Hope for Treatment-Resistant Depression: A Sensorimotor Approach to Change – Janina Fisher

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The very nature of depression often thwarts efforts to treat it. After all, it’s difficult to change when you have no energy, no hope, and no capacity to concentrate. How can we challenge these chronic states? Using interventions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, this recording will introduce ways to help clients relate to their depressive symptoms mindfully, rather than identifying with them, and to manage physical symptoms through changes in posture, breath, and energy. You’ll discover how to:

• Help clients separate depressive thoughts from physical symptoms so that each can be treated separately
• Counter cognitive beliefs that reinforce depressive states by experimenting with new words, new actions, and new habits
• Use body-centered interventions, such as movement, to increase energy and focus in depressed clients
• Facilitate development of an “antidepressant lifestyle” rather than habitual engagement in the opposite  

1. Choose how educate clients about depression as a somatic state, not just a psychological state.
2. Employ cognitive schemas that reinforce depressive states to improve client outcomes.
3. Use a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy approach to understanding depression in sessions.
4. Use three body-centered interventions that increase energy and focus in depressed clients.
5. Evaluate Sensorimotor interventions that transform depressive beliefs.
6. Determine the use of the social engagement system and its role in evoking an internal sense of safety as it relates to treatment.

Explore the foundations for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy 

• DSM-IV Symptoms of Depression
• Trauma
• Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Responses
• Implicit Memories

Describe the process through which depression is conditioned in bodily responses

• Compliance as a Survival Resource
• Depression and Hypoarousal
• Procedural Learning

Describe Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and explore the ways that it can be used to address the physical and cognitive symptoms of depression

• Mindfulness
• Action and Curiosity
• Dis-identifying from Symptoms and Reframing
• Other Interventions
• Social Engagement
• Leavening Distress States with Positive States