Disconnection from self in the context of traumatic experience is a survival strategy that allows victims to disown what is happening and disown the parts that are victimized. The cost of dissociation as an instinctive mental survival response is often lifelong internal conflicts, shame and self-loathing, difficulty self-soothing, and complications in relationships with others. Without internal coherence or compassion, these individuals are vulnerable to suicidality and self-harm or substance abuse, often marginalized by the label of “borderline.”
Despite the feeling of being irretrievably damaged, all humans have a brain capable of visualizing or imagining experiences of acceptance, closeness, and comfort that evoke the same somatic sensations associated with early secure attachment. Helping clients discover their split-off younger selves and imaginatively bring them “home” spontaneously leads to an internal sense of warmth and safety they have never known. In this presentation, we will explore the therapeutic power of using somatic experience to foster internal attachment to clients’ most deeply disowned younger selves.
Objectives
“CP,” a client with Dissociative Identity Disorder, is working on changing her relationship to chronic suicidal ideation and impulsivity. In this session, she is helped to re-frame the wish to die as an expression of a suicidal part of her personality trying to control flashbacks and overwhelming emotions. This helps her more clearly differentiate the wish to live despite the self-destructive impulses. She speaks frankly about the shame evoked by traditional approaches to suicidality and how it fuels the suicidal part to desperate measures. By understanding the suicidal ideation as a communication from the suicidal part, she reports a growing ability to keep herself safe, no matter how intense the suicidal impulses.
Objectives
You work with trauma to make a difference.
But developmental trauma and disorganized attachment have profoundly negative effects on those who experience them -- and the signs and symptoms of dissociation can be difficult to recognize, even for clinicians.
And many people with trauma-related dissociation and dissociative disorders actively work to hide their struggles; stigma and shame driving their secrecy and barring them from sharing the full extent of their distress with you. Frightened and confused, many become “revolving door” patients, in and out of the mental health system when the root of their problems can’t be identified.
They are in desperate need of your help.
This recording will prepare you to effectively meet the clinical challenges involved in identifying and treating individuals across the dissociative spectrum.
Key Benefits:
Don’t miss out on this chance to add valuable skills and tools to your trauma practice and ensure those seeking your help don’t become “revolving door” patients.
Purchase this recording today and provide hope and healing to those with trauma-related dissociation and Dissociative Disorders!
Objectives
After experiencing trauma, our clients often dissociate from their bodies aiming to escape intense sensations and emotional pain. They then increasingly react to inner and outer cues linked to behavioural patterns that are below conscious awareness.
Even after treatment, clients who have experienced severe or sustained trauma, are often overwhelmed by residual symptoms and are trapped in reactivity to triggers. Safe-embodiment skills, carefully introduced, sequenced, and titrated, can move clients beyond the life-diminishing cycles of avoidance and re-traumatization.
In this live online training, you will learn an array of skills designed to create the safety needed to work with the body and with fearful parts of the self. You will learn how to help clients identify, befriend, and shift autonomic states and parts of the self that otherwise perpetuate avoidance and reactivity.
In both virtual and in-person therapy sessions, you will be able to offer embodied trauma-resiliency tools designed to strengthen vagal tone and the motivation to incorporate these vagal toning strategies into their daily lives. Integrate and sequence dialogue with parts of the self with gentle movement and breath, increasing your client’s self-efficacy, steadiness, and ability to choose rather than react.
Watch Debra, an experienced international presenter, in this day of experiential learning as she shares embodied Polyvagal Theory applications. Conclude the day with new tools for trauma recovery and vibrant resiliency.
Objectives
ln this course, Kathy Steele identifies what dissociation is, the challenges one faces when working with dissociation regarding the dance between attachment and defence; and the role of the therapeutic relationship as a stabilizing factor. Attachment strategies, the basic principles in working with parts, and a systematic approach to working with parts will also be discussed and evaluated.
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Hope and light are on the horizon to help clients overcome the challenges of healing and releasing the pain of relational trauma.
The highly acclaimed Transcending Trauma explores a unique, compassionate, and evidence-based approach to resolving complex and dissociative trauma. In this transformative book Frank Anderson, MD, masterfully details an IFS path to therapy that allows clients to access their inherent capacity for healing – called Self-energy – while also helping them welcome, as opposed to manage, the extreme emotions frequently associated with trauma.
Included are clinical case examples, summary charts, current neuroscience research, and personal stories that will enable your clients to reclaim self-connection, experience self-love, and regain the ability to connect with and love others. Designed with clinicians in mind, this book offers a comprehensive map to complex trauma treatment that will enable readers to:
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