Upcoming Workshop.

Acts of Recognition: Embedded Relational Mindfulness and the Dyadic Repair of Trauma and Attachment

 

The past is remembered as unconscious predictions and expectations that are all the more potent because the memories that shaped them are unavailable for reflection and revision. An exclusive reliance on the "talking cure" may limit clinical efficacy since clients cannot discuss the memories that are not explicitly encoded. Privileging mindful awareness of the moment-by-moment experience of implicitly encoded expectations over conversation and discussion of current problems can clearly reveal the internal, unconscious patterns of organization that underlie clients' current difficulties so that these patterns themselves can be directly addressed.

 

Several psychotherapeutic methods have been developed that teach mindfulness through structured exercises, solitary practices, and sets of specific skills. However, in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, mindfulness is integrated with and embedded within what transpires moment-to-moment between therapist and client. Taking place within an attuned therapeutic dyad, embedded relational mindfulness is used to activate not only clients' present moment experience of attachment failure and unresolved trauma but also their here-and-now experiential connectedness with their therapist. This simultaneous evocation of the effects of past wounds and social engagement between therapist and client, combined with attention to the body as a primary source of therapeutic action, can inspire a depth of intersubjectivity that potentiates acts of recognition in the dyadic repair of trauma and attachment failures.

 

Drawing on the Polyvagal Theory, affect regulation theory, and principles on interpersonal neurobiology, this presentation offers a practical overview of clinical skills for embedded relational mindfulness. Clarifying physical actions that pertain to both attachment and defense, participants will learn interventions for recognizing and working with gestures, movements and postures that reflect and sustain the deleterious impact of trauma and attachment failure on our clients' current realities. Interventions for child, adolescent, and adult therapy will be illustrated through new video taped excerpts of therapy sessions, worksheets from the presenter's 2015 book, and brief experiential exercises.