Creating a safe environment is crucial for effective therapy, as it allows individuals to express themselves openly and engage in the healing process without fear of judgment or harm. Understanding the role of regulation prior commencing trauma work is vital for a successful therapeutic journey.
Understanding the link between parent-child bonding and Porges’ polyvagal neuroscience of safety, threat, and connection can guide parents toward opportunities to deepen the parent-child bond, which in turn provides myriad developmental benefits for both the child and the parent. When a child feels that connection, it forms a foundation of love, safety, warmth, and care that lets them move into the world with confidence, wonder, awe, and joy. When the parent builds their ability to deliberately stoke such affiliation and affection, it offers them a feeling of completeness.
Therapeutic presence (TP) is a way of being that optimises the doing and techniques of therapy. Presence includes a balance between attunement with clients as well as with oneself. Therapeutic presence provides a neurophysiological sense of safety in clients that allows them to be seen, heard, understood, and “feel felt.” In this conversation, Dr. Shari Geller will introduce an empirically validated model of therapeutic presence as a map to build and strengthen the skills of presence with clients and in life. The neurophysiological principles to creating safety with therapeutic presence, based on concepts such as co-regulation and neuroception of safety stemming from Polyvagal Theory will be discussed. Shari will offer an experiential practice for cultivating presence.
Some of us are fully on board with Polyvagal Theory and ways of framing addiction through the trauma and Polyvagal Lens. However there are still many models of addiction treatment which are based on a more traditional pathologizing approach. In this discussion, Lou and Jan speak about the changing views of addiction treatment in North America and the UK. We’ll also explore the pros and cons of the 12 Step programs, Harm Reduction models, residential treatment, and both medical and learning models of addiction.
My friend Elspeth Bradley and I recently spent an afternoon with Ruth Lanius and we had such a wonderful time exploring our shared journeys! Some themes emerged that are close to my heart:
– Exploring the Power of Presence.
– Creating safe spaces for women to reflect on our experiences as therapists, researchers, clients, in a patriarchal system.
– How to create change through social movements.
I asked them if they would be interested in continuing our conversation and including you, dear friends, in our passionate dialogue. They agreed wholeheartedly! Together we will engage in an embodied collective dialogue.
Traumatic experiences leave individuals with a dysregulated nervous system, biased neuroception, and a sensitivity to trauma-related triggers. They feel overwhelmed and they impulsively turn to drugs, alcohol, food and a wide variety of addictive behaviors in the effort to manage their reactivity. Over time, tolerance leads to increasingly compulsive and self-destructive addictive behavior, but only a trauma-informed approach to addictions treatment can result in stable sobriety and stability.
The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ (FSPM™) teaches people how to emotionally regulate by connecting with two powerful embodied processes: interoception, felt sensing, and neuroception, rewiring dysregulated autonomic states.
The Four Circles Harm Reduction Practice is an FSPM™ practice that develops upon the Three Circle Practice (Cairns, 2001). It includes graphic elements and is used to help people engage and deepen their embodied connection by locating their state and practicing outer circle safety-seeking behaviors every day for reducing harm.
In this dialogue, therapist Travis Goodman will share his experiences on how he integrates the FSPM™ with EMDR to treat trauma and addiction.
Food, sensory input, digestive health, lack of exercise, and diminished parental availability can influence children’s brain development, impacting children’s external behavior and ability to deeply connect.
Interoceptive cues of non-safety triggered by these inputs are significant barriers to coregulation and self-regulating, creating more trauma.
Just knowing what contributes to the early developmental signs of inflammation and what these truly look like in the body and brain can make everyone an aide for a child and family to find the right resources, and majorly alter outcomes.
Dr. Arielle Schwartz, author of seven books on trauma recovery including Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga and Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma, will discuss the science behind vagus nerve stimulation and guide you through gentle practices support your wellbeing.
You will learn how to naturally stimulate the vagus nerve in areas of the body where the vagus nerve travels close to the surface of your skin such as on the sides or back of the neck and on areas surrounding the ear. She will share with you the foundations of her yoga teachings integrating Science, Soma, and Soul as a foundation for a deep, meaningful connection to your Self and why having safe community spaces is essential to the healing journey.
Research in cognitive and affective neuroscience in the past twenty five years has clearly established the importance of embodying emotions for improving outcomes and treatment times in all therapeutic approaches. In the short presentation, Dr. Selvam will discuss how therapists can go about improving their practice in all therapy modalities through the practice of embodying emotions, with clinical examples.
FREE EVENT: ‘There’s No Therapy Without Safety’ with Trevor Rocca... 
