The Clinical Paradox of Presence

For individuals carrying developmental trauma, chronic hypervigilance, or profound shame, the gentle invitation to notice what’s happening inside isn’t neutral—it’s threatening. Their avoidance isn’t resistance; it’s survival. The present moment isn’t a sanctuary; it’s where threat resides, where emotion floods beyond containment, where long-sequestered material erupts without warning.

What happens when our most trusted clinical tools become instruments of pain? Perhaps due to its empirical validation and ubiquitous application, mindfulness has become psychotherapy’s universal prescription that, for certain clients, can precipitate the very dysregulation it intends to resolve.

And yet, when mindfulness fails, clinicians often find themselves at an intervention impasse. What remains when our primary portal to embodied awareness becomes a gateway to dysregulation?

The Neuroscience of Wonder: An Alternative Pathway

In this intellectually nuanced and clinically sophisticated training, Dr. Jonah Paquette -acclaimed psychologist, author, and international speaker – invites us to explore an underutilised affective intervention emerging from contemporary neuroscience: awe.

Far from a poetic indulgence or spiritual abstraction, awe represents a neurobiologically distinct emotional state with profound therapeutic implications. Recent psychophysiological research reveals that awe consistently:

• Attenuates default mode network activity (diminishing self-referential rumination)
• Enhances vagal tone and parasympathetic dominance
• Reduces pro-inflammatory cytokine production (Stellar et al., 2015)
• Expands perceptual and cognitive frames
• Activates neural circuits underlying safety and social connection

Unlike mindfulness, which directs awareness inward – sometimes toward precisely what the trauma-tuned nervous system is desperately avoiding – awe reorients attention outward, toward phenomena that transcend the boundaries of immediate comprehension. This outward orientation offers a paradoxical pathway: clients access emotional presence without confronting traumatic internal states prematurely.

Clinical Applications: When Awe Succeeds Where Mindfulness Fails

This training will equip clinicians to recognise specific presentations where awe-based interventions offer particular therapeutic leverage:

• Clients with developmental trauma and profound affective constriction
• Individuals locked in emotional numbing, avoidance, or rigidified self-narratives
• Those who experience depersonalization, dissociation, or freeze responses during mindfulness
• Clients for whom emotional awareness triggers catastrophic anxiety or shame cascades

For these clients, traditional approaches that emphasize turning toward difficult emotions can inadvertently reinforce neurobiological patterns of threat and overwhelm. Awe offers an alternative route—not bypassing pain, but transforming the lens through which it is experienced.

Beyond Accommodation: Transforming the Therapeutic Frame

What distinguishes awe from merely pleasant affective states is its capacity to induce what researchers term the small-self phenomenon – a momentary dissolution of rigid self-constructs that creates cognitive and emotional space for new perspectives.

This isn’t merely symptom reduction; it’s frame transformation. Clients describe not just feeling better, but seeing differently – experiencing a recalibration of significance, a softening of existential isolation, a subtle but profound shift in how they inhabit their narratives.

Dr. Paquette articulates how awe cannot be manufactured or imposed, but can be skilfully invited through:

• Evocative language that expands rather than narrows cognitive frames
• Carefully calibrated imagery that induces perceptual vastness
• Episodic memory exploration of moments that transcended ordinary experience
• Co-created therapeutic encounters that embody wonder without demanding it

Through case formulations, clinical vignettes, and current research synthesis, participants will examine how awe can be scaffolded into therapy with exquisite attention to client readiness, attachment organisation, and affect tolerance.

The Embodied Clinician: Cultivating Awe as Therapeutic Presence

Beyond technique, this training explores how clinicians themselves can cultivate a capacity for awe—not as performance, but as genuine therapeutic presence. When therapists access states of expansive wonder, their own nervous systems communicate regulatory cues that invite clients into similar states, creating an interpersonal field where emotional exploration feels possible.

This is neurobiologically-informed attunement. Research suggests that specific patterns of vocal prosody, facial microexpressions, and postural cues communicate safety and expansion in ways that transcend verbal intervention—creating nonverbal pathways to co-regulation with even the most defended clients.

A New Clinical Horizon

For clients who find the present moment overwhelming, and for therapists navigating the limitations of conventional approaches, awe offers not merely another technique, but a fundamental reorientation toward what is possible in the therapeutic encounter.

Join us for a clinically sophisticated and intellectually rigorous immersion that synthesises cutting-edge affective neuroscience, trauma theory, and therapeutic artistry—equipping you to meet your most challenging clients with renewed precision, creativity, and clinical hope.

Key Clinical Gains

• Neurobiological Precision: Understand the distinct neural signatures of awe versus mindfulness, and why this matters clinically
• Diagnostic Discernment: Recognise early indicators that mindfulness may destabilize rather than integrate
• Intervention Mastery: Acquire specific techniques to introduce awe-based experiences calibrated to client readiness
• Case Integration: Examine detailed clinical formulations where awe transformed therapeutic impasses
• Embodied Practice: Develop your own capacity for awe as a fundamental therapeutic resource

Who Should Attend

This advanced training is designed for clinicians working with:

• Complex trauma presentations with affective constriction
• Clients exhibiting emotional blunting, avoidance, or rigid self-narratives
• Individuals with histories of dissociation or shutdown during emotion-focused work
• Cases where mindfulness interventions have proven contraindicated or retraumatising

Reserve your spot now—this is a rare opportunity to rethink how we meet clients at the edge of overwhelm.

© nscience 2025 / 26