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

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 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

Handouts

Outline

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

Faculty