The Core Clinical Challenge: When Survival Defences Block Recovery

Some of your most challenging clients aren’t avoiding change—they’re protecting themselves from it. Behind therapeutic resistance, emotional shutdown, and relational volatility lies a nervous system shaped by betrayal, abuse, or neglect. Offers of help may be experienced as threats; positive experiences are filtered out by a brain wired to expect danger; intimacy becomes both desperately sought and deeply feared.

This programme moves beyond pathologizing these responses to understanding them as adaptive strategies. Rather than struggling against these defences, you’ll learn to work with them, decoding their protective logic and transforming them into pathways of safety and integration.

The Three-Stage Clinical Journey:

1. Resistance as Protection – Decode survival-based responses as wisdom, not therapeutic failure
2. Negativity Bias as Legacy – Counter the neurobiological pull toward fear and hopelessness
3. Attachment and Identity Repair – Reframe “borderline” presentations as trauma adaptations and build new relational templates

This isn’t just about managing difficult clients—it’s about recognizing how trauma creates internal conflicts that show up as therapeutic impasses, and learning to work with these splits somatically rather than cognitively.

The Live Integration Session: Where Theory Becomes Mastery

This exclusive 90-minute session is where clinical theory transforms into therapeutic artistry. Janina doesn’t just review the material—she weaves the three modules into a cohesive clinical framework, using your actual practice experiences as the foundation.

You’ll arrive with real cases, genuine questions, and honest reflections about what worked (and what didn’t). Janina responds with:

• Live synthesis of how resistance, negativity bias, and traumatic attachment intersect in complex presentations
• Real-time case consultation on your most challenging therapeutic impasses
• Advanced troubleshooting strategies for therapy-interfering behaviours and self-sabotage
• Personalised guidance on maintaining therapeutic hope when clients seem determined to prove nothing works

This is clinical supervision elevated to masterclass level—where your most difficult cases become the curriculum and Janina’s expertise becomes your personalised guide.

Essential Clinical Skills You’ll Develop

• Reframe resistance and stuckness as adaptive trauma responses rather than therapeutic opposition
• Use somatic and parts-based tools to “befriend” resistant states without shaming clients
• Apply neuroscience-informed strategies to counter negativity bias and foster genuine resilience
• Work with fragmentation and emotional volatility as understandable trauma adaptations
• Support clients struggling with suicidal impulses, dissociation, or chronic mistrust
• Navigate the delicate balance between therapeutic challenge and safety for volatile clients
• Transform your own countertransference responses to “difficult” clients into therapeutic tools
• Create therapeutic environments where even defensive parts feel safe to participate

The Three Video Modules: Your Inner Conflict Toolkit

🔷 Module 1: Transforming Trauma-Related Resistance and Stuckness

Foundation: Resistance as Survival

Clients’ “no” to therapy is rarely defiance—it’s protection. This 10-hour module introduces a somatic and parts-based framework for decoding resistance, drawing on Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, and the Structural Dissociation model. You’ll learn to “befriend” resistance, negotiate with defensive parts, and reduce therapy as a perceived threat—even when clients seem determined to prove therapy won’t work.

🔷 Module 2: Counteracting Negativity Bias in Traumatized Clients

Recovery: Rewiring the Brain’s Threat-Detection System

The brain’s hard-wired preference for negative information complicates trauma recovery by keeping clients trapped in cycles of despair. This 3-hour intensive explains how negativity bias distorts memory, heightens reactivity, and undermines resilience. You’ll learn neurobiologically informed interventions that help clients notice, encode, and integrate positive experiences—shifting their default setting from “something bad will happen” to genuine hope for change.

🔷 Module 3: Borderline Personality Disorder and Traumatic Attachment

Integration: Beyond the Label to Healing Fragmentation

Seen through a trauma lens, “borderline” clients are not manipulative—they are fragmented, terrified, and fighting for survival. This 10-hour course reframes BPD as a traumatic attachment disorder, equipping you with somatic and mindfulness-based interventions for stabilising unsafe behaviour, supporting dissociative parts, and repairing attachment ruptures. You’ll gain tools for working with clients caught in internal battles between trust and mistrust, love and hate, life and death.

Why This Programme Transforms Practice

⭐ Beyond Pathology: Reframe resistance, negativity, and borderline symptoms as adaptive trauma responses
⭐ Embodied Safety: Transform survival defences into therapeutic collaboration through somatic interventions
⭐ Evidence-Based Integration: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Polyvagal Theory, IFS, and TIST woven into practical tools
⭐ Case-Driven Learning: Your most challenging clinical material becomes the live curriculum
⭐ Master Clinician Mentorship: Direct integration guidance from Janina Fisher on navigating therapeutic impasses
⭐ Therapeutic Leverage: Practical strategies for clients who fight therapy, fear safety, or mistrust hope

Whether your client fights every intervention, expects the worst outcome, or seems at war with themselves, this programme gives you the clinical leverage to work with internal conflict as the pathway to integration—not the problem to solve.

© nscience 2025 / 26