NP 3:  Effectively Working with Process

Teasing out Process • Therapist’s pressures • Shame • Suicide

This 4-day training builds on the understandings and skills from the previous 2 parts and is designed to expand on participants’ development as a process-oriented somatically-focused therapist.  The presentations and discussion, exercises, demonstrations and practicums will focus personally on our challenges of being present with our own process, while attending to the moment-by-moment dynamics of our clients' processes.  As with previous trainings, integration with EMDR and other uses of bilateral stimulation is emphasized.

We continue to explore ways to "trust the process ... all the way in."

Topics include:

• “Teasing out process” to make a client’s dynamics more accessible.  We present ways to use tracking of content, emotion, thoughts, and the body to identify underlying processes that clients disconnect from their own present awareness.  These dynamics may then be directly targeted to re-process the nervous system activation which triggers the overwhelm and disconnection.  Many subtle moments, like "tiny protest shrugs," expose these disconnections, and our noticing makes a huge difference in holding the heat there.

• Using the value and power of simple awareness to better position the therapist to “notice” more, and “think and figure out” less.  We go further into the challenges of “not knowing” for the therapist.  Experiential exercises in “trusting the process” are designed to help each participant find their own edges of being present and non-interpretative.

• Therapist pressure.  We explore the myriad of ways therapists experience pressure in sessions, from themselves, their clients, and the social context.  Recognition of our own signs of feeling this opens the door for us to use this pressure more consciously to make the therapy more effective in the most difficult of moments.

• What’s my job?  We focus on creating clear and explicit agreements about how we will work, and how to engage with our clients in challenging moments when the agendas between client and therapist can diverge.  Tracking the “collaborative alliance” even more closely helps the therapist to gain and utilize traction with their clients.

• Somatics of shame.  Shame is explored from a developmental and somatic perspective, with all its manifestations.  We focus on shame as a dynamic, rather than just an emotion, and track ways to stay engaged when our clients are fighting for avoidance.  The creative survival strategies for not feeling shame arise quickly and in unique forms that require the therapist to be highly present and fluid.  We focus on understanding and skills necessary to do this effectively.

• “When suicide is on the table…”  Suicide requires the therapist to “go all the way in,” meaning total engagement in the face of the highest stakes.  We look at the balance of helping our clients to explore their most intense emotions and desperation, with assessing their ability to be safe and allow support.  The total engagement can allow the client to experience themselves in ways that may open new awareness that the most difficult dilemmas may actually be workable.  We work with participants’ personal reactions to help them to establish their own position of “not knowing” with realistic parameters of what is actually possible for them to do.

Each day has lecture/presentation/discussion, a demonstration session or videotape, and 45- 60 minute practicums with personalized feedback for each participant.

Trainings are limited to 27 participants to allow the work to be very personalized.