- Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing
- Chronic Pain & Trauma
- Brain to Brain: Interpersonal Neurobiology & The Traumatic Transference
- Stabilizing Unsafe Behavior: Suicide & Self-Injury
- Putting the Pieces Together: Trauma and Dissociation
| This powerful online video series includes: |
- Putting the Pieces Together: Trauma and Dissociation
|
 |
| The therapeutic challenges of trauma treatment are frequently reflections of dissociative symptoms and fragmentation, including problems with memory, impulsivity, shutting down or “going away,” paradoxical responses to therapy, self-destructive behavior, and self-sabotage. Because we tend to equate dissociation only with dissociative disorders, we may not be aware of subtle dissociative processes at work, especially in high-functioning individuals.
Join internationally renowned trauma expert Janina Fisher, Ph.D. as she will introduce you to a neurobiological model that conceptualizes dissociation as an adaptive mind-body response to abuse, neglect, and attachment failure-all precursors to borderline and other personality disorders, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorder clients. The treatment paradigm integrates traditional talking therapy methods with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, ego state therapy, and mindfulness-based techniques to create a simple but effective treatment paradigm for working with our most challenging, complex clients whatever their diagnosis. An understanding of dissociative phenomena and the use of this new approach can effectively engage even our most resistant, overwhelmed, numb, or embattled clients.
|
 |
- Brain to Brain: Interpersonal Neurobiology & The Traumatic Transference
|
| Psychotherapy is a complex, shifting, neurobiological exchange or “dyadic dance” between two human beings. How we “dance” is determined by unconscious body and emotional memories of our early attachment experiences that have determined patterns of eye contact, proximity or distance, autonomic arousal, internal sense of safety or danger, trust and mistrust.
When their early experience includes neglect and abuse, our clients find themselves driven by conflicting wishes and fears of relationship. While wishing to trust or tolerate disappointment and misattunement in the therapy, powerful emotional memories of threat, humiliation, hurt, and betrayal invade the therapeutic relationship. Rather than making things better, the therapist’s expressions of empathy or attempts to process what happened in the transference often seem to make things worse.
Interpersonal neurobiology offers therapists a new window into how we can change the post-traumatic “dance” without the need to process empathic failures and misattunements intellectually. Maintaining a smooth dance rhythm with our clients requires knowing how to monitor and regulate our own nervous systems and somatic experience, as well as theirs.
Utilizing insights gleaned from the field of interpersonal neurobiology and from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-centered talking therapy for attachment and trauma, we can learn to facilitate moments of attunement and connection even with our most challenging clients.
|
|
|
 |
| Many of our clients with harsh or traumatic childhood histories suffer physical pain and chronic health conditions that defy medical diagnosis and conventional treatments. While hoping to address their current issues or post- traumatic stress, the preoccupation with their bodies and physical suffering often gets in the way of focusing on the therapy. Equally, attempts to address the psychosomatic issues are apt to be misinterpreted by clients as an invalidating “It’s all in your head.” While therapists often suspect that there is a connection between the trauma and medical issues, psychotherapy models do not offer one clear-cut treatment method.
In this seminar recording, we will approach chronic physical symptoms in trauma clients as a manifestation of unprocessed traumatic memories held in the body. Inspired by the work of Robert Scaer, this approach draws on interventions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, and clinical hypnosis to help clients locate the origins of their pain in the events of their past. You will learn how to help clients “hear” the communication conveyed by their symptoms, connect with the child self holding the bodily manifestation of memory, and begin to resolve the trauma-related fear and pain driving the chronic physical issues.
|
 |
- Stabilizing Unsafe Behavior: Suicide & Self-Injury
|
| The therapeutic challenges of trauma treatment are frequently reflections of dissociative symptoms and fragmentation, including problems with memory, impulsivity, shutting down or “going away,” paradoxical responses to therapy, self-destructive behavior, and self-sabotage. Because we tend to equate dissociation only with dissociative disorders, we may not be aware of subtle dissociative processes at work, especially in high-functioning individuals.
Join internationally renowned trauma expert Janina Fisher, Ph.D. as she will introduce you to a neurobiological model that conceptualizes dissociation as an adaptive mind-body response to abuse, neglect, and attachment failure-all precursors to borderline and other personality disorders, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorder clients. The treatment paradigm integrates traditional talking therapy methods with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, ego state therapy, and mindfulness-based techniques to create a simple but effective treatment paradigm for working with our most challenging, complex clients whatever their diagnosis. An understanding of dissociative phenomena and the use of this new approach can effectively engage even our most resistant, overwhelmed, numb, or embattled clients.
|
- Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing
|
 |
| Shame has an insidious impact on our traumatized clients’ ability to find relief and perspective even with good treatment. Feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy interfere with taking in positive experiences, leaving only hopelessness. This 60-minute recording was webcast live from the office of Dr. Janina Fisher and introduces shame from a neurobiological perspective – as a survival strategy driving somatic responses of automatic obedience and total submission.
Learn to help clients relate to their symptoms with curiosity rather than automatic acceptance, discriminate the cognitive, emotional, and physiological components of shame, and to integrate somatic as well as traditional psychodyanamic and cognitive-behavioural techniques to transform shame-related stuckness.
|
|
