Full Course Description

Bringing the Body into Therapy: Clinical Tools from Relationship Repair and Somatic Experiencing

When it comes to tapping into clients’ natural resources for healing from trauma, the body is an invaluable tool. Not only does it store information about our early attachment experiences, but it shows the signs of epigenetic and transgenerational influences. The body reveals how trauma negatively impacts relationships with friends, partners, colleagues, and loved ones. But research and experience show that trauma behaviours aren’t set in stone. Pulling from the latest developments in Somatic Experiencing and neuroplasticity, this recording will teach you a dynamic toolkit of body-oriented approaches for treating early developmental trauma as well as helping clients improve nervous-system regulation and repair relationships. You’ll explore:

The neurophysiological and embodied underpinnings of healthy relationships
How to create a vibrant experience of resilience and wholeness in your work
How implicit memory shapes our physiological and psychological responses to trauma and recovery
Three skills to work with the autonomic nervous system to rebound from trauma and overwhelm

Program Information

Objectives

Appraise the concepts of attachment theory, interoception, and the window of tolerance in the treatment of psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Evaluate the theory that traumatic memories are stored primarily in implicit memory.
Formulate a treatment process based on the approach of Somatic Experiencing for the treatment of trauma and discuss risks and limitations.
Practice three skills to work with the autonomic nervous system to rebound from trauma and overwhelm.

Copyright : 11/03/2022

Treating Collective Trauma with Hakomi: Listening to the Body

The Hakomi Method is a multidimensional somatic approach to deep healing rooted in an understanding of the silent language of the body. In the moment-by-moment unfolding of their somatic awareness, clients learn to access the unconscious core beliefs that shape their response to trauma, even when it’s woven within the larger context of collective trauma. Discover how the therapist’s own somatic awareness can help clients untangle the complex area where individual and collective trauma meet, and learn techniques to stay attuned and somatically grounded to effectively work with trauma. In this recording, you’ll explore:

The key Hakomi concepts of applied mindfulness and somatic awareness to help clients change rigid mental models
Attachment- and compassion-based skills that facilitate a gentle inquiry into the body’s messages
How to apply gentle interventions that can yield clients’ emotional defences and trauma identities
How to stay self-regulated, somatically grounded, and open-hearted when working with trauma-sensitive processes

Program Information

Objectives

Use the key Hakomi concepts of applied mindfulness and somatic awareness to improve outcomes when treating trauma.
Apply attachment- and compassion-based skills that facilitate the experiential process into the body-mind.
Develop an experiential mindset to hold the multilayered complexity of trauma in sessions.
Demonstrate the essential Hakomi personhood skills that help therapists stay grounded and self-regulated while in therapeutic engagement.

Copyright : 16/02/2021

The Modern Abolitionist

Somatic abolitionist. It’s how Resmaa Menakem, popular trainer, speaker, and bestselling author of My Grandmother’s Hands, defines himself. He’s managed military counselling services for more than 50 bases in war-torn Afghanistan, consulted on trauma and healing for large school districts and police departments, and trained with top trauma and somatic experts to refine and teach his particular healing path of Cultural Somatics: an embodied, antiracist way of living.

For years, he’d watched as well-intentioned therapists tried reading, talking, and thinking their way past the intangible, living nature of racism in order to do good, culturally aware work. But white supremacy lives in the body, just as racial trauma does.

In this recording, Menakem will show us how intergenerational trauma comprises brutal experiences and realities, compounded over time, from which our ancestors couldn’t heal. He’ll offer a road map for learning how to slow down enough to discern, in ourselves and others, historical from personal pain, and the role we may be unwittingly playing in keeping the effects of racism alive in our bodies.

Program Information

Objectives

Assess the stress signs and symptoms of racialized trauma.
Integrate the basics of the HIPP model (historical, inter-generational, persistent institutional, personal) of racialized trauma into your clinical practice.
Demonstrate one resourcing technique to use with trauma clients.

Copyright : 10/03/2022

Helping Clients Who Can’t "Feel"

Nothing defeats a therapist more than a client who’s numb or disconnected. When you ask why they’ve come for help, they may say, “I’m depressed” or “I’ve lost all hope,” but they can’t describe how they feel.

How can we help clients like this deepen into the work of therapy?

This recording offers a body-centred approach to helping clients access emotion and connect to themselves in a way that can’t be defeated by numbing. You’ll learn to use simple movements and sensations as a therapeutic entry point to help clients appreciate how their bodies prevent them from experiencing the emotions they’re entitled to feel.

Program Information

Objectives

Reframe emotional and somatic numbing as a body phenomenon to improve clinical outcomes.
Discuss the role of emotional numbing in the client’s survival or adaptation to trauma.
Describe the autonomic arousal model and its role in emotional numbing.
Identify body-centred interventions that increase sensation or energy.
Implement strategies that increase autonomic arousal.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Body Oriented Therapy Techniques for Trauma and Attachment

The body’s intelligence is largely an untapped resource in psychotherapy. Few educational programs in psychology or counselling emphasize how to draw on the wisdom of the body to support therapeutic change, leaving therapists mostly dependent on a client’s verbal narrative. Yet the story told by the “somatic narrative”—gesture, posture, prosody, facial expressions, eye gaze, and movement—is arguably more significant than the story told by the words. This talk will elucidate the wisdom of the body and how to tap the body itself to support therapeutic goals.

Program Information

Objectives

Choose three somatic resources to regulate arousal
Determine “bottom up processing” to resolve traumatic memory
Distinguish proximity-seeking actions and how they relate to the client experience
Integrate embedded relational mindfulness within treatment planning for client sessions

Hope for Treatment-Resistant Depression: A Sensorimotor Approach to Change

The very nature of depression often thwarts efforts to treat it. After all, it’s difficult to change when you have no energy, no hope, and no capacity to concentrate. How can we challenge these chronic states? Using interventions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, this recording will introduce ways to help clients relate to their depressive symptoms mindfully, rather than identifying with them, and to manage physical symptoms through changes in posture, breath, and energy. You’ll discover how to:

Help clients separate depressive thoughts from physical symptoms so that each can be treated separately
Counter cognitive beliefs that reinforce depressive states by experimenting with new words, new actions, and new habits
Use body-centred interventions, such as movement, to increase energy and focus in depressed clients
Facilitate development of an “antidepressant lifestyle” rather than habitual engagement in the opposite

Program Information

Objectives

Differentiate to clients depression as a somatic state, not just a psychological state.
Determine cognitive schemas that reinforce depressive states to improve client outcomes.
Appraise a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy approach to understanding depression.
Assess three body-centred interventions that increase energy and focus in depressed clients.
Evaluate Sensorimotor interventions that transform depressive beliefs.
Evaluate the use of the social engagement system and its role in evoking an internal sense of safety as it relates to treatment.