It is not the traumatic events that haunt survivors for decades afterward. It is the impact or legacy of those events in the form of emotional, body and behavioural memories.
Janina Fisher, PhD

In this workshop, we looked at how the neuroscience and attachment research of the past twenty years has transformed our notions of “memory”. We now know that “the body keeps the score,” that our most painful experiences are less often remembered than encoded in wordless somatic and emotional memories.

The body, Janina proposes, also “remembers” the habits of responding that helped us survive painful experiences, even when the reactions are no longer adaptive. Though none of these implicit nonverbal memories can be retrieved voluntarily, they are easily evoked by the subtlest reminders of the past: we suddenly feel frightened, ashamed, enraged, impulsive, or numb without any subjective sense that we are remembering.

Participants at this seminar learnt a new model for understanding memory that focuses less on events and more on the legacy of nonverbal implicit memories that keep traumatic and painful past events alive in the body. This new and cutting-edge approach to memory has different goals than earlier methods. Its purpose is to transform implicit memories by evoking new responses that replace feelings of terror and helplessness with a sense of “power back”. In this work we aim to repair feelings of aloneness, inadequacy, and shame so that clients can at long last construct “a healing story” about their lives.

Using interventions adapted from EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, clinical hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapies, Janina demonstrates simple, practical interventions for addressing the effects of past experience rather than the events themselves. Underlying this is an assumption that it is less important to know what happened than to know that the trauma is over and we are finally safe.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

This workshop will address one of the most frustrating and often repeated events in a psychotherapist’s daily practice, when a client, who seems to be making progress, suddenly begins to aggressively defend his family of origin and angrily abandons treatment. This sudden resistance to therapy is provoked when the patient realises that s/he is pulling away from their family of origin, both internal and external, and cannot imagine surviving alone.

W.R.D. Fairbairn recognised that “attachment to bad objects” was a formidable source of resistance to treatment: as the patient develops emotionally in relation to the therapist, their unconscious bond to the parents who neglected them in childhood is threatened by the new relationship, and by the discoveries inherent in the treatment.

The loss of their dysfunctional family appears to the patient to be catastrophic because they will have to confront the reality of their mistreatment in childhood. These unconscious loyalties are harboured in two mostly dissociated pairs of ego structures that developed from relational events between parent and child. These were (and are) intolerable for the child or even the adult to remember. Our speaker will demonstrate how to identify and respond to the two pairs of unconscious structures along with the patient’s developmental deficits, while minimising resistance and early termination.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

While we can’t know the global consequences of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, we can predict that the felt experience of facing this particular existential threat will leave a lasting shock-wave through our emotional systems; that time and space will be needed for grief and anger. But can we also think about this processing as an opportunity for certain kinds of emotional and social enrichment?

Of learning from others who have faced existential crises how they have survived psychologically? To help us to explore these dynamics, we have invited three speakers with a past experience of collective trauma.

Their stories will help us navigate how we can process feelings such as rage and grief around a shared catastrophe in order to recover and adapt in healthy ways – possibly to discover unexpected strengths in ourselves and others, and to protect future generations from intergenerational trauma.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Developmentally traumatized people frequently feel estranged from their internal and external world. They often do not know where their body is in space, leaving them feeling clumsy, uncoordinated, and unable to engage in purposeful action/agency.

How can we combat such foundational difficulties resulting from developmental trauma in order to facilitate the individual to befriend their internal sensations and transform into an embodied, active agent in this world, who is capable of connecting with others through curiosity, language, and play?

Neuroscientifically-guided, bottom-up treatment approaches can target manipulation of sensory, vestibular, and motor experience in an attempt to regulate higher cognitive functions, including emotion regulation and cognition. These treatment approaches, and theory of mind, will be discussed as part of an integrative approach for traumatic stress syndromes in developmentally traumatized individuals.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3.5 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate. 

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Traumatic events, attachment failures, and systemic oppression (historical and current) can become the central defining experiences that powerfully influence our implicit predictions and expectations of ourselves, others, and the world.

Established early on, patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting designed to navigate an unfriendly, unsafe or oppressive world are solidified with repetitive use, and become harder to modify as time goes on.

These patterns are held in place by automatic, non-conscious physical and physiological habits. Their grip can be loosened, and resilience can be strengthened by working directly with the body.

This webinar elucidates how body-oriented interventions can increase resilience throughout life. Pat Ogden will discuss the influence of mainstream values and white supremacist ideologies on psychotherapy, and the inevitability of implicit bias as it affects therapeutic relationship, assessment, and interventions. The role of the body in privilege/oppression dynamics, as well as in developing resilience in the face of current trauma, such as the pandemic and ongoing oppression, will be addressed. This approach will be illustrated through lecture, case examples, and brief experiential exercises that can also be used with clients.

Disconnection from self in the context of traumatic experience is a survival strategy that allows victims to disown and distance themselves from what is happening. But it comes at a cost: long-lasting shame and self-loathing, difficulty self-soothing, internal conflicts and struggles, and complications in relationships with others.

Without internal coherence or compassion, fragmented individuals are vulnerable to suicidality, self-harm or substance abuse, and often marginalised by the label of “borderline.”

But the brain and body have an innate ability to heal. All human beings have a brain capable of visualising experiences of acceptance, closeness and comfort that evoke the same emotional and somatic sensations associated with early secure attachment. Helping clients discover their split-off younger selves and imaginatively bringing them “home” can spontaneously lead to an internal sense of warmth and safety most trauma survivors have never known.

In this presentation, we will explore the therapeutic power of using somatic experience to foster internal attachment to clients’ most deeply disowned younger selves.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 3 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

In this final session of “The Trauma Series” our three expert clinicians will come together to answer your questions on their work in the context of working through the coronavirus threats. After a year of intense threats to our survival, coupled with the stress of social distancing, self-quarantine and isolation, most people will suffer some after-effects even when there is a return to ‘normal.’

Research on previous pandemics demonstrates that prolonged quarantining results in depression and anxiety as well as increased substance abuse and domestic violence. However, other research suggests ways that we can help ourselves to recover using the innate ability of our minds and bodies to heal and recover.

CPD – An optional certificate of attendance for up to 2 hours of CPD, based on completion of a multiple choice questionnaire, will be available soon.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Valerie Sinason is a world leader in the study of traumatology. After decades of working psychotherapeutically with some of the most psychologically wounded people, she has found a way to talk about their unbearable experiences with extraordinary insight, compassion and balance.

This webinar explored many of the issues outlined in her work, The Truth about Trauma and Dissociation: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know and Were Afraid to Ask.

In this webinar she described what she’d learnt about hearing, accepting and responding to their accounts. She takes us through the key concepts of trauma and dissociation as they relate to those who have experienced harm or abuse in childhood and offering clinical expertise on therapeutically empowering responses.

Linking extreme childhood adversities in many forms, this seminar is a relational guide to trauma which builds confidence and skill in the therapist, helping us to learn what we need to be able to hear without a loss of feelings.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Valerie Sinason is a world leader in the study of traumatology and has pioneered some of the most difficult work in the field. In the first part of this presentation, she focuses on the clinical implications of extreme adverse childhood experiences, disorganised attachment and resulting dissociative identity disorders.

This webinar explores many of the issues outlined in her latest work, The Truth about Trauma and Dissociation: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know and Were Afraid to Ask.

Here in Part II, she builds on that guide to offer further insight into the nuances of dissociation – a mental state in which people feel disconnected from their sense of self, experience or history. This defense against intolerable stress can lead to depression or anxiety, to derealisation and depersonalisation or ultimately to a serious dissociative disorder.

Joined by two colleagues who work with dissociative patients, Zoe Hawton and Mark Linnington, Valerie will discuss such distinctions as dissociative amnesia, fugue states, and structural dissociation. These are often misunderstood symptoms and study is advisable for mental health practitioners working with patients who have experienced childhood abuse, infanticidal attachment or – in the most extreme cases – ritualised sexual abuse.

This work creates great anxiety in professional networks. Our speakers will share how they have found their way to work sustainably with these complex cases, and the importance of supportive supervision.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits for 4 hours are available as part of the course fee. You will need to fill out an evaluation form and pass a multiple choice questionnaire related to the content in order to receive your certificate.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience tell us that body and brain are constantly responding to perceived threats from our environment, deciding – on a cellular level – whether we are safe or not. How secure we feel in the world around us profoundly affects not only our physical and immune health, but our brain’s immune health, which, in turn, determines our mental wellbeing.

In this seminar, we will explore how early trauma sets the stage for brain health in adulthood, how chronic stressors in adult life exacerbate these potential ill effects, and the latest scientific understanding on the biophysical link between trauma, inflammation, and mental health.

Access to the Talks On Demand runs for 365 days from the date of purchase.