2014 Seminars
Healing Psychological Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Brain, and Body
~Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
Trauma, in both its acute and complex forms, disrupts our development in very powerful and pervasive ways. When it occurs in childhood, it derails neurological development, disrupts the ability to make sense of one’s emotions and regulate them, and seals one off from making contact with and knowing his or her inner life. It overwhelms the child’s capacity to cope and injects the sense of terror and powerlessness in his or her attempts to navigate life. Trauma turns the world into a dangerous place. It damages one’s ability to make healthy connections with others and works to extinguish the hope of ever feeling safe and becoming a whole self. The imprint of trauma is long-lasting and leaves its victims feeling betrayed, helpless, enraged, and ashamed.
Traumatized individuals often develop maladaptive and pathological strategies to deal with life’s difficulties and ensure their survival. They often avoid treatment as close contact with others feels dangerous and real contact with their own inner life is even scarier. Trauma victims can be difficult patients: inconsistent, angry, volatile, non-responsive, and self-destructive. Their enactments can communicate their pain vociferously but can also function to push away the very people who want and are able to help in their healing.
This seminar offers a practical overview of the nature of trauma and its implications for its treatment. Informed by interpersonal neurobiology and contemporary attachment theory, the seminar will help participants develop an integrated understanding of the dynamics of trauma as well as broadening their abilities to intervene more impactfully in their work with traumatized individuals.
This seminar is intended for mental health professionals involved in the treatment of trauma, counselors working in schools, educators, and mental health students.
Participants are invited to bring in their own case material and current struggles in working with traumatized individuals.
Topics
Monday
• Types of trauma and developmental psychopathology
• Affect dysregulation and its implications for development
• Age-specific consequences of trauma
Tuesday
• Dissociation and other self-states
• Trauma, autobiographical memory, and the development of a coherent sense of self
• Trauma and the body
Wednesday
• Creating the safe space
• Containment and the therapeutic frame
• Working within the window of affective tolerance
• Rethinking resistance
• Borrowing the therapist’s “mind”
Thursday
• Therapeutic mechanisms of affect regulation and mind/body/brain integration
• Listening to unconscious communication and managing enactments
Friday
• Therapeutic connection, rupture, and repair
• Developing a “right-brain” orientation to working with traumatized individuals
• Vicarious traumatization of the clinician
• Grief and mourning in the healing process
Traumatized individuals often develop maladaptive and pathological strategies to deal with life’s difficulties and ensure their survival. They often avoid treatment as close contact with others feels dangerous and real contact with their own inner life is even scarier. Trauma victims can be difficult patients: inconsistent, angry, volatile, non-responsive, and self-destructive. Their enactments can communicate their pain vociferously but can also function to push away the very people who want and are able to help in their healing.
This seminar offers a practical overview of the nature of trauma and its implications for its treatment. Informed by interpersonal neurobiology and contemporary attachment theory, the seminar will help participants develop an integrated understanding of the dynamics of trauma as well as broadening their abilities to intervene more impactfully in their work with traumatized individuals.
This seminar is intended for mental health professionals involved in the treatment of trauma, counselors working in schools, educators, and mental health students.
Participants are invited to bring in their own case material and current struggles in working with traumatized individuals.
Topics
Monday
• Types of trauma and developmental psychopathology
• Affect dysregulation and its implications for development
• Age-specific consequences of trauma
Tuesday
• Dissociation and other self-states
• Trauma, autobiographical memory, and the development of a coherent sense of self
• Trauma and the body
Wednesday
• Creating the safe space
• Containment and the therapeutic frame
• Working within the window of affective tolerance
• Rethinking resistance
• Borrowing the therapist’s “mind”
Thursday
• Therapeutic mechanisms of affect regulation and mind/body/brain integration
• Listening to unconscious communication and managing enactments
Friday
• Therapeutic connection, rupture, and repair
• Developing a “right-brain” orientation to working with traumatized individuals
• Vicarious traumatization of the clinician
• Grief and mourning in the healing process