Before Starting

When Good Resources Go Bad

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  • Calm Place
    • Why We Don’t Encourage Other People in Calm/Safe Place
    • When Calm Place Without Someone Specific is Triggering
    • The Problems of Trying to “Borrow Good Memories from a Bad Developmental Era”
    • Calm Place Will Go Bad… And When It Does…
  • Some Completely Expected Reasons Why Resourcing May Go Bad
  • Resources Going Bad Are Rarely the Therapist “Fault”
  • Container as a Powerful Resource for Working with Complex Trauma
  • The Importance of Visualizing or Drawing from Somatic Memory
    • Drive Through Bank Teller as Helpful and Accessible Container
    • Building the Container Larger and Stronger than Needed
    • Photoshop Metaphor for Container
    • Don’t Test the Container with Real Trauma Containered in the Limbic Brain

Intro to “Dip Your Toe In” Metaphor

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Dip Your Toe In Metaphor

  • Understanding Traumatized Nervous Systems
    • Bodies Can be Triggering
    • Inside Can be Triggering
    • Noticing Can be Triggering
    • Calming or Slowing Down Can be Triggering
    • Paying Attention to the Body Before an Audience Can be Triggering
    • Performance Anxiety Related to All of This Can be Triggering
    • Resistance Not a Useful Concept
  • Dip Your Toe In Provides Needed Information
  • Beware Agendas
    • Beware Informing Clients What the Should Feel or What Mindfulness Will Do
    • Therapist Agendas: Back to How we Teach Mindfulness, and the Cinderblock on the Gas Pedal
    • Many Clients with Complex Trauma Believe that they have Failed Trauma (and are about to Fail EMDR Therapy)
    • Aspirin for a Headache Metaphor

Normalizing Therapist Anxiety

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Topics Covered:
  • The Impulse to Want to Avoid Causing Harm
  • Working with Trauma is Like Working with Lava
  • Normalizing Mistakes and Missteps
  • The Real Risks of Not Doing Trauma Work with Clients
  • We are the Only Professionals on the Planet that Can Do This… Whose Job it is to Do This
  • You Learn to Do This by Doing This
  • The Really Good News About EMDR Therapy: It Breaks in a Very Limited Number of Places

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