Affective Neuroscience for Clinicians-Emotion-based Strategies for the Treatment of Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression – Lee Stevens

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When it comes to working with emotions in therapy, few interventions deal with the emotion itself and how to respond to it.

Instead, we teach our patients to manage and regulate them…and, in the process, we hope they go away.

But, often, the emotions don’t go away.

Why? Because the modalities you know and practice treat the symptoms and not the cause!

We need a new way to think about psychopathology and this is it!

I’ve devoted my career to affective neuroscience research and emotion-based therapies. And, along the way, helped thousands of patients with their emotional struggles.

YOU CAN easily and effectively help your clients create deep, lasting change by giving them the power to access and accept difficult emotions that come at unexpected times.

Spend this day with me and I guarantee that you will walk away with research proven strategies and tactics that help your patients overcome their emotional challenges and move through trauma, anxiety, and depression.

If you see patients with PTSD, trauma, anger, fear, guilt, shame, abandonment and compulsion issues – this is a must see seminar!

Purchase today and I will see you in the webcast!

Lee Stevens, Ph.D.

1. Determine which patients would benefit from affect reconsolidation and how to maximize successful outcomes.
2. Utilize emotion in psychotherapy through techniques involving emotion-based mindfulness, self-validation, self-compassion, and emotional regulation skills
3. Develop patient’s skills to recognize when their feelings are germane to the current situation and when they may be a result of past experience(s).
4. Employ principles of affective neuroscience to inform treatment strategies for working with emotion in psychotherapy.
5. Demonstrate strategies to increase and decrease emotion and recognize when to apply each strategy.
6. Distinguish between the wanting and liking neural systems as they relate to treatment for a patient with compulsive behaviors.

Using Affect and Emotion in Therapy

• Affect reconsolidation as a universal mechanism
• When to implement affect reconsolidation
• Creating the optimal conditions in therapy
• Risks and Limitations

Affective Neuroscience Principles

• Key brain regions for emotions
• Impact of specific emotions on brain cortex
• Emotion as central problem in psychopathology
• Strategic use of emotion in therapy

The goals of emotion-based psychotherapy

• Building safety and trust with your patients
• Addressing internal and external relationships to emotion
• Achieving the optimal level of arousal
• Changing the relationship with memory and emotion
• Seeing emotions as a useful tool in therapy

Affective Neuroscience 4-Step Therapeutic Model

• Emotional Awareness/Mindfulness
• Validation of emotions
• Self-Compassion & Empathy
• Utilizing emotion

The Affect Reconsolidation Toolbox

• Mindfulness for recognizing emotions and where they come from
• Emotional validation techniques
• Techniques for optimal arousal of emotions
• Gestalt techniques for increasing emotion
• Somatic techniques for up and down regulation
• Cognitive based techniques to stop reinforcement of negative feelings

Therapeutic Goals When Targeting Specific Emotions

• Anger – boundaries and consequences, forgiveness
• Sadness – unresolved grief, primary/ secondary emotions
• Fear – managing fear responses, controlling behavior
• Desire – regulating reward systems, increasing self-control
• Disgust – self acceptance
• Jealousy/Envy – comparisons to others, self-judgement

Affect Reconsolidation in the Treatment of Trauma

• Creating curiosity about our emotional responses
• Differentiating between past and present emotions
• Work with secondary emotions first
• Affect Reconsolidation for primary traumatic feelings