ON-DEMAND COURSE
Neurosciences have underscored the critical importance of safety in individual self-development and the fulfilment of the need for autonomy and self-recognition. In psychotherapy, we provide individuals with forms of adaptation to their new reality, based on their needs, safety, trust, relational attunement and deep connections with others.
Our experts will present therapeutic models and theoretical perspectives, focusing on the relational development of the Self and its embodied dimensions. We will explore innovative research studies and effective clinical interventions, seeking to understand and repair trauma on a profound level.
The Attachment and Trauma Congress returns to Rome after a successful 2022 edition with over 850 attendees from around the world. Internationally renowned experts will grace the stage at the stunning Auditorium Antonianum, minutes away from the Colosseum. Join us for this enriching learning experience and connect with mental health professionals globally.
Whether in-person or online via live-stream, this congress is an essential opportunity for professional development and valuable moments of connection.
In this On-Demand Course, speakers talk about ...
The Dissociation of Intimacy and the Attachment Bond in Emotional and Psychosomatic Regulation Psychotherapy
Emotional and Psychosomatic Regulation Psychotherapy delves into the patient's fantasies to understand and address chronic negative emotions and trauma-induced body sensations. These sensations, like fight, flight and immobilization, arise from the Internal Saboteur (or Anti-bonder). This Saboteur warps self-image and disrupts interpersonal bonds, undermining trust and wellness. By disrupting the relational attachment system, it hinders intimacy and deep attachment bonds. The therapy seeks to recognize the "scripts" causing patients to repeat traumatic patterns, which shut down social attachment and hinder their motivation to engage socially or intimately. The therapeutic alliance assists patients in becoming more conscious, reducing the Saboteur's grip. This aids in building trust in relationships, mending relational wounds, and refining their emotional and physical connections with themselves, others and their communities.
Understanding and Treating Attachment Trauma with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™
The current understanding of traumatic attachment is based on a pathologizing approach that labels dysregulated attachment styles as disorders. This fails to recognize the body's innate wisdom. Therapists should adopt an approach that merges trauma and attachment through an embodied lens. The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ (FSPM) offers a strength-based perspective, building on Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which provides insights into the autonomic nervous system's role in assessing safety. Through this theory, traumatic attachment and associated behaviors are understood as adaptive reactions to unsafe environments. This session introduces Jan Winhall’s book on the FSPM, summarizing her four-decade journey with trauma survivors. The FSPM promotes a novel method of engaging with embodied processes: interoception and neuroception. Attendees will learn about Gendlin’s Focusing method and the importance of bodily connection for healing. The model is versatile and complements various therapeutic approaches. Its application will be showcased through the Embodied Assessment and Treatment Tool™ (EATT), which assesses a client’s ability to manage their nervous system. This tool evolves into a structured treatment plan and can be digitally archived. The presentation will offer hands-on examples and case studies for immediate application, blending instructional content with experiential insights.
Dissociation and Ketamine Treatment: A Case Study with Heather
Patients with complex trauma and dissociative symptoms often present with significant and stratified complexity. The treatment trajectory is lengthy, arduous, and milestones typically occur in scarce intervals. While research has contributed to notable strides in treatment outcomes for dissociative patients, the length and severity of suffering remains a feature of the clinical picture. Interventions that combine traditional psychotherapy with novel approaches have the potential to decrease the overarching length and cost of treatment to the patient. Ketamine and psilocybin may have potential to significantly shift the treatment trajectory given the research that is emerging for those with treatment resistant depression. While there may be a great deal of promise in these interventions, of equal concern is the risk potential with their use being applied to those with complex trauma and structural dissociation. Heather’s experience with and response to ketamine as an intervention may offer insight to both the risks and possibilities in the application of ketamine to this population.
By the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
Working with Infidelity: The Gottman Method
Infidelity, with the core ingredients of emotional and/or sexual betrayal, is a distressing, disorienting experience. The impact is visceral, the pain profound. While the bond can be destroyed in a flash, healing and rebuilding take time. Those who have experienced this in their own relationship, or navigated the path with clients, know the journey is turbulent. Intense emotions open quickly. Reactivity is the norm. As a therapist, staying present, attuned and balanced is crucial. A healthy therapeutic alliance is essential. This presentation will focus on the paradigm shifting Gottman “Atone, Attune, Attach” approach to treating infidelity. This model offers clarity and wisdom about how to weather the storm, heal the hurt and rebuild the broken bond. Building on Drs. John and Julie Gottman’s seminal research, this model emphasizes the centrality of Trust and Commitment in the journey from betrayal to intimacy.
Attachment, Trauma and the schemas of impaired autonomy and performance
Two of the most basic of core needs for all humans are the need to attach and the need to be autonomous. And although these two needs might appear to be quite distinct from each other; in fact, they are intrinsically tied and complementary.
When a secure base is built between a caregiver and child; when a child feels safe and protected and understood, their ability to thrive, to explore, to internalize this relational security plays out in their ability to have agency and feel confident in their life and in their capacity to form and develop relationships.
But when there is not enough safety, and protection and understanding between the caregiver and child, this can be described as an attachment trauma. This trauma plays out in an internalized insecurity that engenders such Schemas or Impaired Autonomy and Performance as the Schemas of Dependency/Incompetence and Enmeshment/Undeveloped Self.
We will explore the relationship between attachment trauma and the idea of a corresponding “autonomy trauma” in the form of these Impaired Autonomy and Performance Schemas and the perpetuating Coping Modes. We also explore the remedy of the limited reparenting relationship for healing these Schemas which can help cultivate within a patient a more secure attachment style and a greater sense of autonomy.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for OCD and Trauma: Where New and Old Paths to Dealing with Suffering Meet
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are both challenging and difficult-to-treat psychiatric problems. They may share some common symptoms (such as avoidance, safety seeking behaviors), emotions (anxiety, guilt, disgust, shame), cognitive biases, a hyper reactivity to specific stimuli, a dysfunctional relationship with their own internal experience.
Mindfulness-based approaches, in particular MBCT, are thought to target several core features of both OCD and PTSD, including experiential avoidance, hyperarousal, safety seeking behaviors, and distressful emotions. There are several components of mindfulness that may promote recovery from OCD and PTSD, including attention, a mindful cognitive style, a shift in perspective and non judgment and normalization toward the internal experience.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for OCD is an innovative, manualised and empirically validated 'third wave' treatment programme designed to create significant clinical and life improvement in those suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The programme integrates the most effective tools of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with the clinical application of the principles and practices of mindfulness and self-compassion.
During this presentation the strengths of a mindfulness-based approach, and in particular MBCT, to both disorders and how these interventions act powerfully and effectively on some overlapping etiological and phenomenological factors will be highlighted.
Dr Didonna will also share the latest research results on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for OCD and PTSD.
Participation in this intervention will ensure that participants learn more about this new therapeutic approach and how to use MBCT and more generally mindfulness-based interventionsto help clients with OCD and PTSD to radically change the dysfunctional relationship they have developed in a healthy way with their internal states in order to create meaningful well-being and balance.
Survivors thrive and overcome: human trafficking and narrative therapy practices to rewrite the history of trauma.
The term human trafficking is an overarching concept that includes various multifaceted and intersecting forms of maltreatment. Existing on a larger continuum of violence, human trafficking is ultimately a type of abuse and exploitation perpetrated for the purpose of labor or sex. Individuals subjugated to human trafficking endure holistic (physical, psychological, sexual, social, and spiritual) cruelty that cumulatively, results in psychophysiological trauma.
With a history of demonstrated success walking alongside survivors of human trafficking (as well as other forms of trauma), and a heart to grow with colleagues in developing effective transformational therapeutic practices, Dr. Roswurm will share her Lotus Emancipation ModelTM. In doing so, Dr. Roswurm will focus on how practitioners can utilize culturally relevant narrative practices to assist trauma survivors in re-storying their lives.
Participants will increase their capacity to assist clients through use of therapeutic narrative practices such as:
Applying Polyvagal Theory: Harnessing Your Social Engagement System to Quickly Elicit Trust with Traumatized Children and Adolescents
In this workshop, you will learn about how the Polyvagal Theory (PVT) can help you in your work with children and caregivers.
Many presentations about PVT focus on adult treatment, despite the fact that it is early experiences that create the felt sense of safety or defense. It is critical for all child and caregiver therapy clients to feel safe and to be able to co-regulate; this is especially true for clients who have sustained trauma. This presentation will focus on two complementary forms of caregiver-child relationship interventions, Theraplay® and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP). You will see the impact of physiological state on the child and caregiver client and detail how PVT concepts can be used more intentionally to strengthen your therapy with video examples, practice exercises and case discussion. Assessment methods, planning and treatment advice will be discussed for Video examples of clients with presenting issues of traumatic loss, orphanage care and adoption, dysregulation, autism and parenting difficulties will illustrate.
This presentation will focus on the first component of establishing safety and regulation.
In this workshop, you will learn to:
By the end of this seminar, attendees will be able to:
Theraplay® treatment: Describe activities for responding to retraction of the client’s social engagement system.
Narrative Exposure Therapy - Treatment after multiple and complex traumatisation
Adversities and multiple exposure to traumatic stressors are the 'building blocks' of psychopathology for the individual, the family and the society across generations. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) for children, adolescents and adults is an efficient, trauma-focused, short-term psychotherapeutic treatment for survivors of multiple and complex trauma. Within a life-span approach, it enables the integration of traumatic memories into the biographical context, activates the person's resources and allows meaning-making and corrective relationship experiences. The cross-cultural approach is straightforward and can be deployed by academic professionals as well as trained local counsellors in resource poor contexts and emergency settings within 'screen and treat'- and cascade models of stepped care. In NET, survivors individually and collectively, are supported to give words to injustice, to testify to human rights violations and thereby regain dignity, and satisfy the need for acknowledgement.
MIMT: Beyond the Intrapsychic and Relational Integration, Towards a Deep Connection with the Whole
Mindful Interbeing Mirror Therapy has been working for many years with patients on overcoming trauma, through integration, which is not only intrapsychic, but first and foremost relational.
The unique setting of this approach allows to directly access the deepest dimension of the attachment trauma, as the patient can see the organization of the different Selves that have differentiated during the development, starting from the internalization of the Other, who perpetrated abuse or deprivation. The mirror allows the patient to simultaneously relate with the child victim of the trauma and the Internalized Other, who feels disgust, anger, shame, and fear.
Moreover, the techniques used in therapy allow to work at a deep level, below the level of awareness, by accessing the core of the Self.
Through a continuous and careful process of mirroring in the therapeutic relationship, calibrated through deep compassion between therapist and patient, neural pathways for the integration of different selves and the reconstruction of a cohesive and integrated self are restored.
The ultimate goal of the MIMT is not only intrapsychic integration, but also a sense of compassion for everything surrounding human beings, in a broad, ecological view of reality where we are all interconnected at an ancestral and deep level.
MIMT: Beyond the Intrapsychic and Relational Integration, Towards a Deep Connection with the Whole
Mindful Interbeing Mirror Therapy has been working for many years with patients on overcoming trauma, through integration, which is not only intrapsychic, but first and foremost relational.
The unique setting of this approach allows to directly access the deepest dimension of the attachment trauma, as the patient can see the organization of the different Selves that have differentiated during the development, starting from the internalization of the Other, who perpetrated abuse or deprivation. The mirror allows the patient to simultaneously relate with the child victim of the trauma and the Internalized Other, who feels disgust, anger, shame, and fear.
Moreover, the techniques used in therapy allow to work at a deep level, below the level of awareness, by accessing the core of the Self.
Through a continuous and careful process of mirroring in the therapeutic relationship, calibrated through deep compassion between therapist and patient, neural pathways for the integration of different selves and the reconstruction of a cohesive and integrated self are restored.
The ultimate goal of the MIMT is not only intrapsychic integration, but also a sense of compassion for everything surrounding human beings, in a broad, ecological view of reality where we are all interconnected at an ancestral and deep level.
Dual Attention in Healing: The Essence of IFS-Informed EMDR
Eye-Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) have become widely popular approaches to treating disorders of attachment and trauma. Their shared assumption of the underlying innate human healing capacity, EMDR’s long association with ego state constructs, and IFS’s uniquely accessible formulation have combined to inspire broad curiosity regarding their allied application. At the core of this alliance, dual attention emerges as a key to unlocking their mutual connection to the universal process inherent in all successful healing. How each model approaches a dual attention template, how these parallel the necessary conditions for memory reconsolidation, and how a systematic synthesis of these templates assures more precise alignment to the essence, are illustrated in this presentation.
Neural Desensitization and Integration Training: The New Evidence-Informed, Brain Science-Driven Approach to Trauma Treatment
Several evidence-informed approaches to trauma can be immensely helpful to clients. However, many of these therapies are either rigid, making it difficult to stay client-centered, or vague, mainly rooted in theory. Neural Desensitization and Integration Training (NDIT), developed by a neuroscientist-turned-psychologist, is a brain science-based, exposure, trauma-focused approach to trauma treatment that is both structured and flexible, providing clinicians with easy-to-incorporate strategies that promote trauma processing and help prevent flooding and re-traumatization. Attending this presentation will allow participants to learn more about this new therapy, which has been featured in Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance, as well as to learn key NDIT skills that can be immediately integrated into their own work with clients.
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Hey there,
we just wanted to let you know that the courses in English on this website have been moved over to our sister website
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If you are English speaking and have an account with ISC, it will have automatically been moved to psychotherapycourses.com.
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