When we – client or therapist – experience a lack of safety, we may grapple with heightened levels of anxiety, hypervigilance, and even post-traumatic stress symptoms including:

• Chronic worry: becoming preoccupied with potential threats, making it challenging to concentrate or experience a sense of calm
• Impending sense of doom: resulting in a perpetual state of hypervigilance
• Sleep disturbances: such as insomnia, are also common as the mind remains on high alert
• Physical symptoms: including muscle tension, debilitating fatigue and panic attacks

Living in such a state of perpetual unsafety can lead to a pervasive sense of helplessness and powerlessness, eroding one’s self-esteem and self-worth. We may struggle with feelings of hopelessness and an inability to trust ourselves or others. How do we bring ourselves back to the present and then help our clients do so?

At this intellectually-stimulating and therapeutically-oriented webinar, globally acclaimed trauma specialist Kathy Steele will explore how we can manage our own distress and dysregulation and find moments of safety to ground us, as well as how to help our clients grapple with the existential issues that are heightened in the present. In addition, we will discuss how to help our already traumatized clients navigate more successfully in a world that can be unstable and frightening, particularly focusing on how the therapeutic relationship can bridge the gap between fear and safety.

In essence, as therapists, our task is daunting – to find ways to reasonably regulate ourselves when we feel uncertain or unsafe, and then to support our clients to find the same. We will explore the following:

• The essential work of accepting vulnerability and fallibility in ourselves and our clients, and then sharing it as a way to connect and feel understood
• Accepting the paradox of certainty and safety as illusion, and the need to be certain enough of to enjoy everyday life
• Recognizing and transforming existential crisis
• Meaning making from the perspective of focusing on how we live, rather than on what is happening externally
• Restricting consumption of constant information as a way to regulating our nervous systems and separating the current moment of our lives from the turmoil elsewhere or to come
• Increasing our internal sense of safety even when the outside world is uncertain by staying connected to others, examining our beliefs systems that might promote anxiety, and finding generative ways of living
• Focusing on living from our core values and ethics when we feel uncertain or unsafe
• Working with our inner critic that often intensifies in the face of uncertainty in order to give us more of a sense of control

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss how to accept the paradox of certainty and safety as illusion, and the need to be certain enough of to enjoy everyday life
• Explain how restricting consumption of constant information is a way to regulating our nervous systems and separating the current moment of our lives from the turmoil elsewhere or to come
• Discuss how to work with our inner critic that often intensifies in the face of uncertainty in order to give us more of a sense of control

© nscience UK, 2023 / 2024