Moving beyond Ambivalence and Fear to Embodied Relationship:

 The LA Group Psychotherapy Society will sponsor this 2-day workshop in New Orleans.

Workshop Objectives

• Apply basic concepts of Somatic Experiencing® in order to develop a more embodied therapeutic stance.
  
• Judge the usefulness of tuning in to deeply felt internal states to make subsequent interpersonal interactions with group members and colleagues more effective.
  
• Trace the development of group menbers' individual and collective self-regulation.
  
• List physiological reactions regulated by the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system (the PNS), the sympathetic branch of the nervous system (the SNS), and discuss clinical applications of these reactions.
  
• Utilize the interplay of gentle cycles of sympathetic and parasympathetic stimulation to facilitate the re-regulation of the autonomic nervous system.
  
• Use titrated activation to maintain group members and the group as a whole within a range of resiliency.
  
• List the three specific defensive or protective survival responses—fight, flight, and freeze—and offer examples of how these responses can manifest in group dynamics.
  
• Utilize techniques for the containment and management of client activation, including maintaining group leader’s own settled nervous system; having group members notice indicators of safety in the room; taking time to invite a group member’s attention to go where it wants in the environment; inviting social engagement, which typically leads members back to more PNS-dominated state; developing strategies for grounding, orienting, and stabilizing prior to working with states of higher activation; and having group members learn to notice somatic signs of activation in self and others as that activation arises, before it becomes overwhelming.

This 2-day workshop will award 12.5 CE clock hours; no NBCC credits through LCA.