Caregiver Resilience and Dance/Movement Therapy: A Theoretical Review and Conceptual Model

Abstract

With the population aging, more people are living with neurodegenerative conditions, leading to an influx of informal family caregivers, who often experience negative health outcomes. Few caregiver interventions have successfully adopted a holistic, strengths-based approach to fostering resilience. This article examines existing literature on caregiver resilience factors, which include self-efficacy, flexibility, cultivating positive emotions, and drawing on spiritual and social supports. Despite how dance/movement therapy (DMT) has been shown to foster psychological and physiological benefits, it remains underexplored for caregivers. Therapeutic mechanisms of DMT are expounded for their innate correspondence to resilience factors, and a new comprehensive model of DMT for caregiver resilience is presented, with implications for future intervention design and measurement.