Trauma can stay with us long after a threat is gone. It can lodge itself into our felt experience and embed itself into our bodies and our minds. Even after years of talk therapy and medication, the effects of trauma can sometimes still linger. Fortunately, there is another way.
Trauma therapy from a somatic perspective invites us to reconnect with the oft-forgotten “felt sense” of the body. Instead of working strictly from a talk-therapy approach, somatic psychotherapy uses the wisdom of the body to help guide a client out and through. In this course, Dr. Albert Wong will share the underlying principles of trauma therapy from a somatic perspective, including tools we can use with our clients, ourselves, and those we love.
Students will learn to help clients resource, stabilize, process, metabolize and integrate experiences of trauma.
Topics covered will include: the neurobiology of trauma, polyvagal theory, fractionation, full-octave experiencing, orienting, tracking sensation, the window of tolerance, the three phase and three boards models of trauma treatment, identifying and installing resources, polyvagal mapping, working with implicit memory, pendulation, dual awareness, assessing and regulating traumatic arousal, and stabilization. Additional attention will be given to understanding and treating dissociation and fragmentation, the neurobiology of trauma, and polyvagal approaches to treating trauma.
The instructor for this course is Dr. Albert Wong, the Director of Somatic Psychology at JFK University and and a leading clinician and educator in the field of somatics.
Students who take this course will learn:
How to work with trauma from a somatic perspective.
Trauma’s impact on our nervous system.
How the brain can create dissociative freeze state shut-down.
Use of Polyvagal Mapping to help treat trauma.
How to help clients release implicit memory embedded in the body and rewire their nervous system’s response to trauma.
Why the nervous system tricks us into thinking trauma is happening in the present.
How trauma derails the time-keeping part of the brain.
This course takes place Tuesdays, May 19, May 26,
June 2, & June 9 (7 - 9pm ET). All students will have access to recordings if attendance in live sessions is not possible.