About the Event

Day One - An Introduction to Working with the Body in Complex Trauma Treatments

Current research indicates that trauma is largely remembered non-verbally, leaving the body and nervous system primed for future threat. Many traditional approaches to treatment lack techniques to work directly with this physical legacy of trauma; indeed, the body has largely been left out of the ‘talking cure’. 

Through a combination of lecture material, experiential exercises and discussion, this workshop will introduce a body-oriented approach to working with unresolved trauma. Andrew’s approach to training encompasses not only the most recent theoretical understanding regarding neuroscience and the impact of our experiences on our body, but also provides a clear and pragmatic link between theory and practice.

At the conclusion of day one, participants will be able to:

• Review current neuroscience and practical applications in relation to safe trauma work.
• Understand the role of the body in trauma treatment, including the role of procedural learning and its relevance to trauma treatment.
• Apply simple somatic techniques to facilitate clients' self-regulation (including directed mindfulness).
• Acquire increased knowledge and skills in assisting clients to develop body-based resources and enable them to experience and stabilise embodiment.
• Understand the significance of the relational field in body-based psychotherapy.
• Acquire increased knowledge and skills in incorporating bodily experience into all phases of trauma therapy.

Day Two - Deepening Resources for Stabilisation

The second day will build on content covered in the first day, with particular focus on assisting clinicians to use more advanced body-based psychotherapeutic techniques to enrich and enhance their treatment approach to clients presenting with unresolved trauma. 

Areas of focus will include the impact of somatics on the therapeutic relationship, and assisting clients to effectively access body-based resources to improve their capacity to regulate strong emotion and physiological arousal and more effectively process their traumatic experiences. The workshop will include both didactic and experiential material, with an emphasis on the provision of practical skills for body-based psychotherapy practice.

At the conclusion of day two, participants will have:

• Practiced simple somatic techniques to facilitate clients’ self-regulation (including directed mindfulness).
• Grasped the significance of the relational field in body-based psychotherapy.
• Acquired increased knowledge and skills in incorporating bodily experience into all phases of trauma therapy.
• Acquired increased knowledge and skills in assisting clients to develop body-based resources and enable them to experience and stabilise embodiment.
• Acquired practical skills for the development of advanced resourcing that supports clients’ trauma processing.

About the Workshop

What can we learn from hypnosis to enhance our clinical effectiveness in working with trauma and dissociation? Can a dissociative therapeutic approach, such as hypnosis, be helpful for someone where dissociation is symptomatic? Can this approach be integrated into one’s current therapeutic practices, such as with mindfulness and meditation? And, perhaps most importantly, how can it help a client grow from trauma?

While this two-day course will cover topics such as the principles, ethics, and practise of hypnotherapy in up-to-date, evidence-based, outcome-oriented approaches, it is best seen as an introduction to clinical hypnosis. It will introduce you to the language and processes of clinical hypnosis for post-trauma growth, in a user-friendly, experiential learning format with particular emphasis on your own clinical applications and clinician skills.

Moving beyond the traditional scripted approach to hypnosis, you will learn about the application of hypnosis into therapy in ways that are creative, individual, and adaptive to client goals.

Topics covered will include:

• What is hypnosis
• A brief history of therapeutic trances
• Myths and misconceptions
• Hypnosis, trauma and dissociation
• The nature of suggestions
• Types and power of suggestions
• Basic theories of hypnosis
• How to induce and deepen the hypnotic experience
• Hypnosis for facilitating post-trauma growth
• How to apply your new skills in your own therapeutic work

The style of teaching will be focussed on practical skills-development with many exercises designed to facilitate the application of hypnotherapy in your daily therapeutic work with clients.

About the Workshop

Dissociative processes are most evident in the rapid shifts in self-states identified by the close tracking of ‘no-go zones’ - those places in our psyche which are too dangerous or painful to enter. These places frequently result from persistent early trauma, commonly as a consequence of growing up in an environment where the child’s caretaker(s) are either frightened or frightening, or both.

Working therapeutically with individuals with such disorganised attachments presents considerable difficulties since, by definition, the dissociative processes are designed to ‘hide’ both the fear and the longing for connection from both oneself and the Other. This can result in behaviours which fluctuate between angry attacks on the therapeutic relationship and a tenacious attachment to it. An intolerable dilemma arises from a longing to feel ‘real’ yet also desperately wanting to avoid the associated pain that comes with it. This requires the therapist to survive, detoxify, and metabolize the emotional turmoil that results from the internal shame and fear of humiliation, intolerable loss, intense dislike, disgust, and contempt that often underpin such ‘attackments’.

In this workshop, Dr Chefetz marries dissociation and its clinical manifestations with a wealth of extended case histories. Drawing on theories of self-states and their involvement in dissociative experiences, he demonstrates how to identify and work with persistent dissociative processes, and their related neurobiological and psychodynamic underpinnings.

Learning outcomes

• Recognising dissociative processes in your casework;
• Understanding memory processes in trauma patients; and
• Working with shame, repetition compulsions, enactments, addictive behaviours, depersonalisation, self-harm, and suicidality in the lives of adult survivors of childhood trauma.

Objectives

• Describe the normal tension between association and dissociation and how the balance between them contributes to mental coherence.
• Discuss why discerning depersonalisation is critically important in assessing dissociation.
• Describe how dissociative process influences memory and the questions that are important in discerning dissociative disturbances of memory
• Compare the basics of infant attachment behaviours and their adult manifestations in trauma treatment.
• Discuss the differences between emotions in the shame spectrum of experience and their personal and interpersonal correlates
• Explain the potential value and pitfalls of countertransference disclosure in psychotherapy with trauma survivors.
• Describe appropriate questions to discern depersonalisation, derealisation, amnesia, identity confusion, and identity alteration toward making a diagnosis of a dissociative disorder.
• Discuss and be able to apply the four basic patterns of infant attachment, secure, anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganised/disoriented to their adult cases and apply these to the clinical setting.
• Predict which patients in your practice are likely carrying hidden shame
• Describe the process from which shame and rage become welded together.
• Discuss how hippocampal and amygdala functions interact in trauma treatment.
• Discuss a strategy for pointed intervention to impact and reduce suicidality as an immediate threat.
• Explain how "attackment" describes a shift from proximity seeking in the attachment paradigm to guaranteeing distance when domination- submission, power and control, dynamics overwhelm the interpersonal world of a child
• Describe the difference between the words affect, feeling, and emotion as well as the clinical utility of distinguishing between them.
• Describe the general underlying cause of addictive behaviour as it relates to dissociative processes.
• Discuss a technique for specific psychotherapeutic exploration of addictions and their relief.
• Explain the likely sources of negative therapeutic reaction in the treatment of a person with a complex dissociative disorder.