The overall objective of the workshop is to learn practical skills, which can help improve our client’s functioning in daily life and cultivating our client’s ability to engage as a collaborative partner in therapy. Through a series of clinical vignettes, we, as participants at this workshop will learn a wide range of interventions to stabilize clients prior to working with traumatic memories. Trauma-related conflicts and phobias, especially the phobia of inner experience (i.e., thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, wishes, needs), will be addressed, and their treatment will be described as a central part of therapy. Also, we will explore specific avoidance defences that are common in these clients and learn compassionate approaches to resolve them.

Our learning objectives at this workshop are:

• Employ at least five interventions to help clients overcome trauma-related phobias: The central roles of fear and shame
  • The phobia of inner experience
    • Learning to normalize, accept, regulate and tolerate inner experience
    • Mentalizing and compassion as strategies to cope with inner experience
  • The phobia of attachment and attachment loss
    • Relational strategies to deal with simultaneous or alternating approach and avoidance
  • The phobia of adaptive change: “If I change, I will not be myself.”
  • The phobia of dissociative self-states: “Not me, not mine, not real, not true”
    • Working with dissociative self-states in an integrative, stepwise fashion which emphasises the integrity of the whole person
  • The phobia of traumatic memory: Reliving versus remembering
    • Containment strategies
    • Titration of traumatic memory work
  • Relational strategies for grounding, containment, and integration of traumatic memory
• Identify and help the client resolve specific conflicts that are common in developmental trauma
• Identify interventions to help resolve the client’s disorganized (dissociative) attachment style
• Employ interventions to improve stabilization by working with dissociative parts of self
• Identify common avoidance defences in clients who are dissociative and employ interventions to resolve them

While techniques are helpful adjuncts to treatment, a consistent and predictable therapeutic relationship is a primary factor in whether and how clients improve. Participants will learn how to maintain optimal relational closeness/distance with clients who simultaneously experience the therapist as both needed and dangerous, as well as how to effectively repair frequent ruptures in the relationship. Ample case examples will illustrate specific approaches and interventions.

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