When Worlds Collide: Integrating Body-Based and Relational Depth in Therapy
11/15/2025
Presenter: Michelle Harwell, PsyD, MFT and Jessica Richards LCSW
"Worlds are colliding!"
George Costanza's panic echoed through that iconic Seinfeld episode—his carefully compartmentalized life threatening to implode. Keep Relationship George separate from Independent George. Never let the worlds touch. Sound familiar?
How often we therapists do the same; keeping body-based, bottom-up approaches in one corner and relational psychoanalytic work in another. But what if, unlike George, we embraced the collision? Join Jessica Richards, MS, LCSW, and Michelle Harwell, LMFT, PsyD, as they demonstrate why these seemingly disparate approaches should not just coexist—they need each other. Framed by a case presentation, Richards will respond through the lens of the NeuroRelational Framework (NRF), and Harwell through a relational psychoanalytic approach. We will see how the NRF accesses the nervous system's wisdom through sensation, movement, and implicit memory while the psychoanalytic illuminate meaning-making, attachment patterns, and the co-created therapeutic relationship. Both will reveal how a dysregulated nervous system can't access insight, and how insight without embodiment remains an abstract concept.
Watch as Richards tracks the nervous system's underground rivers while Harwell illuminates the relational currents flowing between therapist and client. A body that feels safe enough to settle can finally access the insights waiting beneath, and psychoanalytic depth without somatic grounding leaves clients stranded in their heads. Together, we will see how these approaches don’t just complement the other, they complete each other.
Rather than keeping these worlds apart, Richards and Harwell will show how integration results in a more powerful and holistic therapeutic approach, enriching your practice and the healing of your patients and clients.
