The symbolism in any kind of dance allows for recall, reenactment, and reexperience of events for purposes of resisting, reducing, transforming, and escaping stress.

It is the persistence of dance in helping people to resist, reduce, and escape stress since early humanity that attests to its efficacy.

In the interweave of mind and body, dance is a mode that allows people to work through difficulties, anticipate the future, recollect the past, and confront the present.

Danced healing rituals (in African village compounds, temple courtyards, dance-therapy studios, public theaters, and other social settings) reinvoke old traumas for exorcism and the transformation of fear, convince people that evil is gone or possible to dissipate, and reaffirm communal solidarity and a sense of well-being.

He [Wilhelm Reich] believed that the individual's walk, stance, and breath patterns revealed a specific character type. Reich thought chronic muscular tension indicated repression and blocked the expression of affect. An example is the tight holding of the chest area as a sign of repressed feelings of need and longing.

Among its many uses, dance/movement therapy aims to help people overcome trauma, often by nonverbally bringing the elements of the experience to the fore.

In contrast to what the women have been told (that they are dumb and ugly) and how they have been controlled with confined strictures, the dance class is a safe place in which the women have choices and can improve their self-concept.