2-Day Certificate Workshop: Shame and Self-Loathing in the Treatment of Trauma – Janina Fisher

Shame… have you noticed how it sticks like super glue to our clients and acts as a barrier to trauma resolution?

Even after effective trauma treatment, shame and self-loathing can interfere with our clients’ full participation in life.

Watch world-renowned complex trauma and attachment expert Janina Fisher, PhD, as she reveals today’s most effective modalities for treating shame and self-loathing in trauma clients.

The body-oriented interventions featured in this certificate recording will help clients relate to their symptoms with mindful dual awareness and curiosity so that, when integrated with traditional psychodyanamic, cognitive-behavioral, and EMDR techniques, issues of shame can become an avenue to transformation rather than a source of stuckness.

If you are frustrated with the lack of treatment success with traumatized clients with chronic shame, this live webcast will provide the solutions for long-term healing.

Key Benefits:

• Discover how shame complicates trauma treatment and how addressing shame can help you expedite recovery.
• Help clients get unstuck, transform shame, and improve treatment outcomes.
• Teach clients to manage shame without resorting to destructive measures.
• Reduce judgmental thoughts and reactivity with mindfulness.
• Cultivate secure self-attachment and self-acceptance.
• Build resiliency to shame with interventions based on empathy, forgiveness and compassion

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1. Describe the neurobiological effects of traumatic experience.
2. Recognize role of autonomic arousal in exacerbating symptoms.
3. Identify animal defense survival responses in trauma clients.
4. Evaluate the effects of shame and self-loathing symptoms, and identify how these symptoms inform treatment interventions.
5. Determine the impact of the neurobiological effects of shame observed in clinical practice.
6. Evaluate cognitive schemas and its clinical implications.
7. Articulate the principles of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and how they relate to clinical treatment.
8. Apply simple yet effective clinical interventions drawn from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to alleviate shame symptoms in clients.
9. Utilize cognitive-behavioral techniques to reframe shame-based cognitive schemas.
10. Integrate mindfulness-based techniques to inhibit client’s self-judgement.
11. Describe a somatic approach to resolving chronic shame.
12. Implement ego state techniques to challenge and re-contextualize chronic shame.

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The Neurobiology of Shame

• The role of shame in traumatic experience
• Shame as an animal defense survival response
• Effects of shame on autonomic arousal
• Why shame can be treatment-resistant
• Limitations of research & potential risks

Shame and Attachment: Its Evolutionary Purpose

• Shame and the attachment system
• Rupture and repair of shame states in attachment formation
• What happens to shame without interpersonal repair
• Shame as a defensive response to traumatic attachment

The Meaning of Shame in the Treatment of Trauma

• Trauma and procedural learning
• Shame as a survival strategy
• Implicit memory of disgust, degradation and humiliation
• Shame-based meaning-making
• Cognitive schemas that exacerbate shame
• Vicious circle of shame
• Vicious circle of shame and anger Internal working models

Treating Shame

• Why shame is hard to overcome
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: physiological state as the entry point for treatment
• Mindfulness-based techniques to combat trauma responses
• Regulate shame states with somatic interventions
• Use mindfulness interventions to inhibit self-judgment
• Work with shame as implicit memory
• Work with shame-based cognitive schemas

Healing Shame: Acceptance and Compassion

• Dis-identifying with the shame
• Re-contextualize shame as a younger self or part
• Shame and the Structural Dissociation model
• Getting to know our “selves”
• Recognize the role of critical voices and judgmental parts
• Dual awareness of who we are now and who we were then bringing our adult compassion to our childhood vulnerability

Healing Shame in the Therapeutic Relationship

• How can we use therapy to ‘repair’ shame states?
• The role of therapeutic empathy
• Therapists as neurobiological regulators
• The social engagement system in trauma recovery
• Incorporate playfulness, acceptance and curiosity