with this person, read through their bio, see if you could have like a call, know, a little like a 15 minute ⁓ explorative call with them just to see where they're coming from and where you're coming from. Because again, I can't say it enough. It's the relationship that really matters when it comes to the therapy.

Aaron Masliansky (46:42)
And do you find also just like, there empirical data that shows that movement therapy is more effective than just talk therapy?

Erica Hornthal (46:51)
so the voice in my head is saying yes, like screaming at it like, yeah, but also I don't want to throw talk therapists under the bus. So, I, so there is evidence, there is a lot of research. Actually, if you just take out therapy and you just think of dance, there's so much research coming out of Europe, the United States, Asia, Australia, talking about how dance is the

most effective form of antidepressant. ⁓ Not to say that medications don't help, but so many people are on medications and they're not doing what they think they're supposed to be doing. So dance alone has been shown to be such a powerful treatment for depression and anxiety. So couple that with doing it alongside with someone, working in a confidential... ⁓

secure stable environment, right? Where you get to focus on you and someone is there for you, talking about you, with you. It really changes so much for the client. So there's a lot of research specifically on dance movement therapy. It can be hard to find because usually it's in institutions, right? Universities, colleges. It's not always accessible to just everyday people who want to search for the research.

But it is out there. ⁓ then there's just a lot of research in general on the benefits of exercise, movement, and again, dance for the effects of anxiety and depression. So those things are absolutely research ⁓ findable on the internet and just reputable sources. Always make sure that it's not just a random ⁓ blog that you're finding it on, but ⁓ there'll be sources at the end. And usually it's coming from Research Gate,

or I can't even PubMed, like some of these larger sites that bring together the research that's been produced over the last few decades.

Aaron Masliansky (48:58)
And then if people want to get a hold of you, where should they go?

Erica Hornthal (49:03)
Yeah, so as you mentioned, right now I'm located in Highland Park. personally live in Deerfield, which is just a few miles away. You can find me through my website, which is erikahornthal.com. If you're interested in the work specifically, you can check out chicagodancetherapy.com. And I love to...

I love to mostly use Instagram. You can find me on Facebook sometimes, but my handle is the therapist who moves you. So if you prefer to connect that way, we can find each other in lots of different ways.

Aaron Masliansky (49:36)
and your book is available on your website.

Erica Hornthal (49:39)
⁓ Body Talk, I've got Body Talk, I have a movement deck and Body Aware. They're all available wherever books are sold. So you can find them on my website. You can go to Amazon if you prefer. But Highland Park especially has some great independent booksellers. So anywhere you choose to buy your book, you can order the book there.

Aaron Masliansky (49:58)
Fantastic. Well, Erica, this is great. ⁓ I think that, you know, for everyone who's listened to this episode, I think that you've got a lot of tools of how to be able to deal with your feelings. And I think that that's what's key ⁓ for all of us. I think this is a great resource and I certainly appreciate your time.

Erica Hornthal (50:12)
Mm.

Yeah, thank you for making the space for it on your platform. And yeah, I just appreciate your time and platform. Thank you.

Aaron Masliansky (50:31)
You're welcome.