Janina Fisher – Somatic Interventions for Treating Complex Trauma

Somatic Interventions for Treating Complex Trauma with Janina Fisher, Ph.D. – Janina Fisher

Presented by internationally-renowned trauma expert, Janina Fisher, Ph.D.

You won’t want to miss this workshop on learning proven Somatic techniques for treating trauma with international expert and author Janina Fisher, PhD!

The techniques you’ll learn during this workshop will make even the most complex clients easier to treat – and the interventions you’ll learn directly address the underlying causes of post-traumatic stress.

Dr. Fisher will give you tools from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-centered talking therapy. These simple body-oriented interventions can be easily integrated into traditional talking therapies to address trauma-related challenges such as:

• Dysregulated autonomic arousal
• Overwhelming affects and sensations
• Intrusive images and memories
• Impulsivity and acting out
• Dissociative phenomena
• Numbing and disconnection

This workshop will cover recent neuroscience research that explains how traumatic experience becomes deeply embedded in both mind and body. Learn how to better assess and make sense of trauma-based symptoms and then how to apply neurobiologically informed treatment techniques in clinical practice.

1. Describe the neurobiological effects of traumatic experience.
2. Identify implicit and procedural memories of trauma.
3. Recognize the role of autonomic arousal in exacerbating symptoms.
4. Discuss how “the body keeps the score as it relates to trauma.
5. Describe basic principles of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and how it can inform treatment.
6. Integrate mindfulness-based techniques in traditional treatments.
7. Identify animal defense survival responses in trauma patients.
8. Describe the roles of substance abuse, eating disorders and self-destructive behavior as trauma symptoms.
9. Implement ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ interventions to address unsafe behavior.
10. Describe a somatic approach to resolving traumatic experience.
11. Differentiate past experience from present moment experience as it relates to the treatment of trauma.
12. Utilize right brain-to-right brain communication to improve the effectiveness of trauma treatment.

The Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma

• How the mind and body react to threat and danger
• Autonomic arousal and affect tolerance
• Inability to feel safe in the body
• Loss of the ability to self-witness

The Nature of Traumatic Memory

• “The body keeps the score” (Van der Kolk)
• Implicit memories: is it memory?
• Remembering situationally: ‘here’ or ‘there’?

Neurobiologically-informed Trauma Treatment

• Regulating the traumatized nervous system and restoring a witnessing self
• Psychoeducation: knowledge is power
• Reframing the symptoms
• Avoid ‘self-defeating stories’ (Meichenbaum)
• Treat the symptoms, not just the event

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

• Trauma and procedural learning
• Tracking the body as a source of information
• Use the language of the body
• Body-centered techniques into talking therapy treatments

Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity

• Mindfulness practices in therapy
• Differentiate thoughts, feelings and body experience
• Dual awareness of everyday experience
• Teach mindfulness to clients

Challenges of Trauma Treatment

• Secondary symptoms: anger, self-harm and suicidality, aggression, substance abuse, and eating disorders
• Treatment-resistant depression and anxiety
• Complex symptoms as manifestations of animal defense responses

Therapy as a Laboratory for the Practice of New Actions

• Dis-identifying with the symptoms
• Develop a new language and a new story
• Capitalize on somatic resources for modulating the nervous system
• New resources that address specific trauma symptoms

The Role of Neuroplasticity

• Neuroplastic brain change
• Principles of neuroplasticity
• Treatments to enhance neuroplastic effects

Somatic Resolution of Traumatic Events

• Repair and transformation rather than re-processing
• Address uninvited memory
• Tell the story to ourselves: creating internal safety
• Right brain-to-right brain communication: feeling safe with others