Body-Focused Interventions for Trauma in Schema Therapy (Part 1 )                                27 & 28 September 2024

This workshop presents the theory and experiential approach to integrating body-focused techniques to enhance schema therapy practice in a time-limited manner. These strategies are particularly useful for clients who present with complex needs and have histories of severe childhood neglect or trauma, and who have difficulties engaging with traditional schema therapy techniques. 
This highly interactive and experiential workshop is designed for psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. Attendees should have an understanding of schema therapy model who wish to expand their repertoire for working with trauma and the body by incorporating simple but powerful somatically-focused interventions.

Topics covered at the workshop

Day 1:
 - Understanding the role of the body in trauma – the neurobiology underpinning complex trauma and fragmentation of self
 - Barriers to working with the body both for the client and the therapist and how to overcome them  
 - Tracking the body to identify schemas and mode shifts
 - Understanding the principles of working safely - helping clients stay within their Window of Tolerance while processing traumatic material
 - Healing traumatic reactions, including freeze and submit states, with body-oriented affect regulation resources and working with intense affect, including anger, grief, terror

Day 2:
 - Working on the therapist’s own body awareness to enhance self-regulation and to facilitate higher levels of attunement with and co-regulation of the clients in the therapeutic space 
 - Utilizing body techniques in the work with dissociation 
 - Work with anger in the body 
 - Enhancing imagery and chair techniques with somatic focus 
 - Somatic interventions for boundary setting and strengthening of a sense of self
 - Facilitating development of an embodied healthy adult mode both for clients and therapists 

Literature:

Briedis, J. & Startup, H. (2020). Somatic perspective in Schema Therapy: The role of the body in the awareness and transformation of modes and schemas. In Heath, G. & Startup, H. (Eds). Creative methods in schema therapy: Advances and innovations in schema therapy. Abington: Routledge.