Full Course Description
Foundations of Somatic Therapy for Trauma: The 9 Key Techniques for Effective Body-Based Therapy
Every trauma healer needs to know how to work with pain trapped within the body.
But, there are so many ways to do somatic therapy… many therapists have been confused about where to start.
That’s why we’ve put together foundational training on how to implement essential body-based techniques with trauma and somatic healing expert, Abi Blakeslee.
This accessible training will give you the skills to start using somatic techniques including Somatic Experiencing™ skills, breathing exercises, Hakomi, Polyvagal, movement-based, and more with your next client.
Take a front-row seat to learn step-by-step how to implement somatic therapy techniques with all your clients. Join Abi to get first-hand experience as you learn from real session demonstrations how to…
- Implement 9 key strategies for nervous system regulation to use with ANY client
- Apply new research on neurobiology immediately in therapy
- Avoid getting caught in “talk therapy” and quickly begin trauma processing
- Help clients disempower the pain and reactivity to explicit and implicit trauma memories
Register now to become the therapist who can transform trauma in their client’s mind, body and spirit – all at once!
Program Information
Objectives
- Differentiate somatic psychology from cognitive-based therapy approaches.
- Analyze perspectives and different schools of thought on somatic therapy approaches to develop a robust understanding of body-based treatments.
- Develop and understanding of polyvagal theory and therapy interventions to integrate into somatic approaches.
- Determine how to gather embodied goals that can be achieved during a session.
- Develop skills (grounding, centering, posture, container, expansion, etc.) to help regulate the autonomic nervous system.
- Formulate questions and reasons that invite conscious awareness of bodily sensation.
- Utilize different forms of attention to access interception.
- Identify signs of down-regulation and up-regulation in the nervous system, as well as other states of arousal.
- Articulate the difference between implicit and explicit timelines and the therapeutic impact.
Outline
Somatic Psychology: Bringing the Body into Therapy
- Introduction to Somatic Psychology
- The new science of interoception
- How therapeutic change happens in the NOW
- Let your client be their own expert
- What is a “bottom up” approach?
- Create kinesthetic awareness
- Identify choice points for working with the nervous system
- What to do when your clients can’t “think their way out”
- Create harmony between parts of self
- How to use metaphor to help clients regulate
Introception & The Insula: Mapping the Body & Nervous System in Therapy
- Mapping the internal body and the story of the nervous system
- What is the Insular Cortex and how can you engage it for healing trauma
- How does information reach conscious awareness?
- Countering the negativity bias in the brain
- Breaking the loop of chronic stress
- Explore the seat where the complex emotion and self-insight arises
What Helps Clients Regulate
9 Strategies for nervous system regulation
- Grounding
- Multiple Examples of Orienting
- Centering
- Posture
- Containment and the Body as a Container for affect and life experiences
- Expansion
- Self Contact and the use of Character Structures and Developmental Repair Messages
- Mirroring
- Gentle Movement
Educate your Clients about the Autonomic Nervous System and how it Influences their Experiences
- Introduction to the Window of Tolerance and Range of Resiliency Model
- Create clear goals for somatic work using the Window of Tolerance Model
- Observe Exercises that teach clear biological markers and interoceptive experiences of the Sympathetic, transitional states, and parasympathetic nervous system
- Learn how to support and observe down regulation in your client’s body
- Introduction to Implicit and Explicit Memory Research
- Work with implicit and explicit timelines
- Re-integrate clients to a sense of present time
Target Audience
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychiatrists
- Psychologists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Psych Nurses
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Copyright :
03/29/2023
Somatic Therapy to Tame the Survival Response and Heal Implicit Trauma Memories
This course is intended to teach therapists somatic therapy techniques for working with the survival response through in-session demonstrations.
Program Information
Objectives
- Integrate the use of imagery and felt sense of safety/feeling into clinical work.
- Practice somatic exercises for the fight, flight, freeze response.
- Integrate polyvagal theory into clinical observation and understanding of client’s body and trauma history.
- Utilize different forms of attention to access interception.
- Assess which part of the nervous system is active in a client.
- Develop exercises the increase a client’s window of tolerance.
- Formulate questions and reasons that invite conscious awareness of bodily sensation.
Outline
The importance of working with survival physiology
- Neuroanatomy of a threat response and a thwarted threat response
- How survival responses impact attachment
- Harness the opportunity for change in “transitional states”
- Learn how to support and observe up regulation in your client’s body
Apply Polyvagal Theory to track the nervous system
- Learn the difference between how to support your clients moving through transitional states of survival physiology vs Biological Completion of Procedural Movements
- Observe the difference between Voluntary vs Involuntary Movement
- How predatory movement, building impulse and Agency helps clients heal
- Learn how to engage how tension patterns can move the body toward self-protection and new learning that reconsolidates implicit memories of helplessness
- Observe and learn step by step Interventions to work with the Sympathetic Nervous System and Active Defensive Responses
Learn about the fight response and healthy aggression
- Skills to work with Animal Imagery to support a client’s connection to their own ability to Protect, Respond, and connect to Instinctual Power
- Learn Push Hands Exercises
- How the completion of Survival Responses relates your Client’s attachment style
- How to support Speaking up
- Exercises for boundary work with client
- Skills to work with freeze physiology
- Identify primary, secondary, and tertiary dissociation
Target Audience
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychiatrists
- Psychologists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Psych Nurses
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Copyright :
03/31/2023
Somatic Therapy to Create Healthy Attachment: Strategies to Heal Development and Relational Trauma
This training in intended to teach therapists how to repair developmental attachment wounds and other relational trauma through somatic therapy techniques – taught via in-session demonstrations.
Program Information
Objectives
- Formulate developmental statements that can assist in repairing attachment styles.
- Practice somatic exercises that target developmental attachment trauma.
- Identify strategies of how to use the relational field through social engagement and ventral vagal intervention.
- Formulate I-statements that help clients put words to bodily sensations, implicit memories, and other biological processes.
- Analyze how image repair with implicit memory of self as infants or children can help with attachment repair and ANS regulation.
- Formulate strategies to increase the parasympathetic rest and digest response through relational support.
- Identify ways to work with attachment and transgenerational patterns in the body and autonomous nervous system.
Outline
Strategies for Attachment and Relationship Repair
- Definition of Soma
- Focusing on Repair and not Pathology
- Learn about how to support the Emotional Motor System and Physiology to change the intra-personal experience and after the inter-personal dynamics
- Introduction to development and Interpersonal Neurobiology
- Attachment from a biological perspective
- Rupture and Repair Cycles and the formation of the Self and Relationships
- Using developmental repatterining through structure
- Creating new implicit memories to change developmental trauma imprints
Learn a Developmental Exercise using body-based skills (string shape exercise)
- Part 1: Doing a developmental pattern differently from the inside out
- Part 2: I statements vs it statements
- Part 3: Developmental statements with relationship repair
- Part 4: Differentiation from transgenerational trauma, working with survival physiology and emodied emotion
Enhancing your Client’s connection to Embodying Essential Qualities
- Formulate questions to help client’s embody a sense of purpose
- Explore Interocpetive experiences of essential self
- Identify somatic archetypes
- Explore how your client’s can use the hero’s journey to support healing in the body
- Learn an Embodied archetype exercise
Increase your Clients sense of Capacity through supporting experience of a wide range of embodied emotion
- Review of Research: “Facilitating adaptive emotion processing and somatic reprailisa via sustained interoception attention” (Price and Weng, 2021)
- Interception and emotion
- Learn how your clients will benefit by embodying emotion through organizing kindled survival physiology
- Learn how to allow new attachment adaptation through relationship repair
- Increase your clients ability to embody a wide range of emotion
- Work with near death experiences and existential terror
Ventral Strategies
- Using imagery, interoception, and movement for repair with implicit non-verbal memories from infancy and early life
- Attachment repair exercises between therapist and client
- Exercises to work with developmental disorganization
- Using resonance in therapy?
Closing a session
- The depth of transformation
Target Audience
- Counselors
- Social Workers
- Psychiatrists
- Psychologists
- Case Managers
- Addiction Counselors
- Therapists
- Marriage & Family Therapists
- Psych Nurses
- Other Mental Health Professionals
Copyright :
04/04/2023
Live Consultation with Dr. Abil Blakeslee
Copyright :
10/03/2024
Live Consultation with Dr. Abil Blakeslee
Copyright :
11/14/2024
Live Consultation with Dr. Abil Blakeslee
Copyright :
12/12/2024