After having been traumatized, the brain is re-set to respond to ordinary challenges as existential threats, and the body continues to pump out stress hormones that make people feel frazzled, agitated, or shut down. In response, traumatized individuals tend to organize much of their energy on not feeling and sensing their inner experience. The sad side effect of this is that they pay with their capacity to fully engage in activities and relationships. After the brain has been rewired to over-focus on danger it has trouble paying attention to subtle changes in one’s universe. Research over the last thirty years has elucidated the nature of these processes, which have profound implications for clinical treatment and effective intervention.
The last twenty years has provided us with a great deal of information about the impact of trauma on the brain, and on its interference with the capacity to pay attention, concentrate and filter out irrelevant information. In this workshop we will review these discoveries, and demonstrate how bottom up processes, that involve, touch, movement and breathing, as well as top-down processes that utilize mindfulness and interoception, can help traumatized children and adults to regulate their arousal and regain mastery over their own ships. In this workshop, you will learn how traumatic imprints can be integrated using techniques drawn from somatic therapies, yoga, theater and neuro-feedback.
Participants will learn:
- Breathing, posture, facial synchrony and vocal exercises to energize your therapeutic presence and enhance being in synchrony with patients’ posture and expressions.
- Skills for bringing parts of the brain on-line that are knocked out by hyper and hypo-arousal.
- Tracking physiological arousal in body language and movements.
How the only way to achieve self-leadership is through activation of the areas of the brain involved in interoception and mindfulness.
Workshop tutor
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has been the Medical Director of The Trauma Center in Boston for the past 30 years. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School and serves as the Director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress Complex Trauma Network. He is past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Though he identifies himself primarily as a clinician, he has published well over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles on various aspects of trauma. He participated in the first neuroimaging study of PTSD, in the first study to link Borderline Personality Disorder with childhood trauma, was co-principal investigator of field trial for PTSD and is chair of a workgroup on Developmental Trauma Disorder. He has written extensively about using neuroscience research to identify appropriate treatments for PTSD and completed the first NIMH-funded study of EMDR. He has taught at universities and hospitals around the world. Dr. van der Kolk’s latest book is ‘The New York Times’ bestseller The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
For more information or to book a place please visit: breathoflifeconference.co.uk/healing-traumatic-stress/