- Understanding that Pervasively Traumatized Nervous Systems are Different than Non-Traumatized Nervous Systems
- Don’t Tell Clients What they Will or Should Feel in Resourcing, Think of it as an Opportunity to Get Helpful Information
- Car with a Cinder Block on the Gas Petal Metaphor
- Pairing Body Scan and Resources
- The Importance of Asking Permission and How Long Resource will Last
- Modeling a Single Breath and Using that Information Select a Breath that May be More Tolerable
- With Some Clients, the Goal is to Find a Resource that Isn’t Actively Triggering
- Using Body Scans without Much of an Agenda
- Understanding What a Resource “Working” Looks Like… If it Calms You, It May Only Calm You for a Moment
- Noticing the Body is Also a Crucial Phase Two Resource
- Body Scanning is a Good Strategy to Promote Embodiment, So Clients Can be Imbodied Enough to Notice
- Homework: Practice Resources During the Times of the Day When Anxiety Isn’t Going Straight Up, Noticing the Layer Below is a Good Way to Lower Baseline Anxiety in the Short Term and Prepare for Reprocessing
Metaphor: Dip Your Toe In
Understanding the AIP Model: The Whale Metaphor and the Mount Everest Metaphor
The AIP Model
- The Difficult Stuff Connects to Right Now/Existing Adaptive Information
- Enough Adaptive Information Must Be Present
- You Can’t Easily Connect Maladaptive Information to Maladaptive Information
- What’s Complex About Complex Trauma Related to the AIP Model?
- A Different Way of Thinking About Complex Trauma
- Mountain Ranges of Adaptive Information vs Mountain Ranges of Maladaptive Information
The Mount Everest Metaphor
- You Cannot Metabolize a Trauma the Size of Mount Everest into Adaptive Information the Size of a Walnut—You Can’t
- Where to Start with Complex Trauma?
- Where Not to Start
- Types of Targets that Make Good Early Targets with Complex Trauma
The Whale Metaphor
- What are the Whales?
- What is the Size of the Client’s Boat?
- You Cannot Land a Whale into a Canoe
- Helping the Client Build a Bigger Boat
- What Clients Learn when Working with “Smaller” Wounds First
- Test the Gear
- Learn How to Notice Effectively
- They Learn that the Can Heal
- Healing Builds Adaptive Information/Makes the Boat Bigger
- If the Client in a Canoe Connects to a Whale we Need a Strong Pair of Scissors to Safely Disconnect
Dip Your Toe In: Phase One
- Dip Your Toe In: Phase One
- Be Careful What You Ask
- Safer Ways to Work with Lava
- Assess for Adaptive Information
- Helpful Assessments, Helpful Questions
Intro to “Dip Your Toe In” Metaphor
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
