Description
Mindfulness and Somatic Regulation:
A Response-side Approach to Healing Developmental Trauma
We often hear clients say that they feel like their body was hijacked in the face of a triggering event. They can’t think, their nervous system seems to have a mind of its own. They lose their sense of home with their sense of self compromised. Mindfulness and somatic regulation practices can be key factors in returning to a secure experience of their felt-sense, a return home to safety.
The integration of mindfulness and somatic awareness into therapeutic practice is often misunderstood and frequently misused. However, a somatically grounded, neuroaffective and psychodynamically informed perspective can support our clients to transform their adaptive strategies.
Somatic therapies engage cognitive, behavioral, emotional, neurobiological and energetic systems to help clients become more organized and alive. Interventions are bi-directional, moving from cognition to neurobiology and from neurobiology to cognition. As we say, somatic therapists work top-down and bottom-up.
At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Differentiate between mindfulness and somatic awareness;
- Describe top-down and bottom-up therapeutic interventions;
- Identify strategies for integrating mindfulness practices into therapeutic process;
- Identify strategies for integrating somatic practices into therapeutic process;
- Integrate somatic practices within their current clinical perspective.
- Describe how somatic practices can enhance awareness of transference-countertransference processes.