Elevate your therapeutic practice with our Healing Through the Body and Mind combo video course pack, thoughtfully designed for psychotherapists and psychologists. This comprehensive training package delves into the profound impacts of intangible childhood grief and the long-lasting effects of childhood sexual abuse trauma, providing you with advanced techniques to foster deep healing and resilience in your clients.

In Grieving a Lost Childhood: Somatic Interventions & Mindfulness Techniques for Intangible Losses, Dr. Janina Fisher explores the often-overlooked grief associated with the loss of a secure and loving childhood. Learn to recognize and validate these abstract losses, using mindfulness-based approaches and somatic interventions to help clients navigate their grief and transform their emotional pain into resilience.

Somatic Psychology Skills for Childhood Sexual Abuse Trauma: A Resilience Informed Approach with Dr. Arielle Schwartz provides an in-depth look at the somatic manifestations of childhood sexual abuse trauma. This training integrates applied polyvagal theory, EMDR therapy, somatic psychology, and parts-work to address the deep-seated physical and emotional scars of trauma. Gain practical skills to help clients develop self-compassion, navigate shame, and achieve embodied healing.

By combining these two powerful trainings, you will be equipped to address the complex and intertwined challenges of childhood grief and trauma, fostering a holistic healing journey for your clients.

Core Therapeutic Challenges Highlighted

• Intangible Childhood Grief: Learn to identify and validate the abstract losses of an uncherished childhood and support clients through mindful grieving and somatic interventions.
• Childhood Sexual Abuse Trauma: Understand the lasting physical and emotional impacts of childhood sexual abuse and implement somatic psychology techniques to promote deep healing and resilience.

Learning Outcomes

• Address Childhood Grief: Employ mindfulness-based approaches and somatic interventions to help clients acknowledge and process their intangible losses, fostering emotional resilience.
• Recognize and Heal Trauma: Enhance your ability to identify and address the somatic and emotional symptoms of childhood sexual abuse trauma, using a resilience-informed approach to support clients’ healing journeys.
• Integrate Comprehensive Therapeutic Techniques: Combine insights from grief therapy and somatic psychology to provide nuanced, effective interventions for clients with complex, intertwined challenges.

Empower yourself with the knowledge and tools to make a profound impact on your clients’ lives by addressing both the invisible wounds of childhood grief and the deep scars of trauma with our expertly crafted video course pack.

This video resource pack contains two complete workshops (CPD hours: 9 / CE credits: N/A) that cover:

Part 1: Grieving a Lost Childhood: Somatic Interventions & Mindfulness Techniques for intangible losses (Dr Janina Fisher), CPD hours: 6 / CE credits: N/A

Our societal norms are geared towards primarily only recognising tangible losses caused by catastrophic events including war, natural disaster, or death of a loved one. These are obvious losses that we can see. The loss of a secure and loving childhood, the absence of being safe and cherished, are not obvious, tangible losses. These abstract losses then, very often, go unrecognised and unacknowledged.

Yet, as therapists, we know the cost to our clients when these intangible losses are never acknowledged or comforted.

• Because grief is such a painful emotion, the universal instinct of all human beings is to avoid feelings of sorrow. That leaves our clients angry at the failure of their attachment figures or angry at themselves for not being good enough to be loved, unable to resolve their grief because it is too frightening to ‘go there.’
• In addition, such anger can reflect as hostility, physical / emotional aggression, lack of self-worth and relationship / behavioural difficulties in clinical manifestations.
• Often the clients are grieving for an intangible loss (like the loss of safety) without being fully aware of what that loss is. Sometimes, the lack of acknowledgement of this loss from parents/caregivers is even more devastating for the clients than the actual loss itself
• Addressing this wide gamut of psychological manifestations requires us to get to the root of the presenting challenge and assist the grieving process for ‘lost’ childhoods. By validating their intangible, abstract, profound loss and allowing them to grieve, we can help support trauma recovery of our clients.

But as psychotherapists and counsellors, how do we help our clients grieve when they fear sadness or re-opening the wounds of childhood?

At this intellectually challenging and therapeutically oriented two-evening online webinar with globally acclaimed trauma specialist Dr Janina Fisher, we will address the special challenges involved in grieving early losses of safety, welcome, comfort, and kindness.  Using clinical vignettes, we will first examine how never feeling important or cherished or delighted in, is a different kind of loss than the socially recognized loss of a parent or partner, further complicating bereavement.

In addition, the early loss of safety results in diminished capacity to tolerate emotional pain, making it harder to grieve without getting overwhelmed by it.  We will then consider how can we help our clients to feel less frightened of their grief and better able to acknowledge it.

Specifically, we will consider how a mindfulness-based approach to grief and loss is gentle and less anxiety-causing than other approaches.  We can use mindfulness to help clients learn to tolerate an optimal level of sadness, not too much that it becomes overwhelming and not so little that it results in avoidance.  Mindful grieving helps us befriend grief and diminishes the sense of aloneness so often felt by those grieving emotional losses of childhood by themselves.  Through case studies, delegates will be introduced to step-by-step somatic approaches for letting sadness arise and then flow through our clients’ minds and bodies, creating release and healing. We can help our clients to transform and heal the grief they carry and find the emotional resilience they need to move on.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the physical and emotional consequences of intangible loss, especially the loss of childhood
• Identify three variables associated with the complicated bereavement of intangible losses
• Summarize the practice of mindful grieving
• Identify two somatic interventions for regulating the intensity of grief
• Integrate our painful past experience/loss into our current reality so we can move towards a more fulfilling life

Part 2: Somatic Psychology Skills for Childhood Sexual Abuse Trauma: A Resilience Informed Approach (Dr Arielle Schwartz), CPD hours: 3 /CE credits: N/A

The impact of childhood sexual abuse trauma on cognitive, emotional, and physical development is lasting and profound – persisting into adulthood and later – unless proper support and healing is found.

The scars of childhood sexual trauma extend well beyond emotional pain and physical injury—manifesting very often as unexplained somatic symptoms. As therapists, we now understand that trauma can register within our bodies on a cellular level. Clients may experience fatigue, nausea, diarrhea, retching, bile rising, gagging, joint or muscle pain, headaches, and palpitations during the recovery process. While talk therapy is an essential part of trauma recovery; but because the abuse has been a very physical experience; working with the body is essential to integrated healing. Somatic therapy explores how the body expresses deeply painful experiences, applying mind-body healing to aid trauma recovery.

In this engaging and practical discussion, therapists will discover how they can help their clients reclaim their lives from the burdens of childhood trauma by fostering deep compassion and reducing the often-accompanying shame. Dr. Arielle Schwartz introduces a Resilience Informed Approach, integrating research on trauma recovery to form a strength-based treatment model that incorporates applied polyvagal theory, EMDR therapy, somatic psychology, parts-work, and time-tested relational psychotherapy.

Clients who have endured childhood sexual abuse trauma are more susceptible to fragmentation, and it is crucial for clinicians to be adept at recognizing and addressing dissociative symptoms. Merely addressing the verbal or narrative aspect of memories may bring change to the story but does not adequately tackle the disturbing sensations that dominate and disrupt clients’ lives. Somatic psychology, on the other hand, acknowledges the significance of working with the felt sense of the body to access implicit memories. By assisting clients in sensing the affective components of body posture, gestures, breathing patterns, and movement impulses with interoceptive awareness, somatic psychology provides a powerful pathway to healing.

In this engaging and informative online course with Dr Arielle Schwartz, therapists will:

• Understand how mutual regulation serves as a precursor to self-regulation in trauma treatment, paving the way for healing and resilience
• Recognize emotional and physiological dysregulation and gain insight into the symptoms of dissociation that require targeted therapeutic attention
• Learn effective interventions to help clients navigate shame and develop self-compassion for their most wounded parts, fostering a sense of safety and acceptance
• Gain practical skills and techniques for working with somatic symptoms in trauma treatment, empowering clients on their healing journey
• Acquire expertise in working with somatic sensations through titration and pendulation techniques, promoting embodiment and integrated healing

This transformative course offers therapists a resilience-informed approach to childhood sexual abuse trauma, empowering both practitioners and clients on their path to healing and recovery. Join us to embark on this journey of compassion, understanding, and somatic wisdom for trauma resilience.

Learning Objectives:

• Apply effective interventions to help clients navigate shame and develop self-compassion for their most wounded parts, fostering a sense of safety and acceptance
• Gain practical skills and techniques for working with somatic symptoms in trauma treatment, empowering clients on their healing journey
• Discuss working with somatic sensations through titration and pendulation techniques, promoting embodiment and integrated healing