Opening the Heart: How to Deepen the Experience of Therapy

CPD

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Speaker

Janina Fisher, PhD Related seminars and products

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Janina Fisher, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and former instructor at The Trauma Center, a research and treatment center founded by Bessel van der Kolk. Known as an expert on the treatment of trauma, Dr. Fisher has also been treating individuals, couples, and families since 1980.

She is the past president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation, an EMDR International Association Credit Provider, Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, and a former Instructor, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fisher lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to the integration of the neurobiological research and newer trauma treatment paradigms into traditional therapeutic modalities.

She is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015) and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation (2017) and the forthcoming book, Working with the Neurobiological Legacy of Trauma (in press).

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Janina Fisher has an employment relationship with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. She is a consultant for Khiron House Clinics and the Massachusetts Department of MH Restraint and Seclusion Initiative. Dr. Fisher receives royalties as a published author. She receives a speaking honorarium, recording royalties and book royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. Dr. Fisher has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Janina Fisher is on the advisory board for the Trauma Research Foundation. She is a patron of the Bowlby Center.

Outline

Traumatic Memory

• Types of Memory
• Implicit Memory as the Focal Point
  • Forms of Implicit Memory

• Neuroception
  • Fight-Flight-Freeze
  • How the Brain Perceives Threat
  • Somatic effects of anxious or traumatic attachment
• The Brain in Survival Mode
  • How the body protects us from hurt: armoring, bracing, constricting
  • Consequences in later life: emotional distance, guarded, closed off
• Early Attachment and The Capacity for Empathy

• Increase engagement and promote internal sense of safety
• Experiment with changes in posture, shoulders, opening the chest, relaxing the body
• Experiment with increasing or decreasing heart rate and tension
• Going “deep” with the client

• What necessitated distance from emotion?
• How did guarding, constricting, or armoring help client survive?
• What happens when the client thinks about being vulnerable?

• Make use of the facial muscles, larynx, movements of the head and neck
• Increase playfulness, laughter, lightness
• Avoid pressure on client to feel vulnerable emotions

• The Transformation Model
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• Integrating Mindfulness into Psychotherapy
• Neuroplasticity and Its Clinical Implications

Objectives

1. Articulate psychotherapy techniques to help clients access emotion to inform the clinician’s choice of treatment interventions.
2. Determine the impact of early attachment and its clinical implications for purposes of client psychoeducation and symptom management.
3. Evaluate the relationship between memory and trauma and communicate how this information can be utilized therapeutically to help clients cope with traumatic memories.
4. Investigate how mindfulness and meditation impact the nervous system and articulate how mindfulness interventions can be used to improve clinical outcomes.
5. Incorporate specific memory reconsolidation techniques to help clients change how they perceive and respond to memories of past traumatic events.
6. Apply simple yet effective clinical interventions drawn from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to alleviate symptoms in clients.

Target Audience

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