Awakening Positive Emotional States: How Imagery, Movement, and Play Can Enhance Your Work

CPD

Handouts

Faculty

Courtney Armstrong, LPC, MHSP Related seminars and products

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Courtney Armstrong, LPC, MHSP, is the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Hypnotherapy and author of Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory Reconsolidation, and Resilience. She has over 25 years’ experience and is a board-certified Fellow in clinical hypnotherapy who has trained thousands of mental health professionals nationally and internationally in creative, brain-based strategies for healing trauma. She is a bestselling author of the book, The Therapeutic “Aha!”: 10 Strategies for Getting Clients Unstuck and Transforming Traumatic Grief and contributes to publications such as Psychotherapy Networker, Counseling Today, and The Neuropsychotherapist. She has been featured as a trauma and grief expert on national television and radio programs and is the owner/director of Tamarisk: A Center for Mind-Body Therapy in the state of Tennessee.
 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Courtney Armstrong is the founder and president of Courtney Armstrong Consulting and Training Services and the Institute for Trauma Informed Hypnotherapy. She is a consultant with the US Veterans Administration. Courtney Armstrong receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Courtney Armstrong serves on the Clinical Hypnosis Education and Training Committee of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. She is a member of the American Mental Health Counselor's Association, the Tennessee Licensed Professional Counselors Association, and the Chattanooga Area Psychotherapy Association.

Objectives

1. Demonstrate how to help clients access resourceful states when they’re feeling hopeless and helpless. 
2. Use imagery techniques to elicit desired emotions and engender positive feelings toward the self and the future.  
3. Demonstrate ideas, questions, and other interventions in ways that foster hope and boost motivation.  
4. Determine how to gently lead discouraged clients into heartening experiences that enable them to reclaim inner states of peace, strength, joy, and vitality. 
5. Create music and movement interventions that lift depression, calm anxiety, and empower traumatized clients. 
6. Apply playful interventions that optimize learning and reinforce new behaviours in a clinical setting. 

Outline

Explain how to help clients access resourceful states when they’re feeling hopeless and helpless. 

• Discuss state dependent learning and research on psychological interventions to increase positive emotion and optimism.  

Use imagery techniques to elicit desired emotions and engender positive feelings toward the self and the future.  

• Demonstrate best possible-self imagery intervention & discuss research supporting it. 
• Demonstrate symbolic imagery intervention to elicit desired emotional states.   

Articulate ideas, questions, and other interventions in ways that foster hope and boost motivation.  

• Demonstrate attune, lift, and lead communication techniques. 
• Demonstrate how to redirect attention towards what the client desires. 

Determine how to gently lead discouraged clients into heartening experiences that enable them to reclaim inner states of peace, strength, joy, and vitality. 

• Demonstrate imagery interventions to reframe sense of self. 
• Demonstrate interventions to evoke self-compassion. 

Create music and movement interventions that lift depression, calm anxiety, and empower traumatized clients. 

• Discuss music can be used to elicit desired emotional responses. 
• Discuss research on the relationship between movement and emotional states. 

Apply playful interventions that optimize learning and reinforce new behaviours in a clinical setting. 

• Discuss how play optimizes learning and reinforces new behaviours. 
• Demonstrate playful association games that can be used to reinforce new learning. 

Target Audience

• Psychologists
• Physicians
• Addiction Counselors
• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Nurses
• Behavioral Health Professionals