|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
| Online Seminar: Keeping the Brain in Mind: How knowing more about the Brain can help you become a better therapist | ||
| Cape Cod Institute: Keeping the Brain in Mind, July 26 - 30, 2010 | ||
|
Keeping the Brain in Mind: How knowing more about the Brain can help you become a better therapist.
We are daily bombarded by unrelenting stress. Our nervous systems struggle to keep up, and unless we were securely "wired up" from birth, our mind/brain/body systems dysregulate too easily. This inability to emotionally regulate can manifest in the symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, somatic illnesses, loneliness, and conflict that our clients bring to us. That same emotional arousal feeds our runaway addiction to substances, food, sex, work, rage, electronic devices, and the compulsion for constant activity.
This seminar reviews the emerging research in neuroscience, with approaches derived from the latest formulations and work of Allan Schore, Dan Siegel, Daniel Stern, Antonio Demasio, Joseph LeDoux, Stephen Porges, Candice Pert, Louis Cozolino, Stan Tatkin, et al., that point to healing in the circuitry of the right hemisphere, which is dominant for intuition, empathy, intense emotionality, a coherent sense of “self,” deep attachments, and the knowledge of how “to be” in intimate relationship.
We begin with a brief explanation of the neural anatomy necessary to understand this model, review the relevant aspects from the attachment literature, and then turn to individual psychotherapy and the importance of the right hemispheric healing that goes on beneath the words and the particular theoretical clinical approach we espouse. We will then briefly explore our work with our clients' relationships, building an understanding of the dominance of the emotional limbic brain, the subcortical structures that can override rationality and thus require that we, as therapists, do more than teach “good communication skills.”
The course ends with an exploration of empathy and love as the main tools of deep relational work, and an empowering explanation of how we act in our offices, as “neural architects,” reshaping and remolding our client’s brains, and engaging so deeply that the work profoundly reshapes our brains as well.
Throughout the seminar, experiential exercises are interspersed to engage those same right hemispheric subcortical structures in the participants and give more than an intellectual grasp of the material. Participants will be guided in a “mindfulness exercise” that will illustrate changes in the left and right hemispheres during the experience. In another exercise, the "Still Face" experiments of Ed Tronick at Harvard will be briefly replicated to provide a subjective experience of the sudden loss of interpersonal connectivity that tethers us to one another and to our own intrapersonal sense of “self.” Clinical vignettes and case material will also be discussed.
You Will Learn:
- About the origins of psychopathology as trauma to the early developing nervous system, especially in the right hemisphere, resulting in an inability to regulate affect and arousal.
- To acquire a grasp of the neurology underlying intense and dysregulated states, including mood disorders, anxiety, addiction, trauma, and dissociative disorders.
- To acquire an appreciation for how we, as psychotherapists, function as "neuro-architects," reshaping both the function and neural structure of our client’s brains.
- To expand your capacity to teach affect regulation skills to clients and/or their families.
- To be able to read the neurological literature with increased familiarity with the physiology, terminology, and prevailing assumptions and beliefs.
- To be able to create healing interventions that utilize current clinical research.
Francine Lapides, MFT |
Francine Lapides, MFT |