Treating Complex Trauma Clients at the Edge: How Brain Science Can Inform Interventions – Frank Anderson

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We often get shaken and lose confidence in our approach when a client’s trauma response edges into seemingly uncontrollable dynamics of rage, panic, or suicidal desperation.

Watch Frank Anderson, colleague of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Dr. Richard Schwartz, as he provides an essential road map for treating relational trauma cases. Explore the neurobiological processes of hyperarousal and parasympathetic withdrawal and the underlying symptoms.

Watch now and you will also learn various therapeutic techniques and interventions that can be integrated with psychotherapy practices to help soothe your clients’ trauma

1. Evaluate the extreme symptoms of trauma by determining if they are rooted in sympathetic activation or parasympathetic withdrawal to inform clinical treatment interventions.
2. Articulate methods by which neuroscience can be interfaced with psychotherapy practices to improve clinical outcomes.

 Experiential Treatments – Integrating neuroscience and psychotherapy

• Necessity of utilizing physical, emotional and relationship aspects in therapeutic intervention

Problems with traditional phase oriented treatment

• Negative evaluation of symptoms – ignoring their protective function

Internal Family Systems

• Understanding symptom presentation as positive efforts pushed to extremes
• Welcoming and integrating all parts of an individual
• Identifying intent of symptomology, importance of avoiding shaming

Redefining trauma related diagnoses and integrating overactive protective mechanisms

• Disorganized attachment
• Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder

Therapist factors – vulnerabilities

• Impact of therapist parts acting as separately as the clients we work with
• Responding effectively to personal triggers

Symptoms of post trauma

• Hyperarousal, hyperarousal, psychic wounds
• Importance of obtaining permission before addressing psychic wounds

Experiential exercise – self-awareness, response to triggers
Mind-brain relationships

• Neuroplasticity, neural integration
• Neural networks associated with trauma
• Implicit nature of trauma memories

Autonomic nervous system

• Role of cortisol
• Sympathetic hyper-arousal
• Characteristics of extreme symptom activation and mixed states

Therapeutic responses

• Choosing compassion or empathic responses
• Providing auxiliary cognition
• Strategies to avoid contributing to hyperarousal
• Top down strategies to separate or unblend

Case presentation – example of permission seeking, direct access and unblending
Polyvagal Theory

• Dorsal and ventral branches
• Activating strategies, responding to hypo-arousal, blunting