Unlike stress, which resolves itself after the event is over, trauma causes people to become physiologically and mentally stuck — hyper-aroused and/or frozen, unable to manage their bodily arousal systems.
This recording will clarify the neurobiological underpinnings of these broken biological systems, clarify how addictive behaviours of all kinds are invariably rooted in desperate attempts to manage and discuss the evidence-based methods that are available to help re-regulate mind and body.
Objectives
For the past 40 years, The Meadows Model has been treating trauma and addiction, using both Pia Mellody’s Model on Codependency and cutting edge trauma interventions to provide safe container while patients learn to re-regulate and traverse the autonomic shifts needed within their nervous systems that allow for healing to occur. Because meaning follows physiology, one of our main goals is utilization of various therapeutic modalities that interrupt negative feedback loops - including disorganized breathing patterns, thoughts, and brainwave patterns. The state of our nervous system will inform how we organize our experience and make meaning of our life. Through Neurofeedback, and working directly with the nervous system to help individuals reorganize the non-conscious survival adaptations developed by the sub-cortical or lower brain, we explore the importance of experiencing the body in the present moment because healing happens in the here-and-now. This recording will include description of various neurotherapies utilized, how and why they are used within context of treatment planning, and a case presentation to demonstrate key concepts.
Objectives
Many clinicians still insist that clients sign and abide by a standard safety contract as a way to manage self-harm and addictive behaviours. This inevitably creates a power struggle between clients and therapists and forces clients to "white knuckle" their destructive urges without giving them alternative ways to navigate and process the deeper reasons why they turn to acts of self-destruction.
This recording will offer therapists a viable alternative that helps to de-code the deeper trauma-based communication, metabolize emotions, access clients' creativity and self-compassion, while teaching them healthier ways to self-soothe that don't lead to an endpoint of guilt or shame.
Objectives
The Trauma Timeline, part of Relational Trauma Repair, Dr. Dayton’s psycho-educational model, is an experiential process for groups and one to one therapy, that helps clients to become aware of their developmental traumas and place them into the overall context of their lives. The Trauma Timeline bonds and engages groups, provides a map for psychodramatic role play that allows for clients to talk to the parts of themselves that they wish to connect with or others who were a part of their lives and impacted their development. The trauma Timeline can be done in one to one, functioning as a map from which empty chair work can be done and/or in a group moved from the “map” into a group, experiential process.
Objectives
WE CAN’T HELP OURSELVES EVEN BEGIN TO HEAL RACIALIZED TRAUMA IF WE DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IT EVEN EXISTS. Our society needs to break down systems and institutions that perpetuate the concept of white body supremacy and recognize how the myth of race and historical trauma is deeply ingrained into our culture.
Through a somatic-body approach that negotiates the common historical and perpetual myths that Black bodies, Native bodies, and other bodies of colour are inherently deviant and that the white body is the standard of humanness, Resmaa helps build an understanding of racialized trauma so that we can move from our racialized lens to a cultural lens – and move further to a resourced energy lens of healing. Learn how to recognize trauma in the body, how to build a cultural container to heal, and how to begin practising resourced resilience. These tools can help us recognize body trauma born out of racism and white body supremacy in our own body and our communities and to start to heal.
Objectives
By looking at addictive behaviours – from drugs and alcohol to sex, technology, and binge eating -- as means of self-protection and a way of staving off deep personal pain, the IFS model provides a model of treatment that avoids power struggles, and feelings of shame and judgment that can often accompany treatment for trauma and addictions.
Watch IFS developer, Richard Schwartz, demonstrate how IFS therapy is used with addictive behaviours and see how the IFS model is a compassionate means to revisit trauma and initiate healing, and in turn, helps the individual to address the subsequent addictive behaviours often without the need for extended grounding techniques at the beginning of treatment.
Developed over the past four decades, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model offers both a conceptual umbrella under which a variety of practices and different approaches can be grounded and guided and provides a set of original techniques for creating safety and fostering Self-to-Self connection in traumatized clients.
This product is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with the IFS Institute and does not qualify for IFS Institute credits or certification.
Objectives
Racial and sexual minorities experience barriers in accessing healthcare that may impact their overall health outcomes. This timely presentation will invite you to look at any implicit bias and behaviours that you bring into the clinical setting that could that negatively promote healthcare disparities.
You will learn how to self-evaluate and how to implement best practices to avoid and correct any biased treatment of your patients.
Objectives
Childhood maltreatment can profoundly influence human development, resulting in a variety of mental, emotional, and social challenges – including addictive disorders. Attachment theory is a useful framework for understanding how early relational experiences can have far-reaching effects. Developmental trauma and attachment disturbances can lead to deficits in nervous system regulation. Addictive behaviours can be seen as an attempt at short-term regulation, with long-term consequences.
This presentation will explore the scientific linkages between trauma, attachment, and addiction, and will offer ideas on how to help clients restore the capacity to self-regulate in healthy ways.
Objectives
The connection between what we eat, and how we feel, has been documented for over a decade in studies. Yet, few organizations dealing with mental health and addiction have incorporated this concept into their treatment protocols. Kristin Kirkpatrick will discuss the major dietary factors that impact depression, anxiety, and addiction. She will also detail why dietary intervention is essential to successful recovery as well. Finally, Kristin will discuss the groundbreaking new program at the Meadows that is addressing these factors in an effort to better serve our patients, visitors and staff.
Objectives
Sexually compulsive and addictive behaviour has become a common presenting problem for today's clinician, whether it emerges in the form of pornography addiction, use of "hook up" apps, or emerges as part of marital conflict.
Dr. Carnes will discuss the current state of the field of compulsive sexual behaviour and pornography addiction, including the most up to date research and information on diagnosis, aetiology, and treatment.
Objectives
The majority of people who experience trauma will experience a chronic form that exists within their own family. Beginning with a genogram, Claudia will give a portrait of addiction in the family, offering an overlay of how adverse childhood experiences, emotional and physical abandonment are the foundation of emotional dysregulation fueling traumatic responses. She concludes the presentation offering a 7-step process for healing.
Objectives
For twelve years Dr. Maté was the staff physician at a clinic for drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he worked with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness, and HIV, including at Vancouver Supervised Injection Site.
In his recent bestselling book In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts, he draws on cutting-edge science to illuminate where and how addictions originate and what they have in common. Contrary to what is often claimed, the source of addictions is not to be found in genes, but in the early childhood environment where the neurobiology of the brain’s reward pathways develops and where the emotional patterns that lead to addiction are wired into the unconscious. Stress, both then and later in life, creates the predisposition for addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, nicotine or to behavioural addictions such as shopping or sex. Helping the addicted individual requires that we appreciate the function of the addiction in his or her life.
Once we recognize the roots of addiction and the lack it strives (in vain) to fill, we can develop a compassionate approach toward the addict, one that stands the best chance of restoring him or her to wholeness and health.
Objectives
Whether on its own or in collision with another mental health problem, pathological exercise is a serious and debilitating condition. Similar to substance use disorder, compulsive exercise can serve as a maladaptive coping strategy in response to increased arousal, hypervigilance, cognitive ruminations, and other trauma-related symptoms. Yet, in a society that glorifies more as better, movement that takes a turn to compulsive—and dangerous—is far too often missed and dismissed. Further, the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of pathological movement—a process addiction—can be complicated by the fact that balanced exercise provides clear health and healing benefits. From both a professional and patient perspective, this presentation discusses the intersection of exercise, trauma, substance use disorders, eating disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicide.
Utilizing neuroscience findings, the personality and temperament traits that increase an individual’s risk of developing compulsive exercise in response to trauma will be described. This unique presentation discusses evidence-based as well as alternative treatment approaches.
Objectives
Understanding the latest in technology is an ever moving target, and a rapid one at that! Digital natives integrate the use of new technologies seamlessly into every aspect of their lives, including their sexual identities, expressions, courtship behaviours, and relationship formation. However, it can sometimes be hard for therapists to help when things go awry, because we may not speak this new and modern language. Older generations of therapists may have very different views on what constitutes healthy use of tech in one's sexual life where therapists who are digital natives themselves may find that the ability to keep their private and professional selves separate in a blurry digital landscape becomes a never ending question of what is right and what is right now? This session provides a basic overview of some of the sexual technology currently out in the world, what may be on the horizon and the joys and challenges new technology may bring to an already complex part of our lives.
Objectives
Trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder but is rather an injury caused by paralyzing fright, helplessness, and loss. Addiction is often used as an excuse for destructive behaviour when it is actually a failed attempt to self-regulate and soothe deep emotional wounds. It is a maladaptive way of dealing with difficult emotions such as shame, anger, sadness, and fear. It is also a way of avoiding or dissociating from the person’s traumas and their accumulation of adverse life experiences; for these reasons, effective treatment needs to be holistic in helping these individuals deal with the underlying roots which propel addiction and reduce the likelihood of relapse. By grounding energetic experiences through the containment of bodily sensations, while engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate states of arousal and intense emotions, we can facilitate the transformation of trauma and the integration of healthy experiences.
In this program, we will look at how underlying traumas often trigger and support addiction-based behaviour and how the roots of addiction lie in unresolved trauma, insecure attachment, lack of support, overindulgence, and habitual childhood frustration.
Objectives
Research in neuroscience provides an evidence-based and comprehensive understanding of addiction that fits well with the experiences of people needing, seeking, and in recovery. There are several insightful and well-articulated arguments challenging the disease conceptualization of addiction, but two important areas of research – epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology – greatly advance awareness of how environmental stress creates vulnerability to addiction.
This lecture reviews the most up-to-date science of addiction, the current arguments for and against addiction’s conceptualization as a disease, and how the principles of recovery management counter the pathophysiology of addiction and improve a recovering person’s chances of achieving long-term recovery.
Objectives
With the emerging knowledge of the nature of addiction and compulsion in their many forms, evidence from many quarters is foreshadowing our next great epidemic. Already addiction ranks as our number one public health problem dramatically outdistancing in financial costs compared to other illnesses such as cancer and diabetes. Unfortunately, deep public prejudice against mental health and addiction professionals as inept or even fraudulent is a steep barrier to the changes we need to make.
The good news is that other countries have pioneered models for changing cultural attitudes. Further, catalytic combinations from genetics, trauma research, neuroscience, emotional regulation, and addiction treatment have cleared a path of hope via effective, core strategies that all clinicians and their patients can access. The real questions are, do we have the resolve and do we have time?
Objectives
In this address, Gabor Mate will discuss how in our hyper-stressed, materialistic society, physical and mental illness are not aberrations but natural outcomes of a way of life inimical to genuine human needs.
Treatment, therefore, must go beyond a focus on symptoms and diagnoses to address the causes of dysfunction from a bio-psycho-social perspective.
Objectives