Voice Movement Therapy with Paul Newham

What is Voice Movement Therapy?

Voice Movement Therapy is a psychotherapeutic modality that combines vocal sound and song with bodily movement and dance to express dimensions of human experience that remain beyond words and is particularly helpful in facilitating recovery from trauma.

Developed in the early 1990s by Paul Newham, Voice Movement Therapy is an integrative modality that draws from expressive arts therapies and artistic creativity, psychodynamic theory and somatic psychotherapy, contemplative practice and sacred traditions of sound, cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology.

Voice Movement Training Taught and Certified by Paul Newham

The Voice Movement Therapy Training, taught and Certified by Paul Newham, is an intensive 5 Day immersive course that facilitates an experiential journey of self-discovery while teaching a comprehensive framework of principles and practices for professional practice.

The Training is for anyone seeking:

• A comprehensive framework of practical tools for liberating the expressive potential of the human voice
• Comprehensive insight into the psychology and psychotherapeutic application of therapeutic voicework and vocal psychotherapy
• An immersive experience of personal transformation and restoration

The training integrates principles and practices developed by Paul over 40 years, which are used in clinical and educational contexts internationally

The training is a unique opportunity to work directly with a recognised pioneer and authority in the field of expressive arts therapy and somatic psychotherapy.

The Voice Movement Therapy equips participants to integrate the techniques developed by Paul into their working practice as teachers, coaches, therapists, and artists.

Clinical and Artistic

Voice Movement Therapy occupies a profoundly complex interface between the measurable evidential domain of neurobiology, and the oneiric imaginal realm of creativity.

It is a clinical modality that uses vocal sound and movement to promotes somatic and psychological resynchrony.

Yet it is also a creative practice that gives artistic form to human suffering through mantra, chant, and song.

The Origins of Voice Movement Therapy

Pioneering therapist Paul Newham founded Voice Movement Therapy during the 1990s, which initially emerged from his quest to understand and recover from a disturbing childhood.

As a boy, Newham frequently escaped the violent conflicts between his mother and the abusive man he thought to be his father by retreating to a bedroom.

From this place of temporary safety, he listened to the fearful woman he called Mum crying and pleading as the man he called Dad shouted and yelled.

This exposure to voices without words moved Newham to study the vocal expression of emotions.

From behind my bedroom door, I had no idea what was happening because I could not hear what was said. The words were a blur. But I could hear the sounds my parents made. They went in through my ears and landed in the pit of my stomach. I felt their voices but remained oblivious to the story those voices told. Only later did I discover myself to be the main character in that story.

Paul Newham

During his research, Newham discovered that the man he called Dad, whose voice terrified him, was not his father.

Newham was among hundreds of offspring conceived through artificial insemination using sperm donated by the Austrian scientist Bertold Paul Wiesner (1901-1972).

Discovering six hundred half-siblings with whom he shared a deceased and unknown father forced Newham to examine how autobiographical narratives shape our beliefs about who we are.

Subsequently, the transformative process of converting personal narratives into songs became a core component of the Voice Movement Therapy paradigm.

A large part of who we become emerges from the stories told to us. When we discover these stories to be fiction, we must find a whole new voice: not a voice that acts out the lines written by others so we can play the part they assign, but a voice that speaks for the Self we know ourselves to be. And with that voice, we can sing a new story that we write for ourselves.

Paul Newham

Early Influences on Voice Movement Therapy

While Voice Movement Therapy emerged from an unusual early personal life, it also evolved from an equally unique combination of educational influences.

Newham first learned the techniques of method acting developed by Stanislavski and the analysis of human movement evolved by Rudolf Laban, while simultaneously studying the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.

He went on to learn contemporary dance with Mary Fulkerson and Steve Paxton while studying cultural psychology with Anne Kilcoyne.

Exposure to this profound combination of disciplines, taught by the leading innovators of their time, provided Newham with a solid and complex reservoir of principles and practices with which to probe the nature of human expression.

To me, dancing was like dreaming in motion: I learned to immediately convert the unspeakable imagery of an inner life into a vocabulary of movements at once spontaneous and unthought, yet at the same time choreographed with patterns that led me as much as I led them. Nonetheless, something was missing that left something unexpressed. Of course, it was the voice, though I did not realise it at the time.

Paul Newham

Alfred Wolfsohn

It was not until acting coach and voice teacher Enrique Pardo introduced Newham to the work of a Jewish German voice teacher called Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962) that the missing piece fell into place.

At the age of eighteen, Alfred Wolfsohn served as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches of World War I.

The war left Wolfsohn haunted by vivid memories of soldiers screaming and moaning as they died slowly and painfully from their injuries.

We are in a foreign country. Here in this foreign country, there are trenches everywhere. I am living in these trenches. Now and then the darkness of the night is lit up very light with strange stars made by man. Shells burst right and left. I throw myself to the ground. My hands are clawing the earth. Often someone next to me is hit. Each time I am astonished that I have been spared. I keep crawling. The hours pass. The fire is getting stronger and my peril greater. I pray to God but He does not hear me. From somewhere I hear a voice shouting. I close my eyes shaking with terror thinking: how can a human voice utter such a sound as this voice in extremis.

Alfred Wolfsohn

Like many of those returning from the war, Wolfsohn took refuge in a psychiatric facility where clinicians diagnosed him with Shell Shock.

Nonetheless, neither time nor treatment alleviated his condition, which we today call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

However, Wolfsohn eventually healed himself by giving voice to the sounds he had heard dying soldiers make.

Wolfsohn described this process of "extreme singing" as cathartic and began offering therapeutic singing lessons to others in search of healing.

Newham resonated deeply with Wolfsohn's traumatic experience, which echoed the distress evoked by sounds of violent arguing between his mother and the man he called Dad as a child.

In 1997, Paul Newham published a concise and comprehensive monograph charting the life and work of Alfred Wolfsohn, which is part of the free archive on this website.

Voice Movement Therapy as an Integration of Traditions

By aggregating the vocal techniques initially developed by Wolfsohn, the approach to expressive human movement practised by Laban, Paxton, and Fulkerson, the method acting of Stansilavski, and the depth psychology of Carl Jung, Paul Newham was able to craft a coherent model of psychotherapeutic investigation with the human voice at its centre.

We arrive with a first cry and leave with the sound of our last breath. Between cradle and grave, we compose a symphony and a cacophony. In harmony and discord, each noise we make reveals part of our inner life. The human voice is the outward expression of this inner life, with its crescendos and quietude, rhythms and melodies. The voice weaves an acoustic tapestry that depicts the effervescent innocence of youth, the wisdom of experience and age, the hollow yearning of need and want, the sharp edge of anger and vengeance, the peaks of hopeful excitement, and the pits of horrible heartache. These elemental sounds of the human voice are international. They transcend the boundaries of language, age, culture, and gender. And when our outer voice seems to express this inner dimension with sincerity, we experience a deep sense of authenticity that dissolves the mask and costume placed upon us by others.

Paul Newham

Analysing the Physiology of Voice

Newham was determined to ensure that Voice Movement Therapy remained grounded in a clearly articulated physiological understanding of vocal function.

Consequently, he collaborated with Otorhinolaryngologist D. Garfield Davies to film inside the vocal tracts of singers as they sang a range of styles using a technique called videostroboscopy.

This research culminated in identifying a set of universal vocal qualities that became a core component of Voice Movement Therapy.

When Newham taught these vocal ingredients to his disabled pupils, they were able to release their voices significantly from constriction, accessing an opportunity to express themselves more completely.

From Teaching to Psychotherapy

During this period, many of Newham's colleagues sought an opportunity to experience his teaching, inviting him unwittingly into the heart of psychotherapeutic work.

When Newham asked these new clients to vocalise, many of them expressed sounds of distress and yearning that they attributed to deep pain and ache they could not describe in words but expressed through sound and movement.

By helping his clients extend and shape these sounds into original songs, Newham provided an external artistic container for internal emotional experience, releasing them from the isolation that proceeds from remaining unexpressed.

Since the dawn of human community we have created sacred spaces dedicated to acts and activities designed to free us from anguish and unease, lift our spirits, release our creativity, and lead us closer to an authentic and meaningful life. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have entered these sacred places to perform rites and rituals, ceremonies and celebrations, dances and ballads, dramas and orations, invocations and incantations. Participants perform and witness these enactments in designated creative spaces, not for recreation and entertainment, but so they can give voice to a dimension of human experience that is quite beyond words. Both our deepest psychological suffering and highest creative aspiration speak in this language, which echoes far beyond the constraints of coherent conversation. In giving voice to the language of this inward dominion, through music and song, dance and drama, myth and ritual, ceremony and communion, people have been able to heal many of the sufferings that ferment within and realise their potential to create profound works of artistic expression. These enactments offer a route to recovery and rejuvenation, restore vitality and offer opportunities to discover an authentic voice of empowering expression.

Paul Newham

The Voice Movement Therapy Paradigm

By the end of the 1990s, Voice Movement Therapy had evolved into the first comprehensive paradigm of principles and practices specifically formulated to facilitate psychotherapeutic investigation and recovery through vocal expression.

This paradigm had three primary components:

• A defined set of vocal qualities designed to inform vocal practice and analysis
• A matrix of ideokinetic exercises designed to develop maximum expressive vocal flexibility
• A series of choreographed bodily movements designed to support physical expression of psychological experience
• A range of structured creative explorations designed to give artistic form to vocal expression

Together, these components enable people to bypass the articulation of cognitive representations and directly express sensed experience through sound and song, gesture and motion.

Voice Movement Therapy Publications

Newham articulated the principles and practices of Voice Movement Therapy supported by case studies in a series of books that also describe the history of vocal expression from the dawn of human evolution to the present day.

The first of these books, called The Singing Cure, published in 1992, along with The Healing Voice, published in 1999, are available as part of the free archive on this website.

This web archive also houses some of Newham's early case studies that describe Voice Movement Therapy in action.

Life Beyond Words

Voice Movement Therapy is particularly effective therapeutically when talking fails to express the intensity and complexity of emotional experience adequately.

It is also helpful in relieving the vocal instrument from constriction caused by social oppression and learned inhibition.

Consequently, professional practitioners from a range of clinical, creative, and educational disciplines integrate Voice Movement Therapy into their work.

Some wounds are older than our words. While we cannot explain them, we can express them. And when we do, our voice ceases to echo the past and begins to reshape the present so we may embrace a future untold.

Paul Newham

The Second Phase

At the turn of the 21st century, a group of graduates trained by Paul Newham began to teach a second generation of practitioners while preserving the core foundations of the paradigm through their therapeutic practice.

They describe their work in the book Singing the Psyche, published in 2023.

A comprehensive review of this book published in Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy.

Voice Movement Therapy has also been the subject of numerous Masters and Doctoral Theses.

Meanwhile, over the past twenty-five years, Paul Newham has continued to explore the evolving landscape of psychology, neuroscience, and expressive therapies, extending the original purview of Voice Movement Therapy, incorporating a contemporary scientific understanding of mind, brain, and body into the therapeutic application of vocal expression.

This exploration integrates insights drawn from multiple disciplines.

These disciplines include affective neuroscience, which explores how the nervous system encodes emotional experience; trauma-informed research, which elucidates the limitations of semantic processing; and music psychology, which reveals how rhythm and melody influence mood and memory.

Paul Newham and Voice Movement Therapy Today

Paul Newham has integrated the core principles of Voice Movement Therapy with new insights from contemporary scientific research to encompass Resynchrony.

This examines the way artistic activity generally, and vocal expression specifically, facilitates restoration of psychobiological rhythms, returning emotional equanimity, cognitive clarity, and physical wellbeing.

Meanwhile, Voice Movement Therapy continues to be a highly adaptable modality that is both artistic and structured, intuitive and informed.

We have always sung with grief, danced away our fear, and called out in longing. Now we are beginning to understand why these acts of expression work not only as art but also as medicine.

Paul Newham

The Voice Movement Therapy Training

The Voice Movement Therapy Training taught by Paul Newham shows you how to work with the human voice as an instrument of healing, embodiment, and transformation.

The Training teaches participants how to use the voice as an instrument of healing, providing principles and practices that facilitate the process of becoming audible to oneself and the world.

The Voice

The voice is not just the instrument we use to speak.

The voice is an expression of who we are.

It travels on our breath, expresses our emotions, evokes our memories, and fills every thought with cadence and nuance.

The voice also retains an imprint of everything that remains unsaid and all we have never before found permission to express.

The Voice Movement Therapy Training returns the human voice to its rightful place at the centre of our healing process.

It offers a structured yet fluid approach to working with voice and song, breath and movement, lighting a path toward emotional release, self-understanding, and embodied presence.

The Voice Movement Therapy Training taught by its founder is an invitation to those who sense that their voice has more to say than words allow.

The Training is for those who want to learn how they can listen and respond to the somatic soundscape and support others in reclaiming an authentic voice that has fallen silent in response to repression, fear, or resignation.

Who the Training is For

The Voice Movement Therapy Training is open to anyone called to work with voice in a therapeutic, creative, or embodied way.

It may be especially resonant for:

• Therapists, counsellors, and psychologists looking to expand into voice-based or somatic work
• Voice coaches, artists, and performers seeking deeper emotional authenticity
• Yoga, movement, or breath work facilitators seeking to integrate vocal tools
• Anyone drawn to reclaim their voice for personal healing and authentic empowerment

The Training supports both personal transformation and professional integration.

What You Will Learn

• The practical foundations of Voice Movement Therapy
• Techniques for working with breath, tone, rhythm, and vocal improvisation
• Movement practices that support vocal release and emotional regulation
• The neuroscience of voice, trauma, and nervous system co-regulation
• Creative tools, including writing and symbolic enactment
• Clinical and ethical frameworks for therapeutic practice
• Group process, relational voicework, and deep listening
• The use of original songs as an expressive container for emotional experience

Training Format, Structure, and Certification

The Voice Movement Therapy Training is an intensive in-person event designed to be immersive, experiential, and transformative.

Group size is limited to preserve intimacy and depth of practice.

Upon completion, participants receive the Certification in Voice Movement Therapy directly from Paul Newham, providing highly reputable evidence of learning.

Training with Paul Newham

As the originator and pioneer of Voice Movement Therapy, Paul has influenced a generation of practitioners worldwide, bringing four decades of experience to the Training.

His work sits at the intersection of psychology and creativity, appropriating insights from contemporary neuroscience while remaining connected to the ancient roots of human expression.

For details of the next Training, please send an email introducing yourself.

Contact Details