Training in Trauma Resolution with Diane Poole Heller Ph.D.

Nov 29th - 30th            - Overview Somatic Experiencing®
Dec 1st - 2nd                - Healing Attachment Issues
Dec 6th - 9th                 - Creating Healthy Adult Relationships
Dec 11th -14th              - Enlivening Intimacy, Sensuality & Sexuality

Part 1: Overview of Somatic Experiencing® – 2 days

Cutting edge brain and nervous system research has shown how body-oriented psychotherapy has distinct advantages to clearing fear and trauma from the body. Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a body-oriented psychotherapy approach, developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine. He has developed a therapeutic approach that teaches clients how to track sensation in the body to elicit the intrinsic healing capacity that all humans share.  
 
This exciting method effectively enhances support of trauma survivors. It efficiently alleviates devastating symptoms such as dissociation, grief and loss, pain and the overall emotional, cognitive and physical distress so often lodged in body and soul. A method integrating mind and body, the client is taught and guided in gradually reducing the echoes of trauma by consciously listening to the sensations of the body and cycling between locations of distress and locations of comfort.
 
Examples of the practical applications of the SE model will be taught through a dynamic interplay of lecture and DVD presentations of actual client sessions.
 

Part 2: Attachment Issues – 2 days

Have you ever wondered why intimacy and relationships seem so difficult that you stay on the sidelines?
Have you ever felt that you may never feel loved or loveable enough?
Do you often feel scared and confused?
Understanding and healing our early attachment styles can help us clear the original imprints that are the foundation of our self-protective ego structure so that we can be more in contact with our intrinsic core intactness.
 
Family of origin issues become projected onto current adult relationships and reflect early attachment models.  Healing childhood wounds is the key for enjoying fulfilling relationships as an adult.  Overcome the grip of past trauma to have more fun, connection and healthy intimacy in your relationships now.


Part 3: Enjoying healthy adult relationships – Days 4

We will excavate the dynamics for each attachment disruption and plant the specific seeds to recapture each individual’s core intactness; the blueprint for health underlying each distress.
 

1. Avoidant Attached Adults: Create enough safety and presence for an avoidant person to risk reaching out again in adult relationships after the intolerable frustration, hurt, and unavailability they experienced as children. What happens when the other person they meet has the capacity to be present and safe enough for potential bonding to occur? Can they allow a connection to the therapist? We must honor that to not feel and to dismiss others was the strategy that helped them survive childhood was
   

This disruption requires working through contact and existence issues. Questions that arise are: “Am I here? Do I exist? Do I have a sense of self? Do I have the right to be? Can I have my body and my feelings as well as my thoughts? Can I take in kindness and love? Can I move toward relationships instead of avoiding them? Can I let someone really know me? Can I be intimate with myself? Is it safe enough to need and receive from others? I know I have one foot in and one foot out; can I fully arrive here in this physical world or in this relationship? I value myself as strong and independent; can I risk allowing myself to need help and to get it?”
 Remember people have come by these fears honestly from the rejection or humiliation of the past. We need to engage in a right brain to right brain communication, (Schore, 2003) to link feeling with thoughts, felt sense language to experience, and a sense of self in relatedness with others to correct what was absent originally with dismissing parents.

1. Ambivalent Attached Adults: Create enough consistent and reliable contact for an ambivalent person to relax the over-focus on others and to find themselves. In ambivalence, people avoid distance with others and fear abandonment. They seek closeness but struggle with the constant fear of losing it. They often under-estimate themselves and their real capacities.
   

Can they allow themselves to be included and valued in the relationship instead of continually giving themselves up? People with this pattern need to own the projection of the “inconsistent other”.  This comes from the parenting style they received of an “on again/ off again” connection and unreliable love. Intermittent reward sets up the ground for obsession and insecurity. It is easy to feel unloved or unlovable due to the dynamics of the past and to project the unavailability and lack of fulfillment on current partners. Sometimes, in adult relationships, the person reverses the pattern and becomes the unavailable one.
Questions arise: “Will I ever be loveable enough? Yes, you love me today, but what about tomorrow? Do you see me? If you don’t see me, how do I know I exist? Can I express my anger about having to submerge myself to get attention from you? How do I know you won’t leave me? Are you coming back? Can I move to receiving available connection versus being stuck in, “wanting, but not having?” Can I trust myself; can I trust you? Can I rely on myself and give up my orientation to helplessness? If I am not terribly distressed, will you notice me? Can I give up attention seeking behavior and the belief that relief only comes from others?” Conspicuous insecurity has been the most reliable means for gaining the attention of unreliable others. This is hard to give up…and may support both a strategy and an identity.(Wallen, 2007, pg 225.)
Because of the recurring threat of abandonment, ambivalent disruption may cause a person to be to willing to please and too fearful to assert their own needs -if they even have the awareness of what those needs are. As the adult relationship proves to be reasonably trustworthy and consistently available enough, the person may begin to relax into the corrective reliability to discover a self that can confidently find the balance of relying on one’s self and attention needed from others.
 

1. Disorganized Attached Adults: Attachment thrives with safety and dis-attachment occurs in fear. Two essential biological processes are in conflict when parents are terrifying to children. The need to distance in order to survive counters the need to attach for nurturing care-giving. As an antidote, we need to create enough safety by evoking and completing successful self-protective responses needed to defend against frightening or disorienting parents.  Activating these responses helps extinguish the constant sense of threat in human relationships and restores personal empowerment. We need to challenge the sense that the world is always a scary place – especially when victim – perpetrator dynamics have occurred in the past.
   

Integrating dissociation and fragmentation related to unresolved relational trauma will be an important focus. Ideally, the client must be safe in the relationship with the therapist before addressing trauma. In therapy, we must gradually install a competing healthy secure attachment to compete with the original frightening one.
 
Questions arise: “Will you turn on me? Will you hurt me if I get close? How can I be safe if you are here?  How do I deal with this overwhelming pain that gets triggered in relationships? How can I stay present with you when my pattern is to dissociate to stay safe? How can you understand me when my memory has so many gaps in it due to overwhelm? How do I heal from my primitive defense patterns of splitting, projective identification, and dissociation? How can I connect to my body and learn how to take good care of it? How can I be present sexually as well as emotionally? How can I gradually experience the present as the present and not merely a repetition of the past?”
Recalling trauma without being re-traumatized , naming trauma-related feelings and body sensations, making implicit memories explicit – all within the context of an increasingly secure and affect regulating therapeutic relationship – are among the essential ingredients in the treatment of unresolved patients (Waller, 2007.) Body awareness practices are critical to reduce panic and impulses to dissociate while gradually discharging over-arousal in the autonomic nervous system.
 
 
Use of Repair to Regain Secure Attachment: We will explore exercises we need to know when an attunement disruption has occurred and repair is necessary. How can we become more effective in our capacity to repair? Secure healthy attachment with parents who are present, safe and consistent offers the holding environment that allows for healthy relating and bonding. Fortunately we can re-access the original, innate healthy attachment system later in life.

Trans-generational Attachment Styles:  Patterns of attachment disruption are easily transferred through the generations.  When we heal our own wounds, we break this unfortunate chain of behavior. By taking responsibility to heal ourselves we can enjoy healthier adult relationships while also healing our relationships with our parents and our children. It is not about “them changing” but more about how we want to be in our relationships. The choices we make will greatly influence our connections with partners, family, at work and with friends.

Conscious Loving, Celebrating Men and Cherishing Women
Acknowledging the differences in needs and communications styles that men and women have can illuminate patterns of relating that have been unsuccessful. By discovering our differences and honoring them we open ourselves to greater possibilities of “meeting”. This balance between knowing our own preferences and those of others helps us practice compassion – and reawakens an appreciation for the beauty of complementary partnership.


Part 4: Enlivening Intimacy, Sensuality and Sexuality - 4 days

Healing the Heart-Genital Split. This common split manifests in such a way that a person feels a deep heart connection with a partner but then may find that sexual passion dissipates. Conversely, one may feel sexually attracted and able to express deep passion but without the heartfelt connection. We will explore how passion and love can be integrated into the same healthy relationship.
 
·     Learn to distinguish between safe and non-safe touch.  Explore how to extinguish hyper-vigilance or dissociation triggered by past physical or sexual invasion.  Build your capacity to stay present and embodied when you experience safe touch.

·     Repair ruptured relational boundaries to increase positive connection. Learn the distinction between “joining” versus ‘merging”.  Experience the possibility of having intact energetic boundaries that can eventually provide the ground for expanded, non-personal, boundlessness.

·     Practice creative self- regulation to enhance your capacity for greater pleasure without the need to disconnect.
“Tolerating” more love, sexuality and positive excitement melts our defenses and sheds our history-based identity so that our true selves get a chance to really meet and be met.