204 & 304 - Catalyzing Brain Change: Transforming Adversity into Learning and Growth

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Helping clients develop flexible and adaptive strategies for coping with both everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters is at the heart of the therapeutic process. In this workshop, we’ll focus on showing clients how to harness their own brain’s capacity for rewiring negative coping patterns that block growth. We’ll also identify empirically validated tools to encode new, more flexible patterns of response. You’ll discover how to:

• Teach clients tools of self-directed neuroplasticity to reverse the impact of stress and trauma on brain functioning and their capacities to cope
• Cultivate positive emotions to shift brain functioning from contracted survival responses to greater openness to change
• Use practices of mindfulness and self-compassion to recover the capacities of the prefrontal cortex for response flexibility and resilience
• Strengthen capacities for empathy and deepen skills of relational intelligence to foster more healthy relationships