Managing World and Individual Crises – A Trauma Treatment Series

Part 1: Working with our Younger Clients and Their Families: A Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Approach to Child, Adolescent and Family Treatment by Dr. Bonnie Goldstein

You will begin by revisiting the development of identity, sense of self, affect regulation, verbal and non-verbal communication as well as the ability to form and sustain relationships with younger clients and their families. Using a mind-body-brain lens informed by Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, a wide range of treatment modalities are explored through clinical vignettes, case studies and brief experiential exercises.

Goldstein will illuminate ways to cope and thrive following worldwide traumatic events, with particular attention paid to offering treatment through remote or long-distance learning. She will elucidate the significance of the “somatic narrative” in treating children, adolescents-transitioning-to-adults, and family therapy, exploring therapeutic challenges and transformative moments. The ongoing process of body-based, implicit and nonverbal behaviour, and the complex interplay between psychological experience, procedural learning, and sensory processing, are illuminated by exploring movement patterns, gestures, stances, postures, prosody, and other non-verbal cues. You will learn new ways to enhance self-regulation and relationship skills, foster resilience, and create new competencies conducted in an atmosphere of curiosity, play and discovery.

Part 2: Building Inner Security When Threat is All Around by David Elliott

We evolved, individually and collectively, in the context of threats to our well-being. Risks of harm from hunger, cold, the lack of shelter, and injury and disease are deeply encoded within us, and our nervous systems have become primed to expect and react to these and other threats. One of our automatic threat response and protection mechanisms is the attachment system. Secure attachment includes the inner sense that when threats arise, there will be sufficient inner and outer resources for good enough handling and resolution of the safety challenges they create. Reflecting on the Pandemic, even for people who have been fortunate enough to develop attachment security, that security is challenged by the nature of the threat. We benefit from social engagement, primarily through physical contact, touch, and soothing. For many of us, the opportunities for this benefit became much more limited or completely absent. The challenges were even more significant for people with insecure attachments and those who have experienced trauma.

Fortunately, we have resources within us that can be of great help for strengthening our security and for helping us if we enter this period of threat with attachment insecurity.

In this video Dr. Elliott will describe and explore our capacities to use imagination to create solid and profound experiences of connection and security with physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual aspects. You will learn specific practices that can be of help, both professionally and personally.

Part 3: From Passion to Action in Times of Corona and Other Major Survival Threats by Ellert Nijenhuis

Ellert Nijenhuis takes you on a journey to explore how individuals, institutions, and nations react when confronted with a significant threat. Such a threat calls for efficient action but may release inadequate responses (passions) involving patterns of ignorance, fragility, and (emotional) control. This ‘trinity of trauma’ becomes dominant the more the causal power of the threat exceeds the power of action of those whose mental and physical existence is under threat. Trauma is a profound loss of power to act. It manifests as a trinity of ignorance, fragility and emotional control within and between individuals, institutions, and nations. You will explore the ‘trinity of trauma’ to grasp a deep understanding of how they play out in a clinical setting, and how to manage them to effectively treat your client.

An overview on the ‘trinity of trauma’: Ignorance involves ignoring perils and their consequences. This passion includes conducts such as looking the other way, underestimating hazards or belittling risks, and remaining naive. Fragility is being and feeling confused, overwhelmed, powerless, and hurt. It shows, among others, fear, panic, excessive worry, and ineffective or inefficient attempts at defence. A third passion pertains to emotional control, to power displays such as blaming others (persons, nations) or things (such as 5G masts), engaging in misleading authority statements (“stay calm, we are in charge”), minding one’s personal or national interests at the expense of meeting general interests, inventing a conspiracy theory, abusing the occasion to gain political power, going to war.

Healing is a progression from passion to action, particularly a growth in the ability to act from reason. Acting from reason involves a higher-order longing and creative striving to integrate various other needs and desires. You will come away armed with the tools needed to guide your client in the skill of acting from reason.

Part 4: Recovering from post-COVID PTSD with Lifespan Integration® Therapy by Peggy Pace and Annandi Janner Steffan

Peggy Pace, founder of Lifespan Integration® (LI) will present LI in an overview, followed by the presentation by Dr A. Janner Steffan, the LI trainer.

You will learn the treatment of COVID-induced PTSD, which remains highly applicable to present day world crises. First, you will review the main characteristics of PTSD and the factors contributing to its genesis, which in the case of the virus pandemic and the measures taken to contain it, were manifold, unpredictable and life-threatening. You will then look at the neurobiology of trauma and how LI therapy works to restore the embodied experience of time flow. Consideration of re-traumatising the client is highlighted, you will learn the LI approach of minimal exposure to trauma. Ultimately you will gain the tools of LI to administer it and observe the appeasement of your clients’ trauma symptoms within a few sessions. This procedure is highly adjustable and can be used for couples and families, as well as individuals, and on yourself (working with a trusted colleague).

Part 5: Undoing Aloneness in the Time of Corona — What AEDP Has to Offer the Worldwide Community by Diana Fosha

COVID-19 created a paradoxical situation in which social isolation was critical to prevent the spread of the virus, but to counteract the fear, attachment theory tells us that it is within our human nature to seek proximity and connection. We can still feel and observe the effects of this in the current day. Diana Fosha will present to you the power of undoing aloneness and you will explore the explicit and experiential processing of profound relational traumatic and reparative experiences.

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) will be broken down into its five essential aspects: undoing aloneness, healing from the get-go, experiential processing of emotional experience, experiential processing of relational experience and experiential processing of transformational experience. Specifics areas you will examine are finding an entry point for accessing the pain; specific relational/experiential interventions for undoing aloneness; the power of judicious self-disclosure; moving through the pain and getting to the other side; the art and science of dyadic affect regulation and paying close attention to vitality within suffering and thus the potential for transformative pathways. You will explore the deep issues that come up with traumatic world events in relation to the traumas at the core of individuals’ suffering, learning how to work with these in transformants-informed ways that bring vitality and energy to both patient and therapist, as well as to the therapeutic process itself in a way that reinforces how we are all in this together. You will establish these practices whilst gaining specific interventions and helpful approaches to navigate the challenges that remain in clinical practice following the pandemic.

Part 6: Making Virtual Psychotherapy a Relational Experience by Janina Fisher

In this highly applicable workshop, Janina Fisher shares with you how to effectively help clients deal with the practical and emotional challenges caused by worldwide crises, such as the 2020 pandemic. Virtual psychotherapy can be stressful for the therapist and client. Often, both are overwhelmed by the technical challenges of working online, dysregulated by the stress they face at home and feeling the need for more relationships, not less. Virtual sessions can feel distant and impersonal without the connection that clients and therapists value as the heart and soul of psychotherapy. Adding to the stress, many of our clients have histories of abuse, failed attachment, neglect, and failed trust, increasing their sensitivity to distance and abandonment. Therapists, wanting to support them, can feel helpless and ineffective or even guilty. This webinar addresses how to overcome the limitations of telehealth technology to make remote psychotherapy a warm and relational experience. The inability to feel emotionally connected in a virtual space is rooted in the failure of object constancy in early attachment relationships, not caused by online teletherapy. Object constancy allows us to internalise those closest to us and trust that they care even at a distance or when there is a change in an emotional state. Instead of focusing on the loss and disappointment, we can use this difficult situation to help our clients develop greater object constancy.

Part 7: Multilevel Meaning Making, Relational Regulation and Stress by Ed Tronick

The Still-Face paradigm instantiates the fundamental for humans about themselves concerning the world of people, the inanimate world and their self-significance of making meaning. The findings on the Still-Face show that making meaning is a dynamic process made at multiple brain and systems – psychobiological or neurosomatic – levels. While meanings can be made and are made endogenously, they are more typically co-created with one another in an active exchange of information. That exchange is messy.

It is characterised by mismatches and matches of meanings and their repair. Successful meaning-making results in an expansion of consciousness and generates attachment and relationships, resilience and trust. Failure to make meaning shrinks, constricts consciousness, and creates distrust and fragility. Delve into the research on humans from Ed Tronick’s laboratory on genetics, physiology, emotions, epigenetics and caretaker-child and adult interactions to learn and understand how this information can be applied to your clinical practice. Examine examples from his new book “The Power of Discord: Why Relationships’ everyday ups and Downs are the Secret to building intimacy, resilience and Trust” to gain further perspective. You will also watch videotapes of the Still-Face in infants, children, and adults.

Part 8: Overcoming Challenging Moments in Trauma Treatment: Toward the Restoration of the Self by Ruth Lanius

Ruth discusses treatment challenges frequently encountered in trauma treatment from a clinical and neurobiological perspective. Throughout the webinar, she will outline practical strategies for dealing with these difficulties using clinical case examples. You will learn integrative therapeutic interventions to restore the self through resolving key symptoms, including reliving flashbacks, dissociative voice-hearing, self-mutilation, and intolerance of positive emotions through demonstrated clinical examples. The capacity to deal more effectively with these difficult-to-manage symptoms will help you to feel more competent as well as reduce burnout.

Part 9: The impact of trauma in youth on emotion recognition and regulation: The work done in Sierra Leone by Vittorio Gallese

In this all-encompassing webinar, you will explore Vittorio Gallese’s research focusing on the relationship between trauma, emotional regulation and emotional recognition. He demonstrates his findings from Sierra Leone on trauma and neglect in adverse environmental conditions during childhood and adolescence. Using an integration of psychological and anthropological approaches with neurophysiology, Vittorio explores how to work with teenagers who suffered terrible traumas such as torture, abuse and witnessing their parents be killed. He will talk you through how the passion for play is converted into a mechanism for violence and how this can be resolved as an example of the wider implications of using an integrated approach.

Part 10: Creating a Story of Safety: A Polyvagal Guide to Connection by Deb Dana

This Polyvagal Theory guided approach to therapy will offer you strategies to help clients identify and interrupt their familiar patterns of protection and skills to find and savour experiences of safety. When we speak the language of the nervous system, we can help clients safely tune into their autonomic states, reshape their nervous systems, and rewrite the trauma stories carried in their autonomic pathways.

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living, powerfully shaping safety experiences and influencing the capacity for connection. Polyvagal Theory provides a guide to the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviours and beliefs and an understanding of the body-to-brain pathways that give birth to our personal stories of safety and survival. For many of our clients, states of fight, flight, and collapse are frequent, intense, and prolonged, while safety and connection are elusive. With an updated map of the autonomic nervous system, Deb Dana illustrates the new understanding of the characteristic post-traumatic patterns of hyperarousal, hypervigilance, disconnection, and numbing. She demonstrates how you can reliably lead clients out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety necessary for successful treatment.