The Resilience Skill Set: Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, even Disaster

Modern neuroscience has shown how we can use the brain’s innate neuroplasticity to modify coping behaviours, even when these appear to be seemingly ‘stuck’ or intractable. At this webinar, we will look at the tools and techniques that work best when we want our clients to:

• Reverse the impact of stress and / or trauma
• Come out of anxiety, depression, grief, loneliness, guilt and / or shame
• Deepen self-compassion and empathy that connects them to inner resources
• Strengthen their resonant relationships that foster perseverance and
• Shift their perspectives through mindful awareness

Linda helps us identify therapeutic techniques that can be applied across modalities. Specifically, we look at:

• The use of body-based tools to help clients reverse the impact of stress and trauma on their nervous system, returning to an inner sense of safety and equilibrium and their natural range of resilience
• Helping clients manage disruptive emotions while deepening self-compassion and empathy. We learn the process for cultivating the positive emotions that antidote the brain’s negativity bias and shift brain functioning from contracted survival responses to openness for learning and growth
• Cultivating the self-awareness and self-appreciation that help clients heal from toxic shame, retire the inner critic, and recover their inner well-being
• Teaching the interpersonal skills that allow clients to trust other people as refuges and resources in difficult times
• Adapting practices of mindfulness to help clients identify dysfunctional patterns of coping and discern new choices of behavior

The webinar is experiential in format. We learn tools for guided visualisations, written reflection and empathic conversations to guide clients through the five factors requisite for growth:

• Acceptance of Reality: and the consequences of what has happened. We learn how we can help our clients use their brain’s social engagement system to manage surges of emotions, generate a neuroception of safety, and prime the brain’s plasticity-receptivity to learning
• Resourcing with Family, Friends and Community: helping our clients balance autonomy with intimacy; Skills of resonant relationships: reaching out for help, setting limits and boundaries, repairing ruptures, resolving conflicts and negotiating changes that allow them to navigate their world with skill, trust, and love
• Recognizing the Positive: in the midst of the difficult; finding the gifts in mistakes. Practices of mindful empathy and self-acceptance as an antidote to the brain’s negativity bias, healing toxic shame and retiring the inner critic; Cultivating positive, pro-social emotions to shift the functioning of the brain out of contraction and reactivity to more openness and receptivity
• Developing a Coherent Narrative: of traumatizing events within the larger life story. Understanding the impact of attachment conditioning, including early developmental trauma on brain functioning and resilience
• Appreciating the new life: that emerges because of the difficulties, not just in spite of them. Assisting our clients in claiming their capacities to rewire less-than-optimal coping strategies and move towards a thriving and flourishing life.

About the speaker

Linda Graham is an experienced psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area.  She is the author of the forthcoming The Resilience Handbook: Powerful Practices to Bounce Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, even Disaster (September 2018, New World Library) and Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, winner of the 2013 Books for a Better Life award and the 2014 Better Books for a Better World award. She integrates modern neuroscience, mindfulness practices, and relational psychology in her international trainings on resilience and well-being.  She publishes a monthly e-newsletter and weekly Resources for Recovering Resilience, archived at  www.lindagraham-mft.net.