Full Course Description

When Talk Isn’t Enough: Embodied Awareness in the Consulting Room with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

Objectives

  1. Demonstrate breathing, posture, facial, and vocal exercises to energize your therapeutic presence and enhance your mirroring of the client’s words and expressions
  2. Implement techniques for projecting different messages (empathy, support, authority, guidance) through how you stand, sit, and walk
  3. Explain how to make yourself “heard” through your body language and movements
  4. Discuss how to bring more mindfulness and optimism into your approach with clients

Outline

  • Understanding the limitations of exposure therapy with its emphasis on desensitization to pain and exploring alternative methods that encourage a fuller mind/body integration.
  • How to make the most of your own healing presence through attention to breathing, posture, and mirroring your clients' words and expressions.
  • A future-focus overview of emerging tools and research that promise new possibilities for healing from complex trauma.

Program Information

Target Audience

Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers, Addiction Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses and other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 03/23/2014

Healing from the Bottom Up: How to Help Clients Access Resource States with Peter Levine

One of the keys to helping clients move beyond trauma is to help them learn how to access safety and positive resource states instead of repeatedly experiencing threats that no longer exist. In this workshop, we’ll focus on specific tools for reading clients’ psychological and physical cues and using their natural instincts to heal and rebalance their physiology.

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Assess physical cues of internal states that indicate the resources clients can access to improve clinical outcomes.

Outline

  • Master the SIBAM model for systematically observing clients' nonverbal responses.
  • Guide clients in "riding the waves" of their sensations as they exit from their immobility response and experience release from their original trauma.
  • Titrate your interventions to maximize your impact and avoid retraumatizing vulnerable clients.

Target Audience

Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers, Addiction Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses and other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 03/22/2014

Advances in Trauma Treatment Today

Program Information

Target Audience

Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers, Addiction Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses and other Mental Health Professionals

Objectives

  1. Explain what really works in trauma therapy.
  2. Summarize a systemic view of trauma.
  3. Discuss to complex trauma issues in youth, including post-traumatic stress, attachment disturbance, behavioral and affect dysregulation, interpersonal difficulties, and identity-related issues
  4. Discover the underlying trauma or sense of shame that clients are trying to resolve when working substance abusers.

Outline

  • Introduction to trauma panel and "flash forum" structure
  • Expert 20-minute panelist presentations
  • Audience pairing up and discussing of panel topics
  • Panelist answering of audience questions

Copyright : 03/21/2014

The Challenge of Treating Complex PTSD: What to do When Things Get Messy and Uncomfortable

Objectives

  1. Describe how to assess the client’s motivation, stage of change, and preferred mode of learning and how to build a therapeutic collaboration around it
  2. Summarize the importance of therapist transparency
  3. Explain how to empower clients by making the therapy process as safe and explicit as possible
  4. Explore intra-family violence or include additional family members in your sessions

Outline
Introduction and overview of collaborative change model for trauma treatment

  • Introduction to collaborative change as a "meta-model" to other trauma therapies
  • Discussion how collaborative change model can help therapists overcome being stuck

Experiencing collaborative change therapy with trauma

  • In-depth study of the concept of ethical attunement
  • Workshop between participants to discuss techniques
  • Clinical feedback examples to support collaborative change model of therapy
  • Review of collaboration change model and lesson on techniques how to apply it to other models of therapy

Concluding remarks and question and answer session

  • Presenters answer specific questions about trauma model
  • Final consolidation exercise to use with clients

Program Information

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, and other Behavioral Health Professionals

Copyright : 03/18/2016

Accessing the Deep Brain with Brainspotting: Interpersonal Neurobiology in Action with David Grand, Ph.D.

Objectives

  1. Identify how specific eye movements, including wobbles and microsaccades, as well as other facial cues and reflexes reveal specific “spots” in the brain
  2. Describe “brainspots,” the eye positions associated with the activation of trauma
  3. Instruct traumatized clients to attend to their inner experience as they move through dissociative blocks and maximize a process of self-healing
  4. Develop skills that allow you to pay attention to interactions with clients while staying attuned to the internal brain changes reflected in their eye movements

Outline
Introduction to Brainspotting

  • Overview education of the components of the brain
  • Identifying the advantages of using brainspotting over talk therapy to overcome trauma and other clinical issues

Discussion/demonstration of how to use Brainspotting in a clinical session

  • Understanding the science behind why brainspotting works
  • Live demonstration of Brainspotting in action
  • Q&A session and audience comments on the implementation of Brainspotting

Concluding remarks from David Grand

  • Final remarks following session experience and enhanced attunement
  • Follow-up training opportunities with David Grand

Program Information

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 03/27/2015

BONUS: Working the Edge in Healing Trauma: Can Therapy Sometimes Be Too Safe?

Objectives

  1. Use resourcing and other methods to set up corrective experiences with clients learning how to handle increasing arousal and discomfort
  2. Recognize your own tendency to be overprotective and rescue vulnerable clients
  3. Describe strategies to invite and empower clients to face manageable challenges and find ways to test their own limits
  4. Recognize the dangers of playing it too safe in therapy
  5. Describe strategies to draw fully on clients’’ resilience and capacity for self-healing

Outline
Overview of working with disorganized attachment in trauma clients

  • Identifying secure attachment
  • Establishing safety and tracking in the body

Step-by-step discussion through client demonstration video

  • How to directly untangle the disorganized attachment
  • How to help clients "reclaim their light"
  • How to use Polyvagal Theory to help our clients

Concluding remarks from Diane Poole Heller

  • Final remarks on client outcomes

Program Information

Target Audience

Psychologists, Counselors, Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists and other Behavioral Health Professionals

Copyright : 03/18/2016