Why Parkour Therapy?

My patients experience significant challenges with everyday functioning. What may sometimes look like avoidance, inactivity or “stuckness” is being driven by:

·         debilitating anxiety

·         avoidance cycles

·         difficulty tolerating discomfort

·         trouble beginning less-preferred tasks

·         lower motivation

These struggles make it hard to thrive and be well, and creates a poor quality of life. In therapy, one of the most effective ways to target these difficulties involves helping my patients to face situations they normally avoid, and to learn the skills of how to act in these situations. This helps a person to improve their ability to cope with their own emotions, to be more effective socially, and to start to making changes in their life. This is the only way that people learn that anxiety, discomfort, and challenges are survivable and do not need to be avoided as if theyre dangerous. This treatment is called exposure.

To someone on the outside, exposure can look deceptively simple. Usually, people understand exposure better when they see the hidden therapeutic layer beneath an everyday activity. For example, I might take a patient to a coffee shop to do a social exposure. From the surface, that looks like a fun outing; but underneath, excellent and challenging therapeutic work is taking place:

• The patient must tolerate being around strangers.

• They face the fear of being judged.

• They practice ordering while anxious without retreating or trying to do it “perfectly.”

• They confront uncomfortable body sensations (sweating, shakiness, heart racing) without trying to escape.

In other words, the coffee shop isn’t about coffee at all—it is therapy in a real-world setting where my patient can encounter exactly the kinds of challenges they usually avoid in daily life and practice the exact skills they need to improve their functioning in everyday life.

Parkour therapy functions in the exact same way. On the surface, it may look like an athletic activity. But inside the session, my patients are doing carefully structured exposure work in a safe and supportive environment. Each parkour therapy session becomes a powerful exposure challenge where my patients are:

• Encountering discomfort (sweating, physical exertion, social awkwardness, interacting with others).

• Facing social anxieties (being seen, doing something new and challenging, not being “the best”).

• Facing less preferrable tasks with multiple activities that involve a less preferred feelings, e.g. drinking water, high-fiving, using grip-chalk, making decisions, making small talk, shouting or raising voice, doing things the wrong way, etc.)

• Practicing resilience when your “inner critic” says no or you cant, and you feel tempted to avoid or back-down, the aim to Parkour Therapy is to find a way through

• Building frustration tolerance by learning to manage frustration or failure in real time and not avoiding or quitting

• Regulating anxiety in the moment, by showing yourself that you can do hard things, hence developing the capacity to transfer into other areas of life.

This makes parkour therapy uniquely well-suited for patients with anxiety, OCD and related conditions. It allows them to work on avoidance patterns and discomfort tolerance in a concrete, embodied way rather than only talking about it in my office. In fact, parkour therapy often creates multiple exposures at once. For my patients, who oftentimes tend to retreat into avoidance, this concentrated exposure is especially powerful because they have to face discomfort, survive it, and move forward. Doing is always better than just talking about doing, that’s why I recommend the doing!

Just like the coffee shop exposures, the activity itself is not the point—the therapy embedded inside the activity is what creates change. The goal is not to become a parkour athlete—it is to help my overcome the barriers that have kept them stuck.