Foundations of a Somatically-Based and Process-Oriented Approach to Therapy
With Craig Penner, LMFT
January 11-12, 2025
In-Person Training in Santa Barbara, CA
1 seat left. Once full, you can get on the waitlist here.
This two-day event will be a small-group, experiential journey designed to deepen your somatic awareness and enhance your ability to connect more fully with your clients' processes.
Awareness of physical sensations facilitates the nervous system’s ability to process through previously repetitive responses, including those associated with trauma. This is fundamental for developing the understanding and confidence to use a somatic approach effectively. This is not just a technique; it is a powerful way to take advantage of how our nature actually works.
We will present and practice practical skills that you can immediately bring into your sessions.
Noticing through a somatic lens
Accurately track “resiliency” as a guide to your “pacing”
Ways to intervene to make existing dynamics clearer and more accessible to work with
January 11 & 12, Saturday and Sunday 9:00-4:30
12 CE credits for LMFT’s and LCSW’s
Location - TBA in Santa Barbara
15 participants maximum
Fee - $400
Bring your lunch to hang out with your colleagues and discuss the training.
There are nuanced aspects of our beliefs, postures, reactions, orienting responses, nervous system reactions, cognitive structures, and muscular and organ systems that are not accessible through words. They are driven by the reptilian and limbic parts of the brain, and primitive functions of the nervous system, which do not have verbal language.
• Increase your somatic awareness to help you and your client gain more access to these dynamics, and spontaneously gain an experiential window into their process - beyond their words.
This offers an even richer potential for facilitating organic movement in therapy.
• Learn to track your client’s “resiliency” accurately on a moment-by-moment basis, facilitate an expansion of resiliency, and make your therapy more efficient.
• Gain a window into noticing “subtle dissociation” that occurs regularly in sessions, is easily missed, and which results in poor progress.
• Increase your confidence and expand skills across a wider range of challenging clinical dilemmas.
• Understand how teachings of neuroscience can direct your observations and interventions, from tracking levels of activation to manifestations of developmental challenges.
• Move from “trying to make things happen,” or just “talking about…” to being better positioned to "trust the process" through the most difficult moments in therapy.
• Learn to tease our “non-presenting problems” that can make processing difficult and create frustrations for clients and therapists.
• Gain clearer options of how to proceed in the moments you feel stumped.
Format for this training:
Presentation and discussion of foundations to make your therapy more somatically focused
Skill-building exercises, demonstration sessions, brief practicums
Craig Penner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and trainer, in private practice in Santa Barbara and Cambria since 1982. He brings a process-oriented approach to therapy, with a strong somatic (body/nervous system) focus, and integrates EMDR and other uses of “bilateral stimulation,” to help the therapy be as efficient and effective as possible.
He has always believed we have a natural drive to completion and resolution. This has inspired his commitment to develop “Natural Processing,” an integration of ways to utilize our awareness to facilitate that drive. He has been training therapists in this approach across the US and Canada, and online since 2014, and has led consultations and other trainings for over 25 years.