Full Course Description

Somatic Interventions for Treating Complex Trauma with Janina Fisher, Ph.D.

OUTLINE

The Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma

  • How the mind and body react to threat and danger
  • Autonomic arousal and affect tolerance
  • Inability to feel safe in the body
  • Loss of the ability to self-witness

The Nature of Traumatic Memory

  • “The body keeps the score” (Van der Kolk)
  • Implicit memories: is it memory?
  • Remembering situationally: ‘here’ or ‘there’?

Neurobiologically-informed Trauma Treatment

  • Regulating the traumatized nervous system and restoring a witnessing self
  • Psychoeducation: knowledge is power
  • Reframing the symptoms
  • Avoid ‘self-defeating stories’ (Meichenbaum)
  • Treat the symptoms, not just the event

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • Trauma and procedural learning
  • Tracking the body as a source of information
  • Use the language of the body
  • Body-centered techniques into talking therapy treatments

Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity

  • Mindfulness practices in therapy
  • Differentiate thoughts, feelings and body experience
  • Dual awareness of everyday experience
  • Teach mindfulness to clients

Challenges of Trauma Treatment

  • Secondary symptoms: anger, self-harm and suicidality, aggression, substance abuse, and eating disorders
  • Treatment-resistant depression and anxiety
  • Complex symptoms as manifestations of animal defense responses

Therapy as a Laboratory for the Practice of New Actions

  • Dis-identifying with the symptoms
  • Develop a new language and a new story
  • Capitalize on somatic resources for modulating the nervous system
  • New resources that address specific trauma symptoms

The Role of Neuroplasticity

  • Neuroplastic brain change
  • Principles of neuroplasticity
  • Treatments to enhance neuroplastic effects

Somatic Resolution of Traumatic Events

  • Repair and transformation rather than re-processing
  • Address uninvited memory
  • Tell the story to ourselves: creating internal safety
  • Right brain-to-right brain communication: feeling safe with others

OBJECTIVES

  1. Describe the neurobiological effects of traumatic experience.
  2. Identify implicit and procedural memories of trauma.
  3. Recognize role of autonomic arousal in exacerbating symptoms.
  4. Discuss how “the body keeps the score” as it relates to trauma.
  5. Describe basic principles of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy how it can inform treatment.
  6. Integrate mindfulness-based techniques in traditional treatments.
  7. Identify animal defense survival responses in trauma patients.
  8. Describe the roles of substance abuse, eating disorders and self-destructive behavior as trauma symptoms.
  9. Implement ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ interventions to address unsafe behavior.
  10. Describe a somatic approach to resolving traumatic experience.
  11. Differentiate past experience from present moment experience as it relates to the treatment of trauma.
  12. Utilize right brain-to-right brain communication to improve the effectiveness of trauma treatment.
Copyright : 12/05/2016

In-Session: Working with Somatic Components to Overcome Trauma Related Fears of Feeling Good

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Describe the characteristics of the split brain and its implications for trauma treatment.
  2. Discover aspects of sensorimotor psychotherapy as it relates to the treatment of trauma.

Copyright : 01/01/2017

In-Session: Steps Toward Healing Traumatic Attachment & Borderline Personality Disorder

Program Information

Objectives

  • Utilize right and left brain communication to improve the effectiveness of attachment treatment.
  • Describe the Structural Dissociation mode as it relates to trauma.

Copyright : 01/01/2017

BONUS: Shame and Self-Loathing in the Treatment of Trauma

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Evaluate the effects of shame and self-loathing symptoms and identify how these symptoms inform treatment interventions.
  2. Determine the impact of the neurobiological effects of shame as it relates to clinical practice.
  3. Evaluate cognitive schemas and its clinical implications.
  4. Articulate the foundation of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy as it relates to clinical treatment.
  5. Apply simple yet effective clinical interventions drawn from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to alleviate symptoms in clients.
  6. Utilize clinical techniques, such as, memory processing, cognitive-behavioral and ego state as related to clinical treatment.

Copyright : 12/12/2016