Weekend of March 5-7, 2010

The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma

This workshop unites two of the leading figures in the field of trauma research and body-oriented treatment approaches. Together they will explore the implications of recent findings in the neurosciences, from how the brain and body deal with emotional information to an understanding of effective therapeutic action.

The leaders will show how the trauma response is a specific defensive bodily reaction that people initially mobilize in order to protect themselves, and then use against feeling the totality of their horror, helplessness, or pain. However, in the long range this response keeps them frozen, stuck in the past, unable to fully be in the here-and-now. Fixed in the defensive trauma response, the shame, defeat, and humiliation associated with the original event replays itself over and over again in the body, detached from history, but experienced in the present.

Traditionally, therapies have attempted to change perceptions of the world by means of reason and insight, along with conditioning, behavior modification, drugs, and medications. However, perceptions remain fundamentally unchanged until the internal experience of the body changes. Even after the death of a loved one, physical injury, rape, or assault, people can learn to have new bodily experiences, then come to heal and accept what has happened and create new lives and new communities.

This workshop will be filmed, but each participant has the option to decline being filmed.

CEUs available for nurses.

CEUs available for psychologists.

CEUs available for MFTs and LCSWs.

CEUs available for bodyworkers.

Reservations Information (Accommodations & Pricing)