“A Deeper Dive into Working with Process - Online 2024”

This new training takes another step into building your skill and fluency in identifying your clients’ “process” and creating collaborative ways to work effectively.  It will help you identify and work with the places where you tend to disconnect. It can also help you stay more engaged.  

Past participants have reported that these trainings help them to feel more confident to stay well engaged in the challenging moments when they aren’t sure what to do in sessions.  This somatically-based process-oriented approach gives therapists a window into dynamics of “non-presenting problems” that can impede therapy if they are not addressed. The ability to “trust the process” more deeply opens doors to more effective and satisfying therapy.

Do you find yourself thinking:

• “There is nothing happening.”

• “I can’t see what to do.”

• “Things aren’t moving.”

• “I’m doing more psychoeducation and less processing when I feel stuck.”

• “My client is so frustrated.”

• “I’m just repeating myself.”

• “It seems I go back to more cognitive work and ‘talking about’ when I lose the process.”

• “I’m still not sure if my client is In the Window.”

Clients have a myriad of ways of disconnecting, subtly and overtly, that make it hard for them to work through their difficulties.  The decreased presence that results then creates a diminished resilience, which further challenges them to take on painful emotions and dilemmas.  These are often “non-presenting problems” that the client cannot see until they become evident in sessions and the therapist makes them explicit.  This is an essential step for creating clear agreements for the work.

In cases when you and your client feel frustrated, something is impeding their drive for completion.  The inability to see these dynamics makes the work harder, or may feel impossible.  Our own cautions, fears, frustrations and sense of avoidance add to this situation. 

We all have potential blind spots:

• Feeling protective of our clients

• Not being sure how to find something solid enough to gain traction

• Backing off from our clients emotions towards us

• “Getting ahead” of our clients. Our encouragement may outpace where they actually are. 

Prerequisites:

This advanced training has a prerequisite of completing NP 1 & 2, so everyone will have the foundation of working from the Natural Processing perspective. 

Note that participants who have taken NP 2-6 and prior“ process” trainings say that every training has helped their therapy become more effective and increased their confidence.

Join us for live presentation, experiential exercises, demonstrations/videos, role plays, and practicums.

This training is limited to 27 participants, to keep it personal and engaging.

As with prior versions of this training, we will cover some topics that I see therapists struggling with in the consultation groups, and issues people have requested that we address.  Being a “process” training, we will also have lots of flexibility to address issues as they arise.

I encourage you to write to me ahead of time with any topics that you’d like us to take on.  It is especially helpful if you have case scenarios that you’d be willing to role play in the training.  This brings out aspects of the therapy process and challenging points in the work that are hard to recognize until we are right in the middle of it.

It can be a vulnerable proposition to bring in your hardest moments, and a different vulnerability when we keep them private.  We are all coming to learn, and everyone benefits from each others’ exposure.  Just as it’s hard for our clients to see their own process, it’s hard for us as therapists as well. This training encourages a supportive environment to help facilitate growth and resolution.

Potential topics include:

• How to make uncomfortable observations in useful ways, and how to reflect what we notice and ask questions that pace your client’s discomfort well.

• “Signs of struggle” - do you use them or let them pass by?

• Minute dynamics of activation and immobilization

• Attunement to “oh no!”  Tracking finely tuned anticipation of danger

• Dynamics of how your clients respond to your questions and reflections as a guide for your pacing and interventions

• Therapist adjustments mid-session to work with emerging dynamics

• The value of updating agreements with your clients to make the work easier

• Signs that the therapist is “out in front.”  Ever feel you are working harder than your client?

• How your client’s: “This isn’t working” can provide good guidance for the therapist

• Working with “negative self talk” and persistent “core beliefs”

• Further exploration of what does it mean for you to truly “trust the process”?

• Common places that therapists find challenging to stay engaged.

• You cannot know anything until it presents itself.  Really?

• We can’t know, and we can discover if we keep noticing.

• Shame - Climbing carefully into “humiliation and devastation” 

• Clients being “new in the room” with their own experience and process.  Pacing considerations

• “I’ve already worked on this.”  How to make this a helpful place of traction.

• Signs of something not being complete and evidence of disconnection

• Making unseen processes and “non-presenting problems” explicit and workable

• Layers of “protection and caution” often spontaneously intensify - staying with those crucial moments.

• Dynamics as the work gets closer to survival and shame issues

• Do your clients leave enough “gap” to truly self-reflect?  Working this foundational dynamic

• Indulging disconnections - by your client and by you

• More on working with “dilemmas”

• Holding “shitty truths” and “no good choices”

• “Have to” dynamics

• PTSD and the emergence of “pre-existing conditions”

• Unwanted exposure that emerges in the work, and pacing considerations

• Working with “confusion” explicitly

• Clients’ responses of going “external” when asked about themselves, and considerations about their search for safety.  Implications for when clients can’t reflect internally

• Tracking the “cycle of experience” in sessions to help assess disconnections and discern interventions

• Unpacking coping strategies.  “Failure” is often ecological with the shortcomings of the strategies, and it’s not experienced that way.

• Is your client in clear agreement with themselves?  Making this explicit.

• “What do you notice?”  Can your client notice?  Are we tracking that?

• Where can they sustain awareness, and not?

• Challenges of working with hypo-arousal

I won’t be giving a presentation on all of these topics explicitly. and there is an interrelation in how they show up.  We will be teasing out the dynamics as we see them to help your ability to recognize them as they appear in your work.