5-Part Trauma Mini-Series – Janina Fisher

• Putting the Pieces Together: Trauma and Dissociation

Join internationally renowned trauma expert Janina Fisher, Ph.D. as she will introduce you to a neurobiological model that conceptualizes dissociation as an adaptive mind-body response to abuse, neglect, and attachment failure-all precursors to borderline and other personality disorders, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorder clients.

The treatment paradigm integrates traditional talking therapy methods with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, ego state therapy, and mindfulness-based techniques to create a simple but effective treatment paradigm for working with our most challenging, complex clients whatever their diagnosis. An understanding of dissociative phenomena and the use of this new approach can effectively engage even our most resistant, overwhelmed, numb, or embattled clients.

• Brain to Brain: Interpersonal Neurobiology & The Traumatic Transference

While wishing to trust or tolerate disappointment and misattunement in the therapy, powerful emotional memories of threat, humiliation, hurt, and betrayal invade the therapeutic relationship. Rather than making things better, the therapist’s expressions of empathy or attempts to process what happened in the transference often seem to make things worse.

Interpersonal neurobiology offers therapists a new window into how we can change the post-traumatic “dance” without the need to process empathic failures and misattunements intellectually. Maintaining a smooth dance rhythm with our clients requires knowing how to monitor and regulate our own nervous systems and somatic experience, as well as theirs.

Utilizing insights gleaned from the field of interpersonal neurobiology and from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-centered talking therapy for attachment and trauma, we can learn to facilitate moments of attunement and connection even with our most challenging clients.

• Chronic Pain & Trauma

While hoping to address their current issues or post- traumatic stress, the preoccupation with their bodies and physical suffering often gets in the way of focusing on the therapy. Equally, attempts to address the psychosomatic issues are apt to be misinterpreted by clients as an invalidating “It’s all in your head.” While therapists often suspect that there is a connection between the trauma and medical issues, psychotherapy models do not offer one clear-cut treatment method.In this seminar recording, we will approach chronic physical symptoms in trauma clients as a manifestation of unprocessed traumatic memories held in the body.

Inspired by the work of Robert Scaer, this approach draws on interventions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, and clinical hypnosis to help clients locate the origins of their pain in the events of their past. You will learn how to help clients “hear” the communication conveyed by their symptoms, connect with the child self holding the bodily manifestation of memory, and begin to resolve the trauma-related fear and pain driving the chronic physical issues.

• Stabilizing Unsafe Behavior: Suicide & Self-Injury

Join internationally renowned trauma expert Janina Fisher, Ph.D. as she will introduce you to a neurobiological model that conceptualizes dissociation as an adaptive mind-body response to abuse, neglect, and attachment failure-all precursors to borderline and other personality disorders, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorder clients.

The treatment paradigm integrates traditional talking therapy methods with Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, ego state therapy, and mindfulness-based techniques to create a simple but effective treatment paradigm for working with our most challenging, complex clients whatever their diagnosis. An understanding of dissociative phenomena and the use of this new approach can effectively engage even our most resistant, overwhelmed, numb, or embattled clients.

• Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing

This 60-minute recording was webcast live from the office of Dr. Janina Fisher and introduces shame from a neurobiological perspective – as a survival strategy driving somatic responses of automatic obedience and total submission.Learn to help clients relate to their symptoms with curiosity rather than automatic acceptance, discriminate the cognitive, emotional, and physiological components of shame, and to integrate somatic as well as traditional psychodyanamic and cognitive-behavioural techniques to transform shame-related stuckness.