The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living powerfully shaping our experiences of safety and influencing our capacity for connection. What begins with our biology becomes the story that shapes our days. Polyvagal Theory provides a guide to the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviors and beliefs and an understanding of the body to brain pathways that give birth to stories of safety and survival. Through this science of connection, we have a new understanding of the ways experience shapes the nervous system and the pathways that lead to healing.
In this time of deep disruptions to everyday life, we are confronted with experiences that challenge our ability to feel safe and find ways to connect. Polyvagal Theory offers us a roadmap to navigate this unfamiliar territory. Anchored in the safety of a regulated nervous system, pathways of connection come alive and we can travel those pathways in service of healing. In this presentation we will use the organizing principles of hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation to guide our exploration and answer the essential question, “What does the nervous system need in this moment to find safety in connection?”
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Few practitioners escape dealing with angry clients. When this occurs, both clients and therapists find it very distressing. Attending this workshop will help you to better comprehend the meaning and function of your clients anger; the main emphasis however is on helping your client to effectively manage their anger in the moment (and beyond). Equally important in this presentation is giving the therapist tools to cope with their own reaction (usually fear and/or anger, or paralysis) and to use their countertransference reaction to enhance the therapeutic work.
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Imagine us all having 2 parts; one is glorious and the other is messed up. As therapists we can over-focus on the messed up part and under-focus on the glorious part. If we draw out and amplify our client’s unique and innate inner strengths we can bring these to their problems. Trauma can rob us of joy and playfulness and we can get them back.
Margaret Olly, a famous Australian poet once said “If the house is a mess, add flowers”. Add more glory. It’s our birthright.
Drawn from Process Oriented Psychology, Family Constellations, Positive Psychology and Trauma Work.
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The work will be experiential and embodied.
3 exercises to help client’s access their ‘glorious’ nature and to reclaim joy and playfulness. Using a synthesis of techniques from Process Oriented Psychology, Positive Psychology, Trauma Work and Family Constellations.
What if we did not try to ‘work on’ difficult emotions but accepted these emotions as part of our human experience? Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) invites you to do just that: sit with and ‘be with’ uncomfortable emotions. According to ACT, ‘being with’ difficult emotions is an essential aspect of navigating these emotions.
ACT encourages clients to not avoid or deny their difficult emotions, and to not ‘work on overcoming’ these emotions, but to accept that their emotions are normal and appropriate responses.
Based on the six core principles of ‘cognitive defusion’, acceptance, being in the present moment, observing the self, exploring one’s values, and committing to action, ACT focuses on changing clients’ relationship with their emotions rather than on resolving symptoms. Surprisingly, symptoms resolve effortlessly this way as a by-product of establishing a more adaptive relationship with emotions.
In this 1-hour session, we will discuss the six core principles of ACT, explore the unique and highly effective way ACT teaches the integration of difficult emotions, and apply acceptance and mindfulness techniques during the session in an experiential exercise.
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Assess the six core principles of ACT. Distinguish how ACT integrates difficult emotions. Evaluate the use of acceptance and mindfulness techniques to navigate difficult emotions.
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For too long, addiction has been misunderstood and stigmatized. Engaging in ongoing substance use or repetitive harmful behaviors has been conceptualized as selfish, lazy, immature, self-indulgent and irresponsible, and treatment options can range from controlling and disrespectful to punitive and coercive. This presentation will help participants reconceptualize addiction as an attempt to manage chronic dysregulated emotional states, and empower the clinician to use collaborative, person-centered interventions that assist with emotion regulation through a compassion-based, harm-reduction lens while upholding ethical, evidence-based and respectful practice standards.
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Trauma experiences leave a wake of conflicting emotions. Overwhelm, grief, shame, sadness, anger are all common experiences that are associated with trauma. It can leave the client stuck in a hopeless and repetitive cycle unable to access the deeper healing emotions of acceptance, contentment, belonging and safety. In this session we will explore three keys aspects of embodied emotions: how the embodied presence of the therapist creates a safe healing container and how to effectively facilitate innate wisdom of somatic-emotional health and the role of self-compassion in trauma therapy. We will explore the notion of “fluid emotions” that reside underneath the trauma narrative and has the power to reconnect the client with their sense self-worth and internalized safety and emotion regulation.
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“The essence of psychotherapy is the experience of the therapeutic relationship and using that to alleviate suffering. Descriptions on the written page do not convey the emotional intensity, the connection between patient and therapist and the dynamic flow of psychotherapy.” (Eppel 2018)
In the preface to his instructive book, Short-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Alan Eppel offers a bold one-line description to the inevitably impossible question, ‘What is psychotherapy?’ In the very next line, he then explains why this simple proposition might miss the mark. Intensity, connection, and flow are lived here-and-now unfolding emotional experiences, difficult to track. His appeal to the need for what I will describe as short-term relational psychodynamic psychotherapy is not an old fashion exclusivist claim for modality superiority. Indeed, he acknowledges the well-established place of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in pioneering short term therapy but wants to suggest that some clients may also require something different. (Plurality suggests such arguments may also work in both directions.)
From the outset of psychoanalysis, when Freud and others engaged various approaches to talk therapy, the processing of emotion within a therapeutic relationship served as a central feature for the field. However, much has changed over the past 130 years in the world of psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy. At least two shifts relevant for the theme of emotion processes might be noted in this evolution. First, since the early 1990s, many theorist/practitioners have identified a relational turn —including notions of two-person psychology, intersubjectivity, mentalization—as one of the key historical expansions of psychoanalysis, resulting in a range of innovative clinical applications. Second, and even more recently, these relational interests would also contribute to the increasing introduction of more innovative shorter-term psychodynamic therapies, often centered upon what Alexander & French termed in 1946 as ‘corrective emotional experiences.’
This presentation will explore three overlapping relational psychodynamic emotion processes explored first by the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) (1) beginning in 2010, ‘implicit relational knowing’, then from 2018, (2) ‘engagement and a charged other’ and (3) ‘being moved’. The first has emerged as a fruitful application of caregiver-infant interactions (mutually regulatory ones) to adult psychotherapy suggesting a causal role for the therapeutic relationship in adult treatment. The second process, ‘engagement with a charged other’ represents an explicit deepening of the first concept and clarifies three contributions: 1) a core positive affective investment; 2) prioritization; and 3) continuity. In the last of the three, ‘moving through and being moved by’, the BCPSG expands previous work by identifying a shared emotional process depicted as ‘body-based interaffectivity.’ Noteworthy here is how embodiment and meaning making are brought together as part of a single relational emotion process.
Lastly, these key processes will be identified within and tracked across a few fictionalized case vignettes, built upon the presenter’s experiences in working relationally in a range of contexts, especially time/resource limited shorter-term settings. A key question posed in this clinical discussion asks to what degree can processes first depicted across long-term psychodynamic contexts be applied to less traditional contexts.
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This presentation will explore successful emotion regulation skills and strategies to use with cognitively impaired clients. This includes looking at the function of a behavior (i.e., what need is your client meeting in this moment?) in order to first understand what emotion your client is experiencing. Secondly, we examine triggers to that behavior to broaden your understanding of the emotion. Then, specific skills and strategies will be discussed to assist your clients through the process of understanding, regulating and communicating their own emotion in order to improve their quality of life. While treatment for cognitively impaired clients tends to focus on the behavior, by assisting them with understanding and managing their emotions we can greatly improve treatment outcomes overall.
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This workshop offers a safe place to explore a basic skill we hope our clients will develop as we work with them towards healing after trauma. As we are learning about the client’s problems and challenges, triggers and safe places, we can model the noticing and naming emotions as they emerge. This is as a somatic, interoception tool to support the regulation of the vagal system.
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The climate crisis is being experienced in every country and on every continent. We are at a crossroads, with ecological breakdown threatening personal, societal and planetary wellbeing, together with an unprecedented opportunity to restore a more respectful and interdependent way of living. Research is revealing the extent and scope of people’s concerns.
Escalating threats and consequences can provoke emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, despair, shame and betrayal. Associated grief is often disenfranchised with few contexts for acknowledgment or support. Complex emotions such as these are understandable reactions to what we are facing, and also healthy alternatives to numbing and denial, suggestive of deep caring and empathy for each other, future generations, and all that inhabits Earth. These can shape people’s responses in multiple ways, including as powerful motivating forces for change and action. They can also foster determination, courage, creativity and meaning which in turn nurtures psychological wellbeing.
Therapists have a key role to provide safe, compassionate and supportive spaces for people to experience and cope with complex emotions, and to do so in a way that they don’t become overwhelmed or disabled by them, or avoidant of facing the problems in order to circumvent the feelings. In this context therapeutic support also includes explorations for how people might find their own foothold in hope and pathways to life-affirming actions, ways of living and relating. Important too is not to pathologize strong emotions as mental health disorders but to locate the source of the problem within cultural contexts and political structures.
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Emotional complexity can be daunting. What if it doesn't need to be? IFS is a process that identifies the strands and their points of interconnection bringing clarity to the knot of complexity. Emotional complexity, including client challenges, confusions, and contradictions can be welcomed by both therapist and client. Your clients can learn that their emotional and psychological world makes sense and has an inherent and inbuilt capacity to heal itself. IFS clients learn to welcome their parts so that they can use their emotional complexity to make choices with a more curious and flexible stance. Richard Schwartz describes the goal of IFS therapy to be one where the individual can resolve conflicts between their parts so they can live life from their core Self which is compassionate, wise and confident. This presentation will give you a personal taste of this process if you bring along a little tangle of emotional complexity you are curious about from your own life.
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In this presentation participants will explore:
After traumatic experiences it is common for the nervous system to get stuck in a hyper aroused and/or hypo aroused state leading to multiple difficulties including relaxation, concentration, focus, sleep, emotion regulation and orientation to time and place. Dysregulation in the nervous system can compound over time as people try to cope with associated distress by avoiding or self-medicating.
This presentation introduces participants to the concepts of hyper and hypo arousal in the nervous system as well as how to effectively teach clients to regulate from a hyper or hypo aroused state. Participants will directly experience these skills as well as taking away tools for teaching them effectively to their clients.
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“Emotions punctuate almost all significant events in our lives, but their nature, causes, and consequences are among the least well understood aspects of human experience. It is easier to express emotions than to describe them and even harder to analyse and explain them.” Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2017).
Emotions may indeed be one of the most common experiences in human life, but behind this more obvious reflection lies a rich, fascinating but deeply paradoxical landscape of empirical research. Indeed, the emotions may qualify as one of the Chalmer’s so-called hard problems in cognitive science, alongside mind-body relationship and consciousness. Nonetheless, this highly fluid terrain of emotion research offers mental health workers important depth, breadth and renewed hope when approaching client’s affective experiences. In particular, observable relief from emotional distress might be integrated with subjective notions of personal meaning.
This two-hour ‘emotions primer’ ambitiously seeks to offer practitioners at least three benefits. First, an up-to-date survey of current multidimensional research will provide an overview of both commonalities and important disputes in the field. What are these elusive phenomena that comprise emotional experiences? Included here will be a review of competing theories and the emerging consensus for a pluralistic based component model. Second, after this required conceptual heavy lifting, attention will turn to the central dilemma of unique individual meaning (referenced by the technical terms ‘intentionality’ or ‘aboutness’) versus physiological mechanism. Following an exploration of emotion dysregulation as a factor in psychopathology, focus turns to a surprisingly broad field of emotion regulation. Finally, the introduction of a practitioner’s checklist will offer viewers a chance to integrate the session’s content within their unique practice.
As with so many areas in the biological sciences (which might properly include the psychological sciences), complexity asks us to also apply more pluralistic approaches to our therapeutic work. Emotions may provide a model that might extend our work to include both relief of suffering and enhancement of personal meaning.
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